3 is my favourite number.

Choice has never been greater in today’s society. To walk the aisles of your supermarket, to browse the net for the best buy, to picking your style of coffee or even finding your new favourite TV show, choice has exploded onto our society, to reign confusion over all. Time spent looking, finding, analyzing, trying to choose and eventually giving up under a tidal wave of confusion has led to decision paralysis.

It is difficult enough to keep up with the speed of change without adding multiple choices for everything we use and do on a daily basis. It’s fine to make fun of the fact that 100 TV channels give us no more quality than 20 years ago but decision paralysis in other areas can make life difficult. How many cereals do we need, how to choose from 30 cars in our budget, standing in front of 50 LCD TVs on sale and figuring out which school to send your child to, all lead to choice overload.

So much so that people pull back on making any decisions at all and then have the marketing departments take the cue that there are obviously not enough choices, otherwise why didn’t the consumer buy something? The cycle of overload continues to grow bigger.

Barry Schwartz in “The Paradox of Choice” gives a simple example of what can be accomplished with a cut down version of what you are looking for. Two tables of popular jams were set up in a supermarket, one table had 24 kinds and the other table had 6 kinds. Both tasting tables were popular with the customers. At the end of the day it was a surprise to find the table with 6 jams generated 10 times the sales that the table with 24 jams did. People simply could not choose from all the jams on the 24 table. In other areas of business this decision paralysis can be found when there are choices to be made between service and cost minimization, quality and speed to market and revenue growth versus profitability.

So what is the answer?

Having encountered this wall of confusion myself, when needing to replace a TV, a car and sundry technology, I now go buying when I have only 3 recommendations from trusted peers and my own knowledge base. Having said that, I intend to make 2 my best friend (after all it’s hard to find really crummy products) and look forward to making my life easier and never getting caught in decision paralysis again. So choose your number and go forth and decide.

Now if I could only get past that cereal aisle at Coles.