We all do it. Regardless of how pragmatic, ego-less and open-minded we think we are, none of us are innocent here. We "satisfice." Satisficing is the reason your elevator pitch failed after the first ten seconds, your product positioning was met with glazed eyes in the market and your brilliant idea was quashed by the grizzled old veterans at your company. Satisficing can kill you. It can also be used by the forces of good, so read on.


To be clear, satisficing is a mash-up of two words, satisfy and suffice, coined by social psychologist Herbert Simon. When we satisfice, we seek adequacy, not optimal results. We do the first good enough thing to satisfy our need or answer our question and then we move on because our busy schedule has little time for reflection. At first blush, this sounds reasonable. We don't have time to analyze carefully whether a particular book is a good investment of a twenty dollar bill .... we look to the reviews. We can't do a comparative vendor analysis every time our car makes a funny noise .... we ask a friend, get a recommendation, and close the case.
Satisficing is the death of many a good idea, regardless of how appropriate it is for your audience. Why? Your target doesn't want to have to think. I've met with VC's who quickly rush to say, "Sorry, just to make this easy for me, who are you exactly like? Can you give me an example so I can explain you to my partners?" Satisficing. He's too busy to understand.
We satisfice when we are too busy to do our homework. We leave the heavy lifting for the agency. We find ourselves thinking, "– and the rest will simply take care of itself–" It doesn't and it won't. Satisficing is the reason so many good ideas never happen in corporations because, "We did that once and it didn't work." Really? You did exactly what I was thinking, implemented it the way I'm suggesting, and did it with the passion and commitment I have in mind .... and it failed? Amazing series of coincidences, and all lazy thinking on the part of our calcified colleagues. While satisficing can be a clean mental short-cut for decision making, it can also hide a huge portion of intellectual laziness.
We can avoid this pitfall by creating new mental models and by avoiding means of quickly categorizing ourselves. Whenever we fall into "buzz-speak," we set ourselves up for failure. When we speak in clichés, we're quickly pigeon-holed.
We can't stop our listener from satisficing .... so let's embrace what we can't change. Work within the listener's ingrained psychological framework instead of trying to storm the walls. This is a smarter approach and everyone is happier in the end. The entire social psychology of interpersonal influence discusses how our mental decision triggers work in request settings. We can try to overwhelm our listener .... with diminishing results, I'd add .... or we can give them a reason to lower their defenses and actually listen to us for a moment.
This is a big subject that I can't cover entirely in a single blog post, so let's approach this bit by bit and over time. I've written a lot about this at Note to CMO over the past few years and can also point you to excellent online resources like Dr. Steven Feinberg's blog, Dr. Robert Cialdini's Influence at Work, and a few others.
Regards.