“Ooch” Before You Leap

In this thoughtful article in ASCA School Counselor, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath share an excerpt from their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Crown Business, 2013). In this piece, the Heath brothers make the case for “ooching”, which is their word for doing a small experiment to reality-test a hypothesis before making an important life decision. 

Here’s an example. Steve decides he wants to go to pharmacy school. He’s considered medical school and law school but thinks pharmacy is a better match for his interest in a helping profession with reasonable hours and a good salary. “But this is pretty thin evidence for such an important decision!” say Heath and Heath. “Steve is contemplating a minimum time commitment of two years for graduate school, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and foregone income. He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an ooch, and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’s be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job.” 

This seems common-sensical, but every year, thousands of young people go to law school without ever working in a law office or medical school without spending time in a hospital or clinic. “This is a truly terrible decision process,” say the Heaths, “in the same league as an impromptu drunken marriage in Vegas.” 

Here’s a less momentous ooch in a family setting. Eight-year-old Colin liked to come down to breakfast in his pajamas, but his father insisted that he be fully dressed so he wouldn’t be late for school. After several arguments, dad decided to try an ooch. “Okay, Colin,” he said, “we’ll try it your way for three days. But if you’re late for school on any of those days, then we go back to the old system.” Colin was amazed at his father’s turnaround and rose to the challenge, eating breakfast in his PJs and getting dressed in time to be punctual at school. PJs became the routine, and both sides were happy with the outcome. (In addition, Colin learned the potential of lodging a protest with an adult.)

The Heaths close with a caveat: ooching is less effective in situations that require commitment. They describe the following scenario: two men drop out of college, but now they’re in their mid-20s, their careers are going nowhere, and they know they need college degrees. The first man doesn’t like the academic world and puts off the decision. For him, ooching by taking one course would be a cop-out – a way of forestalling the inevitable. The second man has always been fascinated with marine biology, but isn’t ready to commit. Ooching would be perfect for him – shadowing a marine biologist for a few hours a week to see if the work appeals to him, and also auditing a class at a local university. If it’s a good fit, he’d be ready to take the plunge and enroll in a marine biology program.

“Ooching, then, should be used as a way to speed up the collection of trustworthy information,” say the Heaths, “not as a way to enable emotional tiptoeing, in which we ease timidly into decisions that we know are right but might cause us a little pain. In short, to ooch is to ask, why predict something we can test? Sometimes the best way to make a good decision is to sneak up on it – one small experiment at a time.” 

“Ooching” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in ASCA School Counselor, July/August 2013 (Vol. 50, #6, p. 30-32), www.schoolcounselor.org  

From the Marshall Memo #497