“ Avoid being caught in The Intelligence Trap ”
When you build your desirable Authority in Big pharma
I was having lunch with a friend and we were talking about our college days. His degree was in the Humanities and he was talking about one of the professors he admired the most. Mr. Brown was Old School and constantly asked questions to stimulate his students’ thoughts. My friend laughed when he told me how Mr. Brown criticized him for answering questions too quickly.
“Slow down! You always say the first thing that pops into your head. Give your mind a chance to work on the question,” Mr. Brown said.
At University, quick thinking is often applauded as intellectual capacity. Not so in Mr. Brown’s class! Just the opposite, it seems.
With our culture’s emphasis on education and earning degrees and certificates to secure a good-paying job that guarantees a comfortable lifestyle and a pleasant retirement, it’s easy to be lured into the intelligence trap.
A predominant bias is that formally educated people can make faster and better decisions than those who lack formal education, but this is not always so.
People living within the intelligence trap can easily rationalize any position and unwittingly limit the broader potential and value that could otherwise amplify even greater success for the business and their career.
When you’re overconfident, you’re limiting the range of responses. People are generally more confident than correct.
When you reach a decision with a snap judgment or fall in love with a genius idea, you’ve created an attachment that makes it hard to abandon even when the great idea stops looking so clever.
Most people defend their ideas by rationalizing and protecting them even with their evident flaws. Once you become attached to your idea, you become its prisoner. You’ve created a limited horizon beyond which you are choosing not to see or think. The possibility of other solutions is difficult or impossible to see and your decision-making process has ceased being dynamic. You have shut the doors on a universe of new potential.
Selective thinking and snap decisions don’t fit well within the reality of life or business. Most situations have more than one right answer. When we choose to stop thinking and fixate on one sure solution because it fits our available information and bias, we abandon our flexibility and reduce our chances for creating a more significant success for our customers, their patients, and ourselves.
The solution to this detrimental loss of opportunity is to slow down. Take enough time to gather more information. Do more research, consult more sources, reflect on the value of the new information you’re gathering .