Her Boss Said It Was a ‘Safe Space.’ It Wasn’t: Nika Kabiri

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My guest for Episode #67 is Nika Kabiri, who describes herself as a “forward thinking, science-loving entrepreneur, author, public speaker, teacher, and researcher.” She's a decision scientist, who has her firm Kabiri Consulting, is on the faculty at the University of Washington Department of Communication, and is co-author of the book Money off the Table: Decision Science and the Secret to Smarter Investing.

Nika has a PhD in sociology and, while she earned the JD degree, she's not an “attorney” (that was my mistake in the episode — oops!!). She has over twenty years of experience studying how people make decisions in a variety of contexts, from business to politics to relationships, and she's an active writer with a lot of great insights to share. You can also find her at YourNextDecision.com.

Questions and topics include:

• What do mistakes even mean?
• Was law school a mistake?
• What’s your favorite mistake?
• Was it a mistake in thinking that the “Safe space” at work was really safe? But she was TOLD it was!
• How does a decision scientist decide whether she should speak up or not?
• Minimizing regret vs. maximizing possibility of good outcomes
• Helpful to delay a decision when you can?
• Forecasting the probability of outcome.. can’t predict the future… but we're craving certainty
• Broader themes on misinformation… what do you trust? Stories? Data?
  • As people decide should they wear masks? Should they get vaccinated?
• You’ve written about solutions to conspiracy theories… what can individuals do, what must society do?
• Her article: Vaccine hesitancy: How much should we worry?

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• Video
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• Quotes
• How to subscribe
• Full transcript

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Automated Transcript (Likely Contains Mistakes)

Mark Graban: Our guest today is Nika Kabiri. She has a PhD in sociology, is the founder of her firm Kabiri Consulting, is on the faculty at the University of Washington Department of Communication, and she describes herself as a forward-thinking, science-loving entrepreneur, author, public speaker, teacher, and researcher. She has over 20 years of experience studying how people make decisions in a variety of contexts, from business to politics to relationships. So Nika, thank you for being a guest today. How are you?

Nika Kabiri: I'm fine. Thanks for having me.

Mark Graban: With all of that in your bio and on your plate, I'm glad you could take time to record a podcast here.

Nika Kabiri: Well, thanks. But I do have to say, I feel a little insulted that you called me an attorney. I'm just kidding.

Mark Graban: Was that a career mistake?

Nika Kabiri: You know, I never took the bar. And so I can't officially say that I'm an attorney or have ever been an attorney. I just graduated from law school. It's just a joke.

Mark Graban: It's a mistake on my part because I see the letters JD after your name. My mistake was assuming. So you have the degree, but you… okay. So I stand corrected.

Nika Kabiri: Yeah, but how dare you call me an attorney? I have a lot of lawyer friends. I work with lawyers a lot.

Mark Graban: I didn't mean it as an insult. Your new book is titled Money off the Table. It's a guide to help you save for retirement in a way that minimizes risk and protects your money, all through the lens of decision science. Your bio says she helps people get real, move forward, and minimize regret. So does that “minimize regret” part mean helping people avoid making mistakes? How do you even frame mistakes from your experience?

Nika Kabiri: Right, that's a great question because what does regret mean anyway? The perspective that I come from is that it's really hard to judge whether or not a mistake is a good one by the outcome, because it would assume that you have that much control over what happens in the world. You can have all your ducks in a row, make all the right choices, and it's still possible that things don't quite turn out for you. If there's ever been a better example, it's business owners who, before COVID, had everything figured out. They were making great choices, they were on their way, and then things just didn't quite work out for a lot of people. It doesn't mean they made the wrong decision and it certainly doesn't mean they should feel regret.

So I like to measure the success of a decision by how well the process follows really objective steps, rather than being swayed by biases or mental shortcuts or going with your gut. We regret a lot of things that are out of our control. I can't help clients with that, but I can help them minimize the regret that can come from choices that they could've made better, but they didn't.

Mark Graban: This is my regret for calling you an attorney and not doing a better job of researching.

Nika Kabiri: That's fine. That's a very human thing to do because we often assume that what we know is all there is to know. It's very common.

Mark Graban: I saw the letters JD and I jumped to a conclusion. I know you've written about cognitive bias. Is that a fancy way for me to say I screwed up?

Nika Kabiri: Yeah. You took a shortcut rather than exploring or questioning. You just assumed. It's not the worst thing in the world to do, but it's not uncommon. Here's where I worry about it: don't ask me for legal advice. That's the only reason it matters.

Mark Graban: As a decision scientist, I guess you haven't made any bad decisions and this will be a really short episode. Or do you still have a favorite mistake story that you could tell?

Nika Kabiri: I do. I want to say that maybe 50% of my expertise in decision science comes from the scholarship and 50% comes from my own mess-ups. I can share a favorite mistake.

This happened when I was working in a company where we were at a point of transition. We were going through some management transitions and we had just done an employee satisfaction survey. The results were very mixed. Some people were okay, some people were not. We had a huge meeting to sort of troubleshoot. You know how this goes, like everybody has to talk, we have to get in a room and just talk about our feelings. It's an anonymous survey, but we still need to share. It was kind of a really weird situation.

It was my turn to speak up. I'm usually one in the workplace to practice restraint. I don't really tend to vocalize my dissatisfaction unless it's critical to the functioning of the business. If I think the business is going to suffer for it, I'll say something. If I'm suffering for it, I'll suffer in silence. In that case, it was a bit of both.

My manager specifically said, “Hey, this is a safe space. We are all being open and vulnerable. So Nika, please tell me what you feel could be done, what I could do better.” And so I was very honest. I said, “You don't respond to emails.” I said this in front of everyone. “I'm stuck and I just need a quick response.”

Her response to me extended beyond just the meeting. There was feedback for weeks after that. But it was, “You don't understand Nika how busy a C-level person is. You don't recognize how many emails we get every day. I can't respond to all of them.” The reaction was as though I was complaining about something minor, making a big deal out of nothing, and that I was too naive to understand the situation.

No big deal, except for that manager then made things very difficult for me in a lot of other ways as a result of that. I think the feeling I got was that she felt I had made her look bad because HR was in the room too. She probably felt that I'd made her look bad and then somehow needed to let me know that on a regular basis. She didn't really respond to my emails, chewed me out for being a difficult person to manage because I couldn't just manage myself. It was my favorite mistake because it really, really taught me what trust really means in the workplace. What safe spaces really mean. Are they really safe?

Mark Graban: And she said, quite literally, “This is a safe space.” Then this pattern of defensiveness, criticism, throwing it back on you, retaliation… that started in response to you saying that?

Nika Kabiri: That's from my recollection. And again, my memory is also biased. It's my side of the story. I recognize that. But my learning is still what it is, which is safe spaces aren't safe because somebody calls them so. Vulnerability isn't something that you should feel comfortable volunteering. It's something that has to be earned. There's a lot of talk in the workplace about authenticity and vulnerability and bringing your real self to the workplace. And I think that the expectation is that you bring your entire real self, all of you completely vulnerable. I really learned that day that that's just not realistic and it's not fair.

Mark Graban: So I'm curious what decision-making frameworks would be helpful. You were in a situation where there's a decision of, do I speak up or do I just say I'm fine? You regretted speaking up, so back to your bio about minimizing regret. If that was your primary function, I guess we would err on the side of not speaking up. But there's a risk that we would regret not doing that. How do you think through this? Is minimizing regret the main goal, or do we need to think about maximizing the positive outcome?

Nika Kabiri: I think it's both. We're weighing both. And that's where risk analysis, which is a huge part of decision science, comes into play. You're really trying to forecast the probability that any number of different outcomes could happen if you were to make a particular choice. I want to believe that in that moment I had the wherewithal to kind of objectively analyze the risks. I wish that sitting in that room, I could have asked myself, “Okay, what is the likelihood that if I actually trust that this is a safe space and I take that chance, that it's going to turn out okay for me?” What's the risk there?

I think that's where a lot of us kind of go with our gut, which I did at that moment. I took a chance. I know I was taking a risk. I felt like, “Oh my gosh, Nika, you're jumping off a cliff right now.” But we don't really slow down, even for a second, and really analyze that risk and also weigh the trade-off of not speaking up. How would it have harmed me if I didn't say anything? What if I had chosen a different option, like speaking to her about it in private? I didn't slow down to think through that well enough. And so my regret was that I didn't evaluate the risks very well.

Mark Graban: You were being put on the spot. Would it have been bad for you in some way if you had just said, “No, I'm good. Thanks for asking, I'm fine”?

Nika Kabiri: You know, I used to work with a guy who was a very junior person, and I learned a lot from him. Anytime anybody asked his opinion, he would say, “I'm not quite sure. I need to think about this.” And he didn't lose respect for saying that. In fact, he got a lot of respect because people thought of him as being very thoughtful. For someone so young, I felt so lucky to learn that from somebody who hadn't been indoctrinated into this world of business where we have to know the answer and we have to know it now.

Perhaps in that room, that could have been my option to say, “You know what, things aren't great, things aren't bad. I just need to think on this. Let me think on this and maybe we can meet in private.” I don't see anything wrong with that in most situations.

Mark Graban: So is that a helpful strategy, to delay the decision?

Nika Kabiri: It is, when the decision needs to be delayed. I've implemented that approach now when I work with clients and they ask me something and I don't know the answer, or I feel like I'm treading on tricky territory where I could put my foot in my mouth. We do have some innate reactions to certain situations, but to not act on them is the trick. More times than not, you don't have to choose immediately. You can give it a moment, sleep on it.

Mark Graban: It seems like with big decisions, like should I take that job or should I put an offer in on that house, you use the phrase forecasting the probability of outcomes. You can't predict the future. If you make a decision to buy a house and the economy goes downhill because of a pandemic, you can't be blamed for what you don't know. I wonder how often people beat themselves up over something they think they should have known, when maybe that's unfair.

Nika Kabiri: All the time. I see people do this with their romantic relationships. “Oh, I saw the signs. I saw the red flags. I just chose to ignore them.” My first reaction is, “But did you, though? Did you really see them?” Because in a six-month period, how can you know everything there is to know about somebody? Some people keep learning about each other after 20 years. Information is limited. I kind of doubt that we all know everything we think we should have known.

Mark Graban: It seems like there are knowledge issues when it comes to making decisions: what do we know, what can we know, what's unknowable. And then there are questions around cognitive biases. I'm curious to explore a little bit about societal issues where things are very polarized. People get information from a polarized news source. What are your thoughts around somebody deciding what information is trustworthy and how that leads into our decision-making about who to vote for, or on a daily basis, should somebody wear a mask? Should somebody get vaccinated?

Nika Kabiri: Gosh, how do I say this without sounding too dramatic? The fact that there is so much misinformation out there is not just a big problem, it's an epic problem. It's a monumentally epic problem. It's not a big deal if you have bad information about certain things, but when those things impact your decisions, when they factor into your cost-benefit analysis or cause you to circumvent it altogether, then misinformation can be very, very dangerous if those decisions have public health implications.

I think society permits certain platforms… free speech is a thing, but I think we don't seem to teach our kids how to discern or how to vet information properly. I don't think in school we learned how to do that. They're very important skills. Many of us don't know how to tell what the likelihood is that a source of information is accurate versus not.

Mark Graban: You're right, the First Amendment restricts what the government can do, but private businesses can restrict speech, and society can apply pressure. But is shaming a helpful strategy? People often double down on their misinformation.

Nika Kabiri: They do. And people on all sides do. I had a conversation the other day with someone on the other side of the political spectrum as myself, very different points of view, different ideas of what reality is. Our facts just don't line up. But when you hear him talk about critical thinking or questioning the press or being skeptical and how it's our duty to see through the BS, he sounded like I would sound. We are all, from whatever side of the spectrum we're on, we believe in that basic premise: don't just believe what's been fed to you. And yet they end up in these other places believing completely different things.

I think it really just comes down to an understanding of the laws of probability. That's what critical thinking is to me, largely about thinking about conditionality and probability, rather than black and white thinking. Rather than believing to his core that Derek Chauvin would not be found guilty because he's absolutely innocent, thinking, “Well, under what conditions would a police officer in that situation be found guilty or innocent?” and “What's the probability that any of those conditions are going to happen?” That line of thinking gets you closer to the truth. You're never going to get the truth, but you can get a lot closer to it. And those skills are what's sometimes missing and lead some of us astray.

Mark Graban: People get led astray by conspiracy theories. I saw something you wrote asking what we can do about that. You said, “all people resist new evidence that challenges their beliefs to varying degrees.” It reminds me of a Mark Twain quote: “It's easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they've been fooled.” Can you talk about the thinking patterns that lead to that?

Nika Kabiri: It's interesting just how efficient the human brain is. I think a lot of our problems come down to the efficiency of the human brain. We feel the need to make decisions right away because our brains are just wired to make decisions very quickly. As we grow, our brain synapses form certain patterns and pathways, and those are shortcuts that are developing.

One of those very important shortcuts to ensure efficiency is the sense that we know everything there is to know, and that whatever knowledge we already possess is plenty to do whatever we need to do. So when we already have all this information, when we have friends that are into QAnon and we go to the websites and we hear this information, we are creating these information databases in our head that are everything we think there is to know. And when somebody comes along and says something completely different, it can't be right. “It cannot be right, what you're saying, because I already know everything. And if you're telling me something contradictory, you're being disingenuous or you don't know the facts or you're part of the deep state,” or whatever it is.

Confirmation bias is a real and dangerous thing. That's why I really like to encourage people to do the opposite of what we often hear as advice in business. Don't be confident, doubt yourself, assume you're wrong. Don't be decisive. Those are things that can lead you down the wrong path.

Mark Graban: It seems businesses crave certainty. What are your sales going to be? When is that product going to be released? Craving certainty leads to all kinds of reactions like sandbagging. And organizations probably reward confidence when deciding who to promote, and that seems likely to spiral out of control.

Nika Kabiri: It's unfortunate that that's the norm. It's not that way in other cultures. In cultures like Japan, there is a lot of uncertainty in decision-making. It's a cultural norm to take time making decisions where decisiveness isn't really rewarded. Here in the United States, the boss is the person who makes the choice, and what they say goes. In other cultures, there's more consensus-forming. It's not necessary to run a good business and have these traits. I think it's more of a cultural expectation that's not really correlated with success or performance.

Mark Graban: Let's say you have a colleague or family member who's gone deep down some conspiracy rabbit hole. Is there anything constructive we can do? Saying “you're wrong” isn't likely to be helpful.

Nika Kabiri: Yes, back to the point about the efficient brain, you cannot convince people with facts because they already have all the facts. And some of the facts they know are that anybody who contradicts their facts is part of the problem. It's rigged against you.

I've heard of people pulling away as a response. I think that has a tendency of creating the kind of polarization that would exacerbate the problem. It's very, very hard to maintain a close relationship with someone when you aren't a QAnon supporter and they are. But when you pull away, you're really cutting them off from information and experiences that contradict what they already believe. Sure, they might not have their minds changed if you parade facts in front of them, but the future is unpredictable. The conspiracy theory itself could fall apart. And in that moment, if you're not there to be a support when their whole world crumbles, you're missing out on an opportunity to change their minds.

Sometimes your personal experiences or stories could be much more powerful to share with them than facts. Because one thing that people really respond to and use to drive their decision-making are elaborate, memorable, interesting stories—which is why conspiracy theories are so attractive. I think that's where people should start. Don't break up with your friends. Just hang in there and see what happens.

Mark Graban: That's food for thought. There are some cases where I've felt like people from professional circles crossed a line where I'm like, “I don't want that in my life.” You're making me think that disconnecting could end up being counterproductive.

Nika Kabiri: Or maybe adjust your perspective. This is really hard to do, but maybe don't mute them, but just absorb what they're telling you as information about them. It may not be comfortable information, but knowledge is power. If you know who this person is, then you're in a better position to influence their perspective than if you have no idea.

Mark Graban: If or when they're open to it, I guess. The same may be true with people described as “vaccine hesitant.” I think that's more constructive language than “vaccine resistant” or “vaccine denier.” When there's hesitancy, people may come around as we see more and more evidence that this is, on the whole, safe.

Nika Kabiri: Totally. I actually wrote an opinion piece that was published in The Hill on exactly this, that hesitancy is not rejection. It's not apathy. If you look at the data from late last year to today, the proportion of people who are saying, “Yes, I'm going to get vaccinated” has increased. So there's a trend in the positive direction, which means hesitancy is not ¹a static situation. It's dynamic. People can change their minds. If you reject them, you don't have that opportunity.

Mark Graban: Good food for thought. I will link to that article. Nika Kabiri has been our guest. Her book is called Money off the Table. Final question: was going to law school the mistake, or did you just make a different decision later?

Nika Kabiri: I think about that all the time. I'm not even sure it was my decision, honestly. I think it was my parents' decision at the time. I wanted to drop out after the first semester, and finishing was their decision. So sometimes that's how it goes too.

Mark Graban: Well, Nika, thank you for being a guest today and sharing your thoughts on decision-making. I feel like we've just scratched the surface of your expertise. Thank you for taking the time.

Nika Kabiri: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

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