Imagine you’ve just started a leather trading business. As it is normal practice to offer discounts to customers, you decide to offer a flat 10% discount to all customers. This is against the norm of more complicated seasonal discount schemes that your competitors offer. You decide to get rid of the complexity, figure out their final discount amount, and just offer this flat rate. Feels fair, right?
Well, it will feel until a customer placing a one million dollar order watches you provide a 10% discount to somebody who buys a thousand dollars worth of leather. Why should the thousand dollar guy receive the same % discount?
This illustrates the power of implicit choices to wreck the intent of original choices. By choosing to give a flat 10% discount, you implicitly backed your smaller customers and alienated your big customers. A “fairer” way to support your big customers would be to offer the million dollar guy 10% discount and the smaller guy a 5% discount. I’m guessing you’ve spotted it now but, here again, you have implicitly told the smaller guy that you like bigger customers more.
There are 2 interesting learnings here –
1. Life’s bad decisions are most of all a result of implicit choices. You haven’t explicitly decided to become unfit when you picked up your daily evening soap opera habit. But, well, it happens.
2. You can’t please everybody. Your choices will upset groups of people – it is better to clearly evaluate who your choices are meant to please (it could just be yourself). What seems fair will have a bunch of implicit repercussions – might as well be intentional about them.
A Learning a Day 