The Haunting Truth of Resilience: Becoming Genuinely Productive

You are using your whole brain. Your mind, however, that’s another story.
The truth that should haunt you is that you only make a fraction of your decisions with your conscious awareness—a tiny fraction.

Experts estimate that anywhere from 80 to 99 percent of all decisions are rooted in the emotional unconscious. That means you use logic and consciousness only one to twenty percent of the time.

The Seven-Second Gap

According to brain scans, decisions are made up to seven seconds before we know we’ve made them. {Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J., & Haynes, J.-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 543-545.}

In those seven seconds, while a decision works its way into your awareness, it becomes more concrete and complex to shake. From confirmation bias to cognitive dissonance, scientists studying brains and behaviour can list many thinking traps and reasons we make them.

With that automatic process on constant repeat, we are doing things without understanding why it’s the right action and certainly without completely accepting the consequences that are about to unfold.

Tuned Out and Unaware

Is it any wonder we aren’t getting the results we want? We are tuned out, emotional, and unaware. It’s how you use your mind that makes all the difference.

Mind is the brain in action, and that’s where we are all unique—including our appetite for and definition of success. Tuned out and unaware, many of us don’t even realize we have options and alternatives available. We continue on predetermined paths that are ill-suited to our best selves, sometimes painfully and unnecessarily.

Far Too Busy

People say they are too busy. Science says entropy is the natural progression of anything, a march toward chaos. If you are too busy now, I’m sorry you might be on a slippery slope to rock bottom. Get ready because it will get more chaotic. This minute is the best time to act, but I know you’re too busy to continue reading.

All you need is seven seconds, but I get that your time and effort are at a premium. Quality is a luxury that doesn’t become relevant until you have options from which to choose.

Making better decisions in business has always been the goal of the quality movement, as I generalize it. The difference in every organization that defines its culture is how it defines “better.”

When decisions lead to less waste, greater productivity, and products and services that align more closely with your customer’s view of “now, perfect, and free,” I refer to this as Quality.

The financial reality is that poor quality is costly. You can’t sell products that don’t measure up, yet money was spent that must be recouped. Someone has to pay for rework, lazy work, and work that never should have been done in the first place.

Someone is the customer—you and me. The easiest way to lower prices is to improve quality, with the added benefit that customers and your free marketing team become happy and loyal.

Quality Control

Improving quality started with quality control. Products are inspected, measured, and tested at the end of the manufacturing line. Products that didn’t cut the mustard were reworked if possible or tossed if not. Quality is achieved because the harmful products aren’t shipped.

Control of quality had the desired effect of improved customer perception of quality, but perception isn’t reality. They were still paying for poor quality if they did not experience it directly.

Added processes at the end of the manufacturing line and before the customer receives the product are costly. From space to people, from tools and equipment, and the most precious commodity, time, the solution isn’t much different from the problem it is attempting to solve.

Someday, someone says, “Why don’t we prevent instead of control?”

Quality Assurance

Quality control leads to quality assurance. Just as a winning recipe and fresh ingredients produce good results in the kitchen, the same idea prevails on factory floors.

Before making the part, you know the machine is set up correctly, the material is within requirements, and all other factors are in place to produce a product that meets the final specification. That way, you don’t have to measure the final product – you know it will conform to your standards.

While quality assurance requires much more knowledge, it is far less costly. You need to understand what key factors are required to produce a satisfactory result and how to ensure they exist before proceeding. Still, you minimize waste of time, materials, and space.

Quality by Design

Designed quality came next. Quality moved from the manufacturing floor to the offices of the engineers and product designers. One such method was Design for Six Sigma.

Quality is the most straightforward way to achieve it, not by adding or verifying its presence but by eliminating anything that leads to poor quality. Anything that requires correction, detection, or compensation later incurs additional costs and time—quality results from design decisions, manufacturing actions, and marketing promises.

Since manufacturers had control of product design, they could create an easy and inexpensive product. Engineers and designers explore concepts like minimizing the number of parts, simplifying their complexity, and ensuring the uniqueness of components while the product is still in the conceptual phase phases.

Quality control existed at the end, like icing on a cake, quality assurance baked it in, and quality by design started to look at the recipes themselves. Quality becomes a result of making better decisions earlier and earlier. The more integrated quality becomes into everything a business does, the more profitable the business.

To me, my profession in Quality has always been about making better decisions and helping leaders, teams, and organizations do that exact thing. As a professional woman who worked in traditionally male roles, I’ve run into many situations I should not have. I first typed “fair share” and rethought my entire sentence to match my position. None of it is fair.

A 6’6” man demonstrated they could hear me loud and clear despite earplugs, heavy machinery, and a sizeable gap between my body and his. From that moment on, anyone who tried to lean on me again, complaining that they had to violate my personal space and even touch me to hear what I was saying, could back a few steps up. That one encounter made me realize what I’d been silently enduring and allowed me the perspective to say, “No more.”

Thanks for the respect; it helps me know that you’ve got your inherent biases under control.

In Pursuit of Truth

The thrust of improvement has been around the essentiality of data-based decisions, but now we know that’s not practical. Data is used to push opinions, not to discover the truth, but maybe once you know that, you can operate differently.

I operated differently because I was too far from my league to have an opinion. I relied on the data to tell me the truth, which might have been my secret power. Later, I learned that if you don’t have an opinion, people think you are stupid, whereas it seemed to me that having an opinion was the hallmark of ignoring helpful truths.

If the pursuit of logic and math is the pursuit of tackling the one percent of your conscious decisions, I believe you stand to make far more progress with far less work by tackling the remaining 99 percent.

The Future of Quality

Technology has given us better tools to help us understand why we make logical errors. Quality has always taught us that if you can predict it, you can prevent it. What science can expect, you should be able to control.
Quality of thought happens when we recognize our cognitive biases and emotional triggers instead of acting on them.

Quality’s future depends on reducing the interference and impact of cognitive biases on decisions. Anyone who does that looks like a genius compared to the normal population working within their unconscious, automatic decisions.

How to Be a Genius

The theme of more progress, earlier prediction and smoother prevention led this engineer to learn everything I could about neuroscience, behavioural economics, and psychology.

Quality of thought can be learned, and it can be engineered into design.
With that massive magnitude of unconscious emotional decisions, your untapped potential exists in becoming conscious of your choices and questioning them before they turn into actions.

Your CEO might call you one day and ask what you are doing differently. I hope you have a more complete and helpful answer than I did.