Matt Abrahams

If we didn't have them, we wouldn't be able to make decisions.

But sometimes a heuristic locks you into a way of thinking.

So let's imagine you and I come out of a meeting and you turn to me and you say, hey, Matt, how do you think that meeting went?

I immediately say, Andrew wants feedback, and I can itemize all the things that went wrong or all the things we could have done better.

But had I been really listening, not locked into that heuristic of feedback, I might have noticed that you were looking down.

You were speaking more slowly and softly than usual.

Maybe what you wanted in that moment was not feedback, but what you wanted was support because you knew the meeting went bad.

So if I lock into a heuristic too soon and not understand that I lock into that heuristic, I might take our communication in a direction that isn't productive or could be harmful.

The situation I just described to you actually happened to me with a colleague.

And I itemized all the things that we did wrong.

It took me six months to repair that relationship because he didn't want to hear what went wrong.

He knew.

He wanted me to give some support in that moment.

So that exercise is to help us understand that we do a lot of judging that we don't need to do.

and that we have these heuristics or patterns that we get into that don't allow us to be present and respond to what's needed.

So to me, a heuristic is a tool that we use often unconsciously to help us reduce the

uncertainty in a particular situation.

So for example, imagine I'm in the grocery store and I'm trying to pick out the best tomato sauce or the best ketchup.

I might use a heuristic of which is the cheapest?

How many offerings from one brand are there?