One hears it often: people make decisions 85% unconsciously and 15% consciously. We have never understood where this thought comes from. Imagine you are going to buy a car and you enter the car dealer. Then you feel something and immediately buy the car when you feel something positive. This may sound like a fine and intelligent thought but it is not at all consistent with reality: when people make decisions regarding a car they are thinking above all; after all, they are spending 30,000 or 40,000 euros and one does not do this lightly.
The principle that people make 85% unconscious and 15% conscious decisions is often summarized in the image below. As the saying goes, "a picture says more than a thousand words."
Why is this metaphor so appealing? Especially gurus who often speak publicly for businesses come across as very learned by using this metaphor. Of course, there is some truth to this metaphor: our brains are evolutionarily programmed to react quickly and effectively to potentially dangerous as well as pleasant changes in the social environment. This is how humans are able to survive and eventually reproduce. Examples here include the human tendency to flee in the face of danger, deal with stress by taking a break or fall in love with. Indeed, these evolutionarily programmed mechanisms are automatically activated in specific contexts or situations.
However, as humans we are a unique species (homo sapiens), we are part of a society, organizations or groups in which we are responsible and accountable to other people. We do this to prevent the ruin of a group or organization if people do not follow its rules. For example, companies ask or require people to be productive, to go along with the group by, for example, supporting each other and doing deeds, such as visiting customers. To encourage these behaviors, companies set goals and use various incentives. For example, they pay better employees more and punish less good employees by isolating them or holding them accountable for their behavior.
Although we are talking about work here, it also has an evolutionary meaning: people work to earn money for their families, working at a well-known company can provide status, and working also provides work vitamins because being among people is very enjoyable. But the question is always: how can people excel?
To answer the question of how people excel in an enterprise, it is important to consider what a person's intellectual and social capital is. Both are also called "human capital. By intellectual capital we mean that people acquire knowledge by working. This knowledge consists of both theoretical knowledge, but mainly unconscious knowledge(tacit knowledge, or knowledge gained through interactions). Social capital is the way people know how to interact with each other so that one can both give and take. People with high social capital tend to have larger networks within companies and climb up in society. That, in turn, has the effect of making people give them something.
An important question is whether growing intellectually and increasing social capital is done consciously or unconsciously. This is where the iceberg principle comes into play. It may seem familiar that almost no one in an organization gets ahead by taking it easy or just letting it all hang out. On the contrary, people who are successful constantly make choices between being distracted from goals and having a focus on the goals - and within companies, those goals also coincide with the goals of the company. For example, employees must meet deadlines, they must arrive at work on time, they must be customer-focused, and they must set and achieve long-term goals.
How can employees make the choices not to be distracted? The answer is to be aware of the choices one makes. This implies making trade-offs, or considering what the consequences might be of making the wrong choices. If we now return for a moment to the first figure which states that people make 85% of their decisions unconsciously: we argue that this is nonsense and that the iceberg illusion is closer to the truth. The iceberg illusion indicates how people can be successful.
In a subsequent blog, we will explore this in a bit more detail.