Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

by Chip Heath

that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: “Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”

Why a process? Because understanding our shortcomings is not enough to fix them. Does knowing you’re nearsighted help you see better? Or does knowing that you have a bad temper squelch it? Similarly, it’s hard to correct a bias in our mental processes just by being aware of it.

The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed.

the first villain of decision making, narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.

Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief. And that problematic habit, called the “confirmation bias11,” is the second villain of decision making.

When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.

the third villain of decision making: short-term emotion.

learn, the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

Actually, there are 18 things that God would be very happy if you chose. You’re not cornered into becoming a priest or not. You’re not cornered into marrying this woman or not. There are 6 billion people in the world. You’re telling me that God looked at you and said, “There is only 1 thing you can do in your life, I know it and you have to guess it or else”? Could it be that you are putting your constraints on God?

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them.

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do?

The study’s authors speculated that people who work on a single track begin to take their work too personally, viewing criticism as a “rebuke of their only option.” Or as one of the authors, Scott Klemmer, said, “If I have only one design, then my ego is perfectly conflated with my design. But if I have multiple designs, I can separate the two.”

How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. Psychologists have identified two contrasting mindsets that affect our motivation and our receptiveness to new opportunities: a “prevention focus,” which orients us toward avoiding negative outcomes, and a “promotion focus,” which orients us toward pursuing positive outcomes.

when we make decisions based on reviews, we are acknowledging two things: (1) Our ability to glean the truth about a product is limited and subject to distortion by the company that makes it; and (2) For that reason, we are smarter to trust the averages over our own impressions.

experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates.

When we zoom out, we take the outside view, learning from the experiences of others who have made choices like the one we’re facing. When we zoom in, we take a close-up of the situation, looking for “color” that could inform our decision. Either strategy is helpful, and either one will add insight in a way that conference-room pontificating rarely will.

When people share the worst decisions they’ve made in life, they are often recalling choices made in the grip of visceral emotion: anger, lust, anxiety, greed.

To use 10/10/10, we think about our decisions on three different time frames: How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?

The researchers have found, in essence, that our advice to others tends to hinge on the single most important factor, while our own thinking flits among many variables. When we think of our friends, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees.fn4

Define and enshrine your core priorities.

Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?”

A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail?

“preparade.” A preparade asks us to consider success: Let’s say it’s a year from now and our decision has been a wild success. It’s so great that there’s going to be a parade in our honor. Given that future, how do we ensure that we’re ready for it?

Rather, compromise can be valuable in itself, because it demonstrates that you’ve made use of diverse opinions, which is a way of limiting risk.

success requires two stages: first the decision and then the implementation.

Our first instinct, when challenged, is usually to dig in further and passionately defend our position. Surprisingly, though, sometimes the opposite can be more effective.

It seems completely counterintuitive, but even if you don’t convince people that your plan is better, hearing you explain your plan’s flaws—and their plan’s advantages—makes them much more comfortable.

Individual decisions will frequently be wrong, but the right process will be an ally in any situation.

Even if you’ve only got 45 minutes to consider an important decision, you can accomplish a lot: Run the Vanishing Options Test to see if you might be overlooking a great alternative. Call someone who’s solved your problem before. Ask yourself, What would I tell my best friend to do? (Or, if you’re at work, What would my successor do?) Gather three friends or colleagues and run a premortem.