Some Takeaways from Therese Huston's talk and World Café today

Therese Huston

At today's gathering led by Therese Huston, focusing on Because How We Decide Matters:  Making Decisions more Inclusive, we learned that all of us are the experts, bringing our different perspectives and knowledge to the table.  Dr. Huston just had to get us going with a couple of points loosely based on her book How Women Decide:  What's True, What's Not, And What Strategies Spark the Best Choices.

After the brief introductory words of wisdom, we discussed how decisions are made in our working area (round 1), ideas on how we can get more diverse perspectives into these discussions (round 2), and steps to make it happen (round 3).  Between rounds, all but one person left their table to find a new spot and thus new group to discuss, with the remaining person as the host welcoming the new group of people and catching them up on the previous discussion.  The result?  We brought up many of the points Dr. Huston was going to make and then some, and we applied them directly to our own work environment, giving us strategies and ideas to take back to our departments and units.  World Café was a great success.

But just in case you do need a reason to read the book, here some of my takeaways, happily overgeneralized:

• having more women in the room for crucial decisions will make these decisions better
• reducing masculinized environments will reduce women's stress level to double excel
• planning hiring interviews carefully will reduce danger of having hidden bias against women and for men (this may depend on the area of interview)
• collaborating leads to better decisions, and being decisive too often is a single, faulty perspective -- and women seen as decisive are seen negatively
• being aware of stereotype threat and not creating situations where this may be a problem -- and counter this yourself with self affirmation
• building coalitions when the risk appears to be high
• remembering that we don't need to know everything about a situation to make suggestions
• showing that we women are willing and able to take risks and be obvious when we have done so
• men take more risk than women -- leading to more and bigger mistakes -- because men are more emotionally stressed when they are in a stressful situation -- this is counter to women being too emotional to make important decisions (which is of course rubbish)
• knowing the difference between confidence and overconfidence
• thinking about a pre-mortem rather than having a devil's advocate
• reframing anxiety into excitement (I am excited rather than I am anxious)
• generating at least one more option (rather than yes or no)
• asking people who you think made a terrible decision to help me understand it
• writing down our decisions so that we can remember them more accurately