Randomness as a Solution to Analysis Paralysis
Can't make a decision? Try flipping a coin – it's more rational than you probably think.
This is the first post in an ongoing series titled When Randomness is Rational, which looks at the usefulness of randomness in decision making.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
When it comes to decision making, analysis paralysis is probably the most universal and relatable frustration. Everyone can remember a time when they simply couldn’t make a decision and instead over-analyzed each option for far longer than what could be considered rational (or sane!).
There are several solutions to dealing with analysis paralysis, but in this post we’re taking a less common approach: using randomness to make a decision. At its simplest, this means flipping a coin or rolling dice, but there are more complex ways to use randomness in ways that address analysis paralysis.
Put simply, randomness is useful in breaking analysis paralysis because it allows for faster, unbiased decision making. Used intelligently, it is an effective tool for cutting through indecision.
To start, let’s talk about what analysis paralysis is and why it happens in the first place.
2. What is Analysis Paralysis?
You’re probably familiar with the concept already, but for the sake of this post, it’s worth clarifying precisely what we mean by analysis paralysis.
Analysis paralysis is a situation where you want to make a decision about something, but aren’t, because you can’t stop overthinking and analyzing the potential options. As a result, you become paralyzed and are unable to make a decision quickly – or at all.
This inability to decide usually has negative consequences, whether that be increased anxiety, a waste of time or resources, or merely a missed opportunity by not making a decision quickly enough.
Ergo, analysis paralysis is something that any rational decision maker wants to minimize or eliminate entirely. But why does it happen in the first place?
3. Why Analysis Paralysis Happens
There are essentially five reasons as to why analysis paralysis happens:
Too Many Apparently-Equal Options: Too many seemingly-equivalent choices leads to difficulty in ranking or categorizing them by desirability – or eliminating a choice entirely. The Fredkin Paradox is a variant of this problem.
Complexity Leads to Feeling Overwhelmed: In situations with multiple complex choices, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed – and avoid making a decision entirely. Even worse, your inability to make a decision increases anxiety levels, making you feel even more overwhelmed and continuing the vicious cycle.
Perfectionism: Aiming for the optimal decision leads to a never-ending quest for the perfect option when good enough options are more rational. This idea is often conveyed with the maxim, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Fear of Regret and Negative Consequences: Inversely, avoidance of negative consequences can lead to an avoidance of choosing one option over another. Rather than make a decision and face concrete undesirable consequences, we prefer to do nothing and keep the consequences in an amorphous future. Of course, not deciding still has consequences – but these are more hidden and less immediately obvious – and thus easier to ignore.
No Urgency: Without a strict deadline or cut-off point to make a decision, over-analysis can continue indefinitely. In situations where a decision has consequential impact and cannot be avoided indefinitely, this delay only increases stress, making it even harder to make a decision. Hence, the term paralysis.
4. Scenarios in Which Randomness is Useful in Breaking Analysis Paralysis
How can randomness help break analysis paralysis? Primarily by introducing a decision-making mechanism that is external to one’s mind. This externalization offloads the stress of making a decision, reducing decision fatigue, and building momentum by moving past the analysis stage as quickly as possible.
Randomness is a type of universal constant that can be tapped into in order to make decisions without requiring the decision maker to use much mental energy.
A key point to note is that analysis paralysis is primarily a problem in situations in which decision speed is more important than decision consequences. In other words, it’s a problem when quick action is needed, but hesitation prevents it, and when the outcomes of different options don’t vary widely in impact.
However, in high-stakes decisions where the wrong choice carries significant risks, randomness probably isn’t the best solution – unless you’ve already pre-filtered the options. In such cases, more analysis might actually be what you need.
Now that we know what analysis paralysis is and why it happens, let’s talk about scenarios in which you may find randomness useful for addressing it.
A. Choosing from Equal Options
The simple and most obvious application of randomness is in a scenario wherein all of the options are, or appear to be, equal. This can be a serious situation, such as choosing which internship to take or which university to attend, or something more mundane, like choosing what to watch on Netflix or what to eat for dinner.
(The options may not actually be equal, but let’s assume that you’ve analyzed them sufficiently and cannot find any significant differences.)
In such a situation, randomly choosing from the equal options is an unbiased way to quickly make a decision and move past analysis paralysis. Just try to be sure that the options are actually equal!
B. To Reduce Complexity and Make Decisions More Quickly
In situations where complexity is the prime reason for analysis paralysis, a random decision-making process can cut through the fog, simplify the mental load, and help you take action more quickly – or just get started in the first place.
The Fable of the Fox and the Cat illustrates such a situation. It’s only a page long and you can read the Grimm Brothers’ version here.
In the fable, a fox and a cat are discussing their ways of escaping from hunters. The educated, worldly fox has many strategies for escape, while the uneducated cat has only one: climbing a tree.
As the fox is bragging about his “sack full of cunning tricks”, the hunters appear. The cat uses his only strategy and climbs a tree, while the fox wastes time choosing which strategy to use – and is subsequently caught by the hunters.
‘O Mr. Fox!’ cried the Cat, ‘you with your hundred arts, and your sack full of tricks, are caught, while I, with my one, am safe. Had you been able to climb up here, you would not have lost your life.’
Because the fox falls prey to analysis paralysis, he wastes too much time contemplating options, takes no action, and is caught. In situations with many possible options, selecting one quickly—even at random—can help break indecision and prompt immediate action.
As a side note, a similar fable is the origin of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of The Hedgehog and the Fox: “…a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” However, Berlin used the animals as descriptors of working styles, not to indicate that the hedgehog’s approach was superior.
C. To Force a Decision if No Solution is Found
A related element of randomness is its inherent implication of commitment. Randomized decision-making has a sense of finality not present in other analytical decision making techniques.
When you flip a coin, it feels final – you don’t immediately begin flipping the coin again for a new result. If you want to flip the coin again, then it probably means you didn’t like the first result, which means that the options aren’t actually equal – and that randomness might not be useful here. More on that below.
Contrarily, when you decide on an action after doing a Pros/Cons analysis or Scenario Planning, it’s very easy to continue analyzing and remain stuck in analysis paralysis.
One effective way to make decisions is to set a specific time period for analysis, then decide randomly once that time is up. For example, you can give yourself five minutes to choose between 10 local restaurants, and assuming no decision has been made after five minutes, choose randomly from them.
D. Simply the Prioritization Process
Prioritization optimization is a significant part of any productive system. Deciding which task to do first is a key element of everything from emergency room triage processes to supply chain logistics. It’s also important in more mundane things, such as completing to-do lists or emptying email inboxes.
Imagine a manager has 5 tasks, all of relative equal importance:
Answer an email from a high-value client
Review the advertising mockups for a key new product launching next month
Write a performance review on an underperforming employee for your manager
Prepare a presentation for an upcoming investor pitch
Schedule interviews with new candidates for the sales position
Which one should he do first? All of them are important and prioritizing one over another seems difficult or impossible. For many people, merely deciding which item to do first is a significant cause of stress leading to analysis paralysis, wasted time, or even burnout.
Randomness is one solution to this problem – assuming that the tasks are truly of equal importance. Just randomize the tasks and complete them in that order. After all, the important part is to execute, not to optimize the plan.
E. Reveal Unknown or Unconsidered Options
One cause of paralysis analysis is a lack of information: because you don’t know something important, the available options seem inadequate, and subsequently you cannot choose between them. After all, if you did know everything, then the right option would probably be obvious.
This is where randomness can be useful, as it is a simple way to force unexpected combinations or ideas. When stuck in a cycle of over-analysis, we tend to obsessively focus on what’s in front of us, to the exclusion of other possibilities. By randomly generating words, images, prompts, or other relevant items, you can brainstorm new ideas that you hadn’t previously considered.
The art and literary worlds are full of examples of this application of randomness:
André Breton and other Surrealists used a variety of randomized methods to create art, literature, and poetry
Tristan Tzara and other Dada-influenced artists used randomness, with even the name supposedly coming from artist Richard Huelsenbeck randomly sliding a knife into a dictionary
The cut-up technique, popularized by William Burroughs in the 1950s, took a finished text, cut it into smaller pieces, then rearranged the words/phrases into a original piece of writing
Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt created the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards intended to break creative blocks and stir the imagination. Each card has a short suggestion, such as “Only one element of each kind” or “Ask your body.”
Writer’s block (or any form of creative block) is essentially a version of analysis paralysis caused by overthinking, and so randomness is a great solution: it breaks routine thinking, removes perfectionism, and creates anti-paralytic momentum.
F. To Reduce Mental Load
Decision making can be mentally exhausting – hence the concept of decision fatigue. Deciding things randomly is a great way to offload this decision making burden to an external agent.
The “typical” method to reduce decision fatigue is to eliminate the number of decisions one needs to make. For example, a number of Silicon Valley CEOs have famously reduced their wardrobe to minimize the number of decisions they need to make.
Using randomness to make a decision is a variant of the same idea. Instead of reducing the number of clothing items, choose what to wear randomly. Of course, this only works if your wardrobe is constructed of pieces that can work together in any combination. This is known as a “capsule wardrobe” and the same principle is applicable in other situations, including meal preparation, exercise routines, and so on.
G. To Resolve Deadlocks or Ties
In group-based analysis paralysis situations, where the group is split between multiple choices, randomness is an unbiased and largely fair leadership approach.
No matter what age, culture, or education level a person has, they likely understand the basic concept of randomness and perceive it to be a relatively fair way to make decisions.
As such, a randomized decision making process can often be used to solve a deadlock and break stalemates. This is one reason why coin flips are often used in sports as a way to resolve ties or preemptively avoid deadlocks and advantages; for example, flipping a coin to decide which football team receives the ball first.
H. To Avoid Blame for a Decision’s Consequences
Similarly, random decision making is ideal in group situations when you want the decision maker to avoid resentment or punishment – specifically, from making a decision that impacts others negatively. This is because randomness is widely perceived as fair and external to the whims of an individual.
As we mentioned above, a major cause of analysis paralysis is the fear of regret or negative consequences. In a business context, this often leads to managers that avoid or delay making decisions, or to choose safer, less risky options. As the old phrase goes, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”
This behavior is also an integral factor in the Innovator’s Dilemma, which describes how larger companies avoid investing in risky, but potentially industry-shifting technologies, and instead focus on growing their current customer base. Allocating resources to an unproven project is an often-delayed or avoided decision – even when the competition makes it urgently necessary.
By making a decision randomly, the blame of making the decision can be offloaded to “the universe” and not to the individual decision maker. Of course, this doesn’t absolve the person deciding to use randomness as a decision-making mechanism in the first place. As such, it’s important that the group first agree on the legitimacy of randomness as a decision-making tool.
A classic implementation of this method is drawing lots (or straws) to select someone to complete an undesirable task. A particularly morbid example of drawing lots comes from sailing; until the late 1800s, it was considered acceptable for a crew stranded without food to draw lots, with the loser being killed and cannibalized. This “custom of the sea” was a tolerated practice in the Anglosphere until an 1884 English court case definitively ruled that necessity is not a defense to a charge of murder.
Interestingly, the practice was generally tolerated unless the process of drawing lots was manipulated and made unfair – which is a good indication of how using randomness to make decisions, even life-or-death ones, is perceived as unbiased!
I. To Reveal Hidden Preferences
Finally, using a random decision-making process can also help reveal preferences that you previously couldn’t – or didn’t – want to acknowledge.
A classic example involves flipping a coin to decide between two options. If you find yourself wishing for the coin to land on a particular side, you already have your answer – take that option.
In situations like these, the value is in the forced decision, not in the random process itself. Oftentimes, forcing yourself to make a decision is required to bring out true preferences – and randomness is usually the simplest, fastest, and least biased way to force a decision. It doesn’t get much simpler than flipping a coin or rolling some dice.
5. Implementing Randomness
So, randomness can be useful for breaking analysis paralysis. But how can you actually implement it? We’ll delve into this in more depth in a future post, but here is a quick overview.
First, Filter: Most implementations of randomness benefit from first filtering the possible options to ensure that they are all viable choices. Otherwise, you may end up with an option that you actually don’t want.
Flip a coin: The classic method. Technically, a coin flip is not 50/50, but in most situations, this minor discrepancy isn’t significant enough to matter.
Roll the dice: Number your options from 1 to 6, then roll some dice. Increase the number of dice if necessary. Alternatively, buy dice with other side amounts.
Random Number Generators and Other Online Tools: You can also use an online tool to generate randomness. Random.org is full of such tools, including Dice Roller, Coin Flipper, Playing Card Shuffler, and List Randomizer.
Traditional Methods of Divination: Although somewhat controversial to suggest in a rational decision-making context, most traditional methods of divination (in particular, cleromancy) work by generating randomness and applying that to decision-making.
While you probably don’t want to sacrifice a chicken and examine its liver (as was common in Ancient Rome) to make your next decision, other methods like the I Ching are easy, straightforward, and pain-free to use.
Conclusion
While it’s no replacement for deep analysis, randomness an incredibly underrated tool in situations where a decision needs to be made quickly, fairly, and with a minimum of mental resources required. That makes it particularly useful for breaking analysis paralysis or other types of indecision.