United States – Page 2 – understand-culture

Good decision making in the American context means a healthy balance between objective analysis and intuition.

Intuition: The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning; a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning. Late Middle English denoting spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication. Latin intueri, to consider.

Empiricism. Observation. For Americans, intuition is experience-based knowledge, called on immediately. Intuition is more than a spontaneous thought, a “gut reaction”, a hunch. Americans trust the judgement of the experienced, the wise, of those “who have been there”.

But not to the exclusion of objective analysis. Americans are constantly coming up with new ways to quantify what is deeply human, what in its essence cannot be quantified. It’s a question of balance. When to go with the objective analysis, when with intuition? Can they be combined?

Star Trek. A brilliant television series. Late 1960s. Deeply human, created with little frills, eye-candy, special effects. Instead it tapped into the human imagination, the greatest source of special effects. Kirk is intuition. Spock is reason. Tension between the two. But it worked.

The Pareto principle: Also known as the 80-20 rule, stating that in many situations approximately 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, documented in the early 1900s that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto went on to observe that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It has become a common rule of thumb in business that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients.

The 80-20 rule could be a metaphor about the American approach to many things, or at least about an element or aspect of the Americans approach. Americans tend not to be perfectionists. Not because they do not recognize and honor striving for the best. But because in many cases attaining, reaching, accomplishing that extra 5% is in many cases “simply not worth it”.

Worth. Value. Does the customer want that extra degree of engineering excellence? Is it necessary to calculate that many digits behind the decimal point? Is that depth of analysis necessary in order to make a decision?

80% is often enough. For Americans, depending on the situation, 60% is enough. Depending on the risk-benefit relationship, even less is enough.