Beyond Analysis: Unleashing the Power of Somatic Decision-Making in a World of Overwhelming Choices
What is the most expensive item you own? I imagine it is your house. And how long do you imagine it takes to decide to buy a house? The answer is a staggering less than eight minutes. You probably spent more time deciding what to wear this morning than choosing the house you want to live in.
We find ourselves amidst an era of unparalleled abundance in choices: breakfast cereal, cars, televisions, jam, and sofas. One online shopping site has almost ten thousand different pairs of jeans you can choose from. And they all do the same thing - stop you from being arrested in the supermarkets when deciding which of 150 different types of biscuits you want to buy. Such is the level of choice we face that people become frozen and don’t make any choice - even if it's physically or financially damaging. Psychologists call it ‘choice anxiety’.
So, in this (morally obscene) world of hyper-choice that we have to navigate without making ourselves mentally unwell, what can buying a house teach us about making smart and faster decisions?
Love
When buying a house, we combine two inherently human skills: analysis and phenomenology. The concept of analysis is clear. It has been one of the primary decision-making tools in Western society for the last hundred years. In fact, before the Enlightenment at the very end of the 17th Century, the word ‘analysis’ hardly appears in any literature.
Analysis is gathering data from various sources and using our neocortex's superb functionality to deduce a decision. It’s a brilliant tool for making quantifiable decisions. Which of these two jobs would suit me better if my ambition is to earn more money, work fewer hours, or be closer to the family? Or which of these two products is healthier or better for the environment? Even complex decisions like cancer patients' treatment plans are based on quantifiable and measurable criteria.
But what about decisions that are not quantifiable, systematic and measurable? Which school is a better fit for my son? Which house should I buy? Which job would give me a greater sense of satisfaction? What impact will changing our logo have on our customers?
After all, we have mastered analysis in the last hundred years, but how did we make decisions before we had the abundance of analytical tools currently available?
Let’s go back to our house-buying process. First, we use analysis: we list all the attributes we use to narrow down our options. And then, we use a second skill, phenomenology. It's a skill we use subconsciously daily, but we need to learn how to use it consciously. Phenomenology is the opposite of analysis. Where analysis is zooming in to see the detail in the data, phenomenology is zooming out. Psychologists describe it as ‘to show itself’ or ‘to bring what is there into the light’ from the Greek phenomenon. We stand back and let what is there hit us in the face.
If you’ve ever fallen in love, that was phenomenology. I doubt you did thorough analytical research into your partner. It was love, and it just smacked you in the face.
Research from Aalto University in Finland had participants map where certain feelings were felt in their bodies. When we feel an emotion like happiness, anger, fear and love, it is a bodily experience. We have constructed an entire vocabulary of idioms around how our bodies express emotions. ‘Cold feet.’ ‘Butterflies in my stomach.’ ‘Smacked in the face.’ ‘I feel it in my gut.’ The same paper proposed that “somatosensory feedback can trigger conscious emotional experiences”. Or put another way: just as an emotion like anger can travel from our brain to create a sense in our bodies. So a feeling in our bodies can make an emotional response in our brains. Our body can create a conscious reaction in our brain.
Core to this experience is the vagus nerve. The central part of our nervous system manages movement and social interaction. It forms from the embryonic skin in the womb, and its principal job is sending signals from the body to the brain. The vagus nerve is called an afferent nerve; it sends signals from something (the body) towards something else (the brain). But it’s not a two-way street; it’s more like a three-lane motorway travelling from the body to the brain, a winding country lane from the brain to the body. This means our ‘gut feelings’ more significantly impact what we do and feel than our brain.
By why? What possible survival-enhancing benefit does it have? After all, nature is anything but frivolous. Everything serves a purpose.
It's All About Relationship
In a chaotic and dangerous world, individuals isolated from the community die. Finding shelter, food, warmth, sleep, and protecting ourselves is impossible if we’re alone. Like many other herd and pack animals - we’re designed to be part of a community. It's how we survive. Our bodies have a chemical, oxytocin, to ensure we connect and bond with like-minded Homo sapiens.
More than merely surviving, this somatic-super-sense has allowed us to form mega tribes of thousands of people who have created cities, computers, and MRI scanners and put men on the moon. Yes, because we are brilliant analysts, but before that, we are highly sensitive somatic creatures that can form deeply connected relationships.
Your somatic decision-making means you have a partner, friends and life itself. Without our somatic super sense, life would not exist.
Logic Is Not Always Logical
The second advantage is that our somatic super-sense enables us to bypass the prejudices and biases of our brain.
Most of what we see, perhaps 80%, is a ‘digitally enhanced’ image our brain has created. As Professor David Eagleman writes, “Your Brain is not directly experiencing any of [what you see]. Instead, your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull.” Everything you see is a hallucination. Simon & Chabris’ famous 1999 video of basketball players and a gorilla demonstrates that our eyes see what our brains want them to see. Or what we subconsciously tell it to see. If it’s not expected, out of scope or does not conform, our brain does not bother to show us. At any given moment, your brain is processing about eleven million pieces of information and only providing you with the forty it ‘thinks’ you need.
Your brain is much less a computer and more like a storytelling, pattern-finding machine that creates your entire world and does everything it can to support your version of that world. It filters out information and facts that do not support your narrative.
And we know this and have known for some time. Behavioural economics is now widely regarded as mainstream. Yet despite a surfeit of information, research and understanding about our inherent biases - it has had minimal impact on organisational decision-making. For example, 60% of leaders thought bad decisions were made as frequently as good ones. Left unchecked, subconscious biases will undermine strategic decision-making.
Phenomenology effectively uses the body's vagus nerve system to send signals to the brain, bypassing any filtering mechanisms and defences its puts in place. When you fall in love with a house, you want it, even though your brain might tell you practical reasons not to do it. It’s farther from school for the kids. The garden is too big to maintain. The kitchen will need replacing. The walls are painted a horrible colour. These might be good and legitimate things to consider, but they are not reasons not to buy.
The somatic vagus nervous system is designed to enable us to make smarter, faster, better decisions without logic or reason. What is the reason you fell in love with your partner? What is the reason you fell in love with your house? Why did something feel ‘not right’ in that job interview? In that instantaneous moment, there is no reason; it just is. If we waited to ‘know’ why a house or partner felt right, we would never move house, be in a relationship or take a new job.
The New Enlightenment
The same somatic, phenomenological experiences are used in constellations, therapy, psychology, acupuncture, massage, haptic therapy, chiropractors, medicine, osteopathy, and tribal healers worldwide. The Enlightenment ended religious bloodshed in Europe; it gave birth to science as we know it, literature, exploration, curiosity, and the quest for reason. As Descartes said: ‘I think, and therefore I am’. But over the years, it has become dogma, and unless science could explain it, it was rejected as a fallacy, mysticism, or magic. Yet from cancer to our expanding galaxy, the world is full of things that we know to be ‘true,’ yet we do not know ‘why’ or ‘how’ they might be true. We used to think Earth was the centre of the Universe until Galileo suggested otherwise. Perhaps in a world where we tend towards black and white, left and right, rich and poor, east and west, right and wrong, good and bad, we should learn to embrace the unknown, the full spectrum of colours. And the mysterious.
Three practical applications
A New Purpose
We’re creating a new purpose and ambition for a global science brand. Our clients are professors, scientists, geneticists, cell physiologists, microbiologists, and experts in quantum physics. The combined brain power and knowledge are nothing short of incredible. Asking them to discuss purpose, story, and ambition is like trying to catch smoke in a jam jar. Combining both analytical and phenomenological approaches allows us to see the whole picture. One exercise we do is to place three A1 pieces of paper on the floor labelled A, B, and C. These represent three possible Emerging Purposes we have distilled. We know what each one represents; the people in the room do not. We do a brief exercise to tune into our whole bodies. They are then asked to stand on each piece of paper and see what it feels like before making a choice.
You might expect them to be cynical and write it off as pseudoscience. Nothing could be further from the truth. They love it. Embrace it. And it enabled them to choose an ambition without being bogged down by positive or negative biases. What might have taken months of energy-draining wrangling and debate took thirty minutes.
A New Brand
Somatics are great hacks for A/B testing. For example, I had a client I was coaching looking at a rebrand but wasn’t sure how their clients would view the changes. Using Post-It notes, we set up the Client on one and the series of proposed changes on separate Post-It notes. For example, a new strap-line, changing the logo from a square to a circle, using red instead of green. I asked the client to ‘feel’ how the client was doing when each element was bought in on a Post-It note. The client reported that, for some, the client felt energised, but other changes made the client want to move away. This enabled my client to choose without cost, time, and traditional analytical approach.
A New School
We’re looking for a new school for our son. How do you choose? Of course, we make a list based on approach, culture, engagement with society, education style, and the things we’re passionate about. And we make visits. But we will also A/B like above. Using Post-It Notes, I assign each school we’re looking at a letter. Then, with my wife, we will feel which letter has the most energy that ‘feels’ right for our son. Those results will weigh the heaviest in our decision-making.
Like buying a house, it’s not either/or but both/and. We don’t throw spreadsheets, logic, and ‘why’ out the window and put a stop to our critical thinking and rigorous research. I want my doctor to be an analyst and a very thorough one, but the truth is, I also want him to be somatic, to not just take the data as definitive but trust her phenomenological senses. How many lives have been saved because of precisely that?
Only when we combine the analytical and phenomenological pictures, do we see the world as we were always designed to. Only when we combine both can we thrive in chaos and disruption.
Maybe if Descartes were here today, he would say something different, ‘I don’t know, and therefore I am.
