The curse of too many good options

When I started out in advertising, many light years ago, I once attended a marketing meeting where I noted down over 20 abbreviations, none of which I had any idea what they meant. If you work in business, you might recognise this. It’s like we’re all speaking a different language. Well, I have to warn you: there’s a new kid on the abbreviation block, one I hadn’t come across before.

FOBO.

I came across an interview this week with Patrick McGinnis, the Harvard Business School graduate who coined the term FOMO back in 2004. Most people know FOMO. Fewer people know the concept he developed afterwards: FOBO, or Fear of a Better Option.

You have perfectly acceptable options in front of you, but you keep looking for the perfect, riskless one. And so you wait. And look. And wait some more.

McGinnis describes FOBO as an affliction of abundance. It tends to increase the more options and resources you have. Which means that the people who have worked hardest to build successful lives are often the ones most paralysed by the choices those lives produce.

Behavioural scientist Barry Schwartz documented this paradox in his research on decision making. When people are given more options, they do not become more satisfied. They become more anxious, less decisive, and more prone to regret whatever they eventually choose. More options, more paralysis, less satisfaction.

The mechanism behind this is what Schwartz calls the opportunity costs. Every option you consider but do not choose becomes a source of imagined loss. The more options you have weighed, the more losses you have mentally accumulated, and the worse your eventual choice feels by comparison, even if it is objectively good.

This is where Behavioural Design becomes genuinely useful. The solution to FOBO is not to try harder to be decisive. It is to redesign the choice architecture so that the decision becomes easier to make and easier to feel good about.

McGinnis suggests a simple framework: sort decisions by stakes. No-stakes decisions get outsourced immediately, to whoever cares most or to a random input. Low-stakes decisions get a deadline and a trusted outside opinion. High-stakes decisions get structured due diligence with a diverse group of people who are explicitly invited to disagree with you.

What all three approaches share is a designed process that takes the decision out of your head and puts it into a structure. The enemy of FOBO is not willpower. It is a well-designed decision environment.

How to use this insight:

The first move is to name what kind of decision you are actually making. Most FOBO lives in the low-stakes and no-stakes category, dressed up as high-stakes because we have given it so much mental airtime. Recognising that is already half the work.

For teams and organisations: FOBO is contagious. When a leader cannot commit, the people around them cannot either. One of the most powerful things a manager can do is model decisive behaviour on small decisions, not because the decision itself matters enormously, but because it establishes a norm that choosing is acceptable and that imperfect decisions can be corrected.

For anyone designing a process, a product, or a service: reducing the number of options available is often more helpful than increasing them. The instinct is always to add. The smarter move is frequently to edit. A shorter menu, a cleaner proposal, a recommendation rather than a list, these are not lazy shortcuts. They are acts of respect for the people you are asking to decide.

BTW and FYI, FOBO might actually beat FOMO. At this rate, we might as well YOLO and stick to the FAQs. LOL.

There is a curious finding in decision research: people with deep expertise in a field are often worse at making personal decisions within that field than at making decisions in areas they know less about. A sommelier agonises over choosing a bottle for dinner in a way that a non-wine drinker simply does not. A doctor researching their own symptoms spirals in a way that a patient who trusts their GP does not.

The reason is that expertise multiplies the number of considerations a person can generate. The more you know, the more variables you can imagine, and the more ways you can picture going wrong. This is sometimes called the curse of knowledge, though in decision making it shows up as a specific kind of paralysis.

The implication is counterintuitive: sometimes the most useful thing an expert can do for themselves is to treat a decision the way a non-expert would. Set a time limit. Identify two or three criteria that matter most. Decide on those and ignore the rest.

Knowing more does not always mean deciding better. Sometimes it just means worrying more elaborately.

Until next week,

Astrid Groenewegen

Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.