Quotes About Perspective

Our three-ring binders won't change a thing. But a little humor and humanity might. December

Make the baskets as small as you can while retaining the wholeness of whole numbers. If 2/3rds or .67 or 67% of people didn't like the new flavor, then make them feel like people in a room. "2 out of 3 people thought cheesy marshmallow was "disgusting." Going up to 67 out of 100 would dilute understanding.

Confirmation bias = hunting for information that confirms our initial assumptions (which are often self-serving).

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage. He called this tendency "what you see is all there is.

In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment.

and the wrong one for others, depending on their bank account and their movie lust.

but this experiment made me think about how I'm impacting others.

Surprise isn't enough. We also need insight.

as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy—when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we've got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we've either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage.

the value of asking more questions and listening to the answers.

The error lies in our inclination to attribute people's behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so.

There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.

Sometimes, in life, we can't get our bearings until we trip over the truth.

When you use analogies—when you find someone who has solved your problem—you can take your pick from the world's buffet of solutions. But when you don't bother to look, you've got to cook up the answer yourself. Every time. That may be possible, but it's not wise, and it certainly ain't speedy. DUNBAR

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

A good change leader never thinks, "Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people." A change leader thinks, "How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.