We all have scores of decisions to make every day, and we often want to move quickly. Cheryl Einhorn, an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, helps us understand how to think of past decisions as a dataset you can mine for insights to make better future decisions.
We rarely want to spend time and mental energy revisiting the past — particularly if it involves reflecting on uncomfortable missteps. We often want to move quickly, telling ourselves that speed equals efficiency. True efficiency, however, sometimes requires slowing down, being mindful and especially looking back at the decisions we’ve made that didn’t go as we’d hoped.
Join Cheryl Einhorn, an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, for a discussion of using your past decisions as a dataset you can mine for insights to make better future decisions.
What You'll Learn
The Cornell Keynotes podcast is brought to you by eCornell, which offers more than 200 online certificate programs to help professionals advance their careers and organizations. Learn more in our Complex Decision-Making certificate program, authored by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn.
Did you enjoy this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast? Watch the full Keynote.
This transcript was generated using AI and has not yet been edited for clarity or accuracy.
Chris Wofford: On today's episode of Cornell Keynotes, we are looking closely at how we make decisions. Now, some of us have rigorous processes for making decisions, some of us not so much.
This episode is all about reflection and how to reduce the number of mistakes we make, and even better, making mistakes before we make them, or rather, imagining failure early on in our decision making processes. So we can avoid it once we've reached a final decision. Today's guest, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, is the author of the book Problem Solved, where she introduces her system for making decisions, and it's called the AREA method.
And a lot of what we cover in this discussion comes from Cheryl's online Cornell certificate program that's called Complex Decision Making. So check out the episode notes for info on how the course can teach you to be more reflective and make better decisions in your personal and professional life.
And now, here's my conversation with Cheryl Strauss Einhorn. So Cheryl, how'd you get into this idea of decision making, developing a framework or a system.
Cheryl Einhorn: So my background is in investigative journalism. And I spent over a decade at the business magazine Barron's. And while I was there I ended up specializing in what you might call the bearish company story. Stories that take a skeptical look at a company's finances. Or at their strategy. And when these stories came out, there was a really outsized reaction.
some companies went out of business. Sometimes regulators would get involved. One company was raided by the FBI. Sometimes the stock exchange would halt the shares of the publicly traded. Companies that I wrote about for one company, the CEO was sentenced to 10 years in jail after a series of the investigative articles.
And I just just started to think about how do I know that I'm telling stories that are true? It should be told. And how do I know that I'm thinking about the incentives and motives of the people who are talking to me about these stories. And I just [00:02:00] realized that I should take a closer examination of the decisions that I was making.
And at the time, there was research coming out saying we all have these mental mistakes, what we now call our cognitive biases, that we see the world as we are, not as it is. And so there was no real framework out there to really think about testing our assumptions and judgments to make evidence based decisions that really involve other stakeholders.
And so I thought with my background in research, maybe I'll put something together and that became what we now call my area method.
Chris Wofford: Why, why get better at making decisions? what's the business case for it?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think people who want to maintain their health, they eat well on a consistent basis, even if they cheat a little and people who want to stay fit, they continue to exercise and they actually change up those exercises.
Over time. At times you need strength. At times you need flexibility. At times you need balance. And certainly it's good to continually work on all three. [00:03:00] And decision making is the same way. When you feel good about a decision, your mental and physical health are impacted. And so it's something that we want to continue to work on.
Complex problems are complex. And so it takes continual effort to continually feel satisfied by the decisions that we make.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. Okay, let's get into the meat of our conversation, Cheryl. The recent Harvard Business Review article is called, How to Learn from Your Mistakes. Tell us how you came up with this idea.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I came up with the idea partly because I make mistakes when I make decisions , but also more often than I would like, but also in working to support other people who are making high stakes decisions, I more often than I would have thought see people wanting to just move on. They've made a mistake, something hasn't worked out, it's of consequence, and they want to move away from that.
And I just thought, what is it that is keeping people from, from learning, from what is essentially [00:04:00] their own personal data set? That if they mine it, that they could hopefully make fewer mistakes and feel better about themselves and their decisions.
Chris Wofford: Repeating mistakes, over and over. Yes. What does that tell us about ourselves?
Cheryl Einhorn: I think one, it tells us that self awareness is difficult. It is. Even if we're somebody who wants to have self awareness, I think it's a constant struggle. And I think the other thing is, Sometimes it's difficult to know what to look back on or how to examine it and unpack a past decision to really get at the root of what is the mistake and then how do you think about what can I do differently next time and then again bring that self awareness when you next experience something that's akin to To the decision that you made that you have some regret about to actually put that into put that into action.
Chris Wofford: So when you think about, hopefully, ideally, we're learning from our [00:05:00] mistakes as we go, right? We're growing older and wiser. What do we look to learn? How do we kind of structure that revision of the past or revisiting the past rather, in order to learn from that mistake? How do you talk about that?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, one tool that I think is very easy is called a rear view mirror exercise. Okay, take a decision that you have that didn't work out well. And. Go back over what was the decision that you made, what happened that you were unhappy about, and really sort of what was, think about what was the outcome you were hoping for, and then see if you can examine those factors and say to yourself, if I had the great good fortune to do this again, what would I do differently?
Because now you're beginning to imprint a new pathway forward so that you're priming yourself for the next time that you face something. to, to recall that you've already reimagined that there's a better way that you wanted to handle that situation.
Chris Wofford: And you [00:06:00] just mentioned a tool, I should re mention that, uh, complex decision making, you're the Certificate author of this four course program.
Yes.
Chris Wofford: how does that, what we've just talked about are these tools that are, part of the instruction that people can find at eCornell and in your courses.
Cheryl Einhorn: Absolutely. These tools are embedded into that course. And actually that course, I think, allows anyone to take it to select the high stakes decision of their choosing, personal or professional, and apply it through my area method system.
And I'm the facilitator of that course. So they'd also be working with me, having an opportunity to ask questions and so on. And I would be guiding them through the area method to help them with that decision making process. And actually in the area method, the E letter is exploration and exploitation, and it gives you an opportunity to do some creative exercises to, as you mentioned earlier, make your [00:07:00] mistakes before you make them.
These exercises help you to think about your hypotheses for the different pathways that you might move forward. And to match them up against the evidence that you have. So you can really test your assumptions and better bring out where you might be making unfounded assumptions and increase the likelihood that the decision can succeed for you.
Chris Wofford: I think the fact that thousands of people register for this tells us something, right? You and I can talk about the importance of decisions and, you know, how we learn from our mistakes and things along those lines. But I think the most critical takeaway in the through line in this conversation from here on out should be that this is something you can learn.
This is something you have to work on. It's not easy. You're not going to learn it by the end of this 45 minute discussion, right? And that's what I really appreciate about your work, is that it gives us frameworks to do all these things that sometimes feel like abstractions. Yes?
Cheryl Einhorn: It, it can certainly feel abstract, but the idea that there's a process I think is a liberating and equitable tool.
[00:08:00] Anybody can use it and it sets up the guardrails to help keep you along a pathway that if you continue to follow it, hopefully will help you get to an outcome that is satisfying for you.
Chris Wofford: You mentioned writing a book or creating tools to help people make high stakes decisions. Of course, there's low stakes decisions, and that's part of our life, right?
There's, it's a series of decisions every single day.
Cheryl Einhorn: Right.
Chris Wofford: Do we learn equally from all of them? Do you distinguish between high stakes, low stakes decisions? Are there some that we can learn more from than others?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think certainly when you can see the impact, that's a decision you can really learn from.
And sometimes we make a small decision and it turns out to be a big decision. And we may have, we may have missed that.
Well, let's say in the way that. We're listening. We're valuing a colleague in a meeting. We may be on to the next meeting in our mind and getting up and leaving, and we may have completely missed that there was something important going on for somebody [00:09:00] else.
And I think this idea that, you know, we need to always be self aware and present in the moment is a constant struggle and recognizing at times when we have made a mistake, I think is something that yeah. powerful because we can learn from it and we can say we're sorry and we can do something new because we're constantly learning as humans.
Chris Wofford: Right. uh, when you start getting into the mindset of the Sheryl Einhorn courses you're thinking about decisions and and prioritizing them and thinking about them with a new fresh analytical kind of way.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, the idea is to really have an opportunity in a process like the area method.
To explore these different pathways And to also think about failure, you know before you make a decision There's a really useful tool that anybody can use called the pre mortem.
Just imagine Before you begin to execute the decision that it's failed, can you identify how it's failed?
Well, [00:10:00] once you're able to do that, you can see where are their vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your plan. Then you can shore them up to strength, test your path forward and increase the likelihood that you can succeed.
Chris Wofford: Before we started talking here, we were talking about this idea of looking back reflection.
none of all of us are good at that. tell me a little bit more about how you think about that.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think that part of it has to do with self awareness, which as we spoke about is difficult and having self awareness allows us to be able to see that there are things we might want to do differently and to give us the opportunity to look back and to excavate those past decisions.
And I think that that's something that offers us. Unlimited opportunities to do new things, be somebody who's a little bit different each day and be closer to in alignment with our values and the way that we want to show up in the world.
Chris Wofford: And this kind of lines up with what Peter asks. Do you have a tool [00:11:00] or have you developed a method for reflection itself?
any heuristics or anything, within your world that It helps people frame the way they look back at decisions.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well I think the rear view mirror exercise that I mentioned certainly is a very easy version and also in the Harvard Business Review article, you'll see how I helped somebody actually go through the logical progression.
of the rearview mirror. So you also have an example of how somebody's used it. And that can be really useful when you're mapping your own problem into it as well.
Chris Wofford: Thinking about all this, may make some of us emotional, right? In some way, or recalling emotions or going through, you know, the feelings that we feel when we've made some bad decisions or good ones, right?
How do you talk about emotions like within your Uh, how can they affect decisions and the looking back on decisions?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I don't think that emotions are the enemy of good decisions. I think they're actually really important information. And I think that's one [00:12:00] reason why we often don't look at our mistakes, because they're often tied to difficult emotions.
And we tend to want to get away from those emotions. But if we can actually label them, That gives us something to work with since we do think in language. And so I think it's actually a very powerful tool and something that we don't want to ignore. The other thing that I would say is that discomfort is not bad.
You know, I think many of us have been taught that we don't want to feel uncomfortable, but discomfort is really where the growth is. And so if we can recognize that, that again, gives us a bit of a litmus test to say, you know what? I actually do want to spend some time here in this uncomfortable space because I actually want to get to someplace that feels better.
Chris Wofford: After you've made learned some hard lessons, you want to get to a good place as soon as you can. And this kind of points us next direction, which is self awareness. Again. Some people have it in greater capacity than others, but it can be taught and learned.
how do you talk about self [00:13:00] awareness when you, teach your courses or speak with students?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think one of The ways that I talk about it is partly by educating people about these cognitive biases and the mental mistakes. For example, I'm somebody who, in terms of problem solver profiles and the way I approach decisions, I would call myself a detective, which means I'm very comfortable with research.
So a cognitive bias that I have to always be careful about is confirmation bias. I can generally find a piece of evidence to tell you why I'm right. But that doesn't mean that I'm actually right and disconfirming evidence is far more powerful. And so I need to constantly remind myself that just because I can find a data point that supports my way of thinking, that doesn't mean that it's right in that situation or that it's right in the absolute.
So learning some of these cognitive biases, I think, is very useful. I'll give you one more example. Another one of the problem solver profiles is the listener. [00:14:00] This is somebody who generally has a trusted group of advisors who she likes a lot. So that would be somebody, for example, who might have a liking bias because she likes you.
She may give much more weight to what you have to say. Knowing that can also Cause her maybe to say before she asked you for advice. Maybe she wants to ask herself what she thinks so that when she listens to you, it can bounce off and give her something to react to. And so that's one way that we can think about self awareness.
Chris Wofford: You mentioned problem solver profile in there. This is a tool, this is a resource that we're going to share with our audience as well.
Heads up for that in the chat. Let's talk about some of the steps, that are involved in the problem solver profile. I want you to flesh it out a little bit, talk about this tool a little bit, so that people can understand how it could be useful for them. Oh,
Cheryl Einhorn: sure. So in my newest book, which is called Problem Solver, I've identified that there's five dominant ways that people approach decisions.
Okay. They each have beautiful [00:15:00] strengths, but they each are associated with some common cognitive biases that can tend to Trip up how somebody makes decisions. I gave them all fun names because we think in language. And so they are the adventurer, the detective, the listener, the thinker and the visionary.
The adventurer is somebody who's a confident decision maker and generally has a very strong internal gut. She's able to identify the next step. Move through a decision quickly and a cognitive bias that might be associated with that is an optimism bias because she favors forward momentum and wants to take a decision quickly because it feels right to her.
She knows that if she gets it wrong, she always has the next. decision that she can make. And then the next one is the detective, somebody who favors data. I told you that I am a detective, and that one of our blind spots is the confirmation bias that we just talked about.
Yes.
Cheryl Einhorn: The listener, we also just mentioned, this is our most collaborative, cooperative [00:16:00] decision maker.
This person knows how to gather the wisdom of others, but she often has a tough time identifying her own internal voice and a cognitive bias for her. Would be the liking bias or also social proof where she may overweight the wisdom of the crowd. Instead of actually listening to her inner voice, the thinker is our most contemplative decision maker.
This is somebody the action is between their ears. They want to understand the why behind the decision, and they really want to understand their options. They can under they can end up in a relativity bias where they compare one option against the other and too narrowly confine a problem. And then finally, our visionary is our big.
Creative blue skies kind of a decision maker. They can see things that are potential, not just practical. And this can have a saliency bias where one thing can seem to make a [00:17:00] decision. True outweighs everything else. But when you want somebody who's your creative problem solver, they're a great person to have a seat at the table.
Yeah. So you can see that they each bring a very different way of looking at a problem. And that's why intellectual diversity in our teams, in our families, in our friendships is something that can really give us a more fulsome understanding of the problems we solve.
Chris Wofford: So if we've assessed ourselves and categorized ourselves as a particular type of problem solver, what's the path forward?
Then what do you do?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, first, I think it lets you know what your strengths are and also where you may have some limitations that you want to challenge and work on.
I'll just give you a quick example since we're talking about past mistakes. I have one daughter that lives very close to where I live. We're in the same time zone. I have another child who lives very far away in a very different time zone, and I found that I would interrupt my local child when my distant child [00:18:00] called.
And what that made me recognize is it could make my local child feel devalued. Not as important. And when I was able to categorize that as a mistake, I was able to apologize, but I was also able to schedule with my distant child phone calls That would not be interrupting anybody else and give us dedicated time together.
And that's something that I think was a great lesson to learn for me.
Chris Wofford: And then where did you go from there? What did that decision, that particular decision, unlock for you?
Cheryl Einhorn: It unlocked a couple things. One, like I said, I was able to apologize to my local child who actually hadn't said anything. But she so appreciated that I noticed and that I did apologize for that.
Yeah. And then for the child that lives far away. It was also better for her because I was able to say, given our time change, there's a perfect slot where you can call me and I can call you and it's not going to interrupt anything else. And that's super early in my [00:19:00] east coast warning. And so now we always have a call at the same time of day.
It was the rare win on every part of looking at a Miss mistake, finding the awareness that I was doing something that I wanted to fix and having a new pathway after I examined with the rear view mirror what I was doing wrong.
I want to tell you about, The story that I used in the Harvard Business Review article because it was about this female leader who was getting ready to create a new post at her company, chief of staff, very senior hire. But they just had a disastrous, very senior hire in another part of the company.
So disastrous that about four months after finally making the hire, the person left. And in looking at these answers that we got here, the CEO was blaming her head of HR. Oh, I didn't get enough good candidates. Oh, the time was too compressed to make the hire. But when we [00:20:00] did the rear view mirror exercise before she engaged in this brand new high stakes hiring process, what we noticed was that in fact she could do three things differently.
One, she could have a longer time to find the applicant. And she could just erase the time urgency. Second, she could actually conduct more thorough interviews herself of the candidate, more simulation questions for the type of duties that the person would have to carry out. And third, she could also call more references and spend more time with those references.
So in doing the rearview mirror, she was able to have much greater confidence in her head of HR. It wasn't his problem at all and much greater confidence that she could better control a better outcome by doing a more thorough interview process.
Chris Wofford: There's a through line in the article about slowing down to make better decisions, right?
Managing it in a measured, [00:21:00] careful way. But there's also times where making a decision quickly works well, too. Tell us about that.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I was talking before about the problem solver profiles and the adventurer and the visionary both can move quickly and for different reasons. The adventurer because she can easily identify a next step and a visionary because they tend to have very strong conviction in their decisions.
For the rest of us, there are detectives, the listeners and the thinkers, we tend to go more slowly, but guess what? We are not less accident prone. So going slower doesn't mean we're going to eradicate mistakes, but certainly knowing what to do when we slow down to examine the pathways forward, the people who are involved and our own expectations can really help us.
to make more satisfying decisions.
Chris Wofford: I think a lot of what you're talking about, too, we're, considering this in kind of a personal, the me professional kind of way. But this can be applied to teams across [00:22:00] departments, et cetera. Tell us how we, how we scale up.
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think these same tools are accessible and equitable to everybody.
You know, um, a team that has just had a problem at work, they can do a rear view mirror exercise as a cohort and actually before Let's say, a go to market strategy, or before making a big decision, you can use the pre mortem to examine what have we missed? How could it go wrong? Did we actually set up the safeguards that we need to?
Have we identified where there are weaknesses in our plan forward? So these tools can be used personally, professionally, alone, with teams. However, you want to
Chris Wofford: Peter checks in who is a certified Six Sigma black belt and says he uses and applies DMAIC in all problem solving you familiar with this?
I'm not I'm gonna go
Chris Wofford: through their acronym But what Peter is asking for is are there any comments on helping people write a problem definition?
So DMAIC is defined measure [00:23:00] analyze It's implement or improve and control. Problem definition.
Cheryl Einhorn: You see what
Chris Wofford: he's getting at.
Cheryl Einhorn: Yeah. So I think problem definition, it's a great question, is um, is actually very important. And I think that many people jump over this step of problem solving and assume that their mind has figured out what it is that they're actually solving.
And what that does is if you slow down enough to put language to it yourself, you have an opportunity to see, is it incomplete? How am I actually characterizing this? Would somebody else characterize it the same way? And so problem definition is a wonderful alignment tool as well, so that you don't actually only partially solve the problem, or heaven forbid, solve the wrong problem.
So when you're defining a problem, I really like to use something we've talked about in the past. I call it the vision of success. And this asks yourself, well, what has to happen in the outcome of the decision? for you to know that it has succeeded for you. What that [00:24:00] means is if you can answer that is you'll have both the problem in the statement, but you also will identify those few criteria that actually will let you have a measurable identification of what success is.
So I suggest that's something, Peter, that you try. And this tool is written up in my first book. Problem solved where you can see how other people have applied it to have a variety of examples. So no matter what problem you're solving, you will have seen different approximations.
Chris Wofford: We have a viewer who asks a question, and I'm thinking of it in the group cohort or, um, you know, making decisions among your peers and having a system for doing so.
Chuck asked, How do you address dilemmas in decision making? Like in the case of where there's competing value, shifting priorities, Things along those lines. Those are variables that quite often we can't control, but how do we deal with them?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, I think alignment becomes very important to this vision of success tool Yeah It's something that [00:25:00] everybody would be agreeing on what success looks like once you start to execute the decision and Circumstances are changing around you.
It should be a living Breathing vision of success, meaning you should be updating and iterating as you're gathering information and better understanding and synthesizing what it is that you're actually solving. So I think that's something that could help.
Chris Wofford: I think that's a lovely question. Thank you, Peter and Chuck for those back to back.
You're doing some work in artificial intelligence and decision making. Tell me about the work that you're doing and how you do it.
Cheryl Einhorn: Thank you. So, um, I designed a course for LinkedIn in AI and decision making, and now I've been working on a book about the same topic.
And really what I've come to appreciate is, you know, AI is this incredibly powerful tool. It's great for brainstorming. It's great for gathering more information together than And more quickly than we ever could. And it is also really good at synthesizing information, but it doesn't know [00:26:00] what we know.
And so if we can lead A. I. then we can give it prompts that are really going to help us to solve something that is meaningful and relevant to what we're working on.
Chris Wofford: Great. So we'll look for those. Uh, the book is coming out when?
Cheryl Einhorn: Well, the book is due at the publisher, March 1st. So hopefully it will come out by the end of the year.
Chris Wofford: Good luck through the rest of the editorial process. That's the most grueling part.
Cheryl Einhorn: It is a grueling part. I wish
Chris Wofford: you the best of luck. More tool time. You've got a tool to send us out with that'll help our decision making process.
Cheryl Einhorn: So, um, if people go to app dot area method, so it's app dot area dot com, you will find two.
self assessments that you can take.
One
Cheryl Einhorn: is for the problem solver profile that we discussed, and there you will self categorize yourself after taking a brief quiz into which one of those dominant decision making profiles is yours, and then it [00:27:00] will give you just a little bit of information about what your profile means.
And then my problem solver can help you really think about how do you use this yourself? How do you use it with your home team or with your work team? I personally have found that this piece of research transformed my relationship with my mother
and it gives me, I think, a really, active way. to listen to other people to better understand what's important to them when they make decisions.
And then the other tool that you'll find at app. area method. com assessment rather, is what I call my research on decision making myths. And these are the most common decision making mistakes. And you can take the quiz and it will show you two things. One is, Which of the most common decision making mistakes is actually a problem for you, but then it will also give you your superpower.
Which of these most common mistakes do you circumnavigate around? And this may be an issue for [00:28:00] others, but you actually do pretty well. And we would love a lot of people to take this because we would love to get a really big data set that we can help share back with people what it is that we're learning.
Chris Wofford: Great to have you in the studio. Thank you,
Cheryl Einhorn: Chris. Thanks so much.
Chris Wofford: Thanks for listening to Cornell Keynotes. Check out the episode notes for information on Cheryl Strauss Einhorn's online courses on decision making from eCornell. Thanks again, friends, and please subscribe to stay in touch.