By: Donald L Swanson
We’ve all been there:
- when faced with alternative courses of action, we make a choice; but
- time and subsequent developments show we made the wrong choice.
So, a hard-knocks rule is this:
- keep all options and alternatives open and viable for as long as possible;
- so choices can be made when additional time and developments are in.
A Study
A study explains why this hard-knocks rule is true. The study is titled, “When silver is gold: Forecasting the potential creativity of initial ideas.”[Fn. 1]
The study’s essential findings are these:
- When faced with a project for which they must develop creative solutions and then rank future prospects for each solution, study participants will:
- identify the best solution as the one that’s most concrete; and
- rank as second best the solution that’s most abstract.
- And then, it turns out:
- the concrete solution yields best results over the short term, but
- the abstract solution is best over the long haul.
Here’s how the author of the study explains the findings:
- Across five experiments, participants undervalue abstract initial ideas with greatest long-term potential and overvalue concrete initial ideas with more obvious short-term potential;
- The most creative final ideas often begin as abstract initial ideas—that’s because such ideas focus on general principles or concepts, allowing freedom to flesh out details;
- By contrast, concrete ideas are usually closer to obvious or conventional ideas, with limited room for creative development; and
- If participants move forward with a concrete idea, they may never realize what the development of their abstract idea might have yielded (at 98, 99 & 111).
An Illustration
A common illustration is this: when debtor’s first call to a bankruptcy attorney includes a comment like,
- “Oh . . . and by the way, a foreclosure sale is scheduled for Thursday.”
This call puts the bankruptcy attorney in a huge bind. The only alternative available is a terrible one: to file bankruptcy in a “Fire! . . . Ready . . . Aim” mode. Long gone is the opportunity to plan and strategize for a bankruptcy filing or for non-bankruptcy alternatives.
On many occasions, along the way, this debtor made the wrong choice:
- decided against contacting the bankruptcy attorney; and
- decided against keeping the planned-bankruptcy alternative (and many non-bankruptcy alternatives) open and viable for as long as possible.
Debtor’s wrong choice, when made, is concrete: to do nothing and incur no cost.
And the result is this: debtor will never know what the abstract alternative (i.e., contacting a bankruptcy attorney, in a timely manner, for advice on how to proceed) might have achieved.
Conclusion
Keeping all options and alternatives open and viable for as long as possible is a wise and well-founded rule of hard-knocks!
It’s also supported by the study described above.
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Footnote 1. The study is by Justin M. Berg and is published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 154, at 96-117 (2019).
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