Thinking does not cause action. Ever.
Why you didn’t think that thought through - even though you really, really, really want to believe you did.
This blog aims to try and summarize a series of ideas that you find in many places and books. The basic concepts are best covered in The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. To summarize the book, check out the following site that gives an excellent overview of the book, and I will be using one of their graphics.
It is amusing how people justify their decisions by explaining their logic – sadly they may be fooling themselves. They give long, complex descriptions of how they concluded and then executed their plan after careful review. It sounds so right, so bright, so logical, and probably completely wrong. I am not saying there is no case where action follows thinking; it is just that it is not really what happens. For the sake of this piece, it will help if we assume that people can’t really 'think' before they act - we can add exceptions later – and let’s learn why.
So, with our assumption in place, if we don't make decisions based on our thinking, what is the basis for most decision-making? The 3 Laws and other sources imply that we decide or perform based on one thing and one thing only. About 100% of the time, we decide based on how a situation occurs to us. But this is more than just saying perception equals our reality. The idea of 'occurring' is derived from the philosophy of Phenomenology.
I do not have the intellectual skills to explain this to its fullest extent, but here is my view. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Phenomenology as the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. It analyzes relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do. Understand this condition, including our past, our family, our beliefs, and add them all together, you get a reason, although not always obvious, why situations occur to us the way they do. Locked into how these analyses works are perception-memory patterns and action-memory patterns. These record how we responded when something happened and how we saved both the information and how we acted on it. It was hot, it burned, we moved our hands away and we don't do that again! The American Psychological Association noted in the 2021 paper that perception, memory, and action are serial actions. They probably are, and at the center of this action is the amygdala.
The amygdala is a complex structure of cells nestled in the middle of the brain, adjacent to the hippocampus (which is associated with memory formation). This allows the amygdala to organize physiological responses based on the cognitive information available. The most well-known example of this is the fight-or-flight response. If a situation occurs to you as dangerous, you run, and if not, you stay and fight. As one of my mentors would put it, "can I eat it, or will it eat me?"
The fight-or-fight response is critical here because, as Ryan Holiday describes in his book The Obstacle Is the Way, few situations exist today where we have a fear of being eaten. But shame and embarrassment may be the 21st Century equivalent. Given the role of fear in most decisions, our actions happen before we have even considered or thought them through. Those who have studied the connection between our amygdala and the occipital lobe (where we do our thinking) have noticed that the amygdala can act milliseconds before the occipital can even respond.
Why does all this matter?
This delay implies that our responses to why we did something are post hoc justifications of why we did it. I know you think you did, and can assure me (or mostly) yourself you did, but you didn't. Given the sheer number of decisions,
we need to take every day (some suggest up to 35,000), having to think all of those through would be both impractical and exhausting. For that reason, we use shortcuts and past paths through this decision-making. We rely on what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking, so we make most of our decisions on autopilot.
Like any autopilot system, it would be worth understanding how it was programmed - what decisions it is taking. Our decision-making programming comes from our learning experiences and perception-memory patterns, and action-memory patterns. These learnings become the lens that we 'see' the world with. Maybe this is best encapsulated by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he says, "experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
It is worth drawing two key strands from all of this:
Strand 1: While you think you thought that through, you probably didn't. Understand how the world occurs to you and you will better understand why you did what you did. Explore what experiences create the lens through how you see the world. If you can identify those lenses and learn to remove them, you may see the world differently.
Strand 2: If you see the world through your lens, then someone else sees the world through their lens. They respond to how the world occurs to them. Understanding that the world happens to different people differently is a considerable power. Understanding how things occur to someone else is a precious tool or skill if you can build it.
Daniel Kahneman also points to a System 2 that allows for deeper thinking - or engaging the occipital to do more analysis. But even in this case, how things occur to you does matter. You may spend enough time in System 2 to explore how things occur to you, but you need to make it a conscious decision.
The Next Question
I remember a conversation my wife was having with her siblings. They all recalled something from the past, but the implication of what happened was different for them. The way it occurred to each of them was different.
The next question that arises is this: how do I change the way something occurs to someone? We will explore that in a future post, but the secret is to change the context of the conversation you are having. Either way, be careful not to assume how it occurs to someone else is how it occurs to you. It might make you feel better, but that might just be a story you are telling yourself.