Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

by Chip Heath

“process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.”

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.

Cole is fighting 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.

The tricky thing about the confirmation bias is that it can look very scientific. After all, we’re collecting data.

And this is what’s slightly terrifying about the confirmation bias: When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision. Oops.

This brings us to the third villain of decision making: short-term emotion.

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

A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves “completely certain” about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

We can’t deactivate our biases, but these people show us that we can counteract them with the right discipline.

Nutt found that “whether or not” decisions failed 52% of the time over the long term, versus only 32% of the decisions with two or more alternatives.

Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person’s lifetime earnings don’t vary based on what college they attended.

“There’s a myth that there’s only one thing that God wants you to do,” he said. “We spend so much time trying to figure out that one thing and become so fearful of making a mistake.”

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?

You won’t think up additional alternatives if you aren’t aware you’re neglecting them. Often you simply won’t recognize you’re stuck in a narrow frame.

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

Our lack of attention to opportunity costs is so common, in fact, that it can be shocking when someone acknowledges them.

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What

Vanishing Options Test, which you can adapt to your situation: You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do?

That phrase “whether or not” is, as we’ve seen, a classic warning signal that you haven’t explored all your options.

When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere—really move it—often for the first time in a long while. (In contrast, when people are asked to “generate another option,” they often halfheartedly shift the spotlight a couple of inches,

we’ll see that the simple act of surfacing another option—even if we ultimately decide against it—helps us to make better choices.

executives who weigh more options actually make faster decisions.

When the executive board considered more than one alternative, they made six times as many “very good” decisions.

If there’s disagreement, that’s a great sign that you have real options. An easy consensus may be a red flag.

One is triggered when we think about avoiding bad things, and one is triggered when we think about pursuing good things. When we’re in one state, we tend to ignore the other.

Yet the wisest decisions may combine the caution of the prevention mindset with the enthusiasm of the promotion mindset.

important example of combining prevention and promotion focus

The most successful companies acted more like multitrackers, combining the best elements of promotion and prevention.

They were cautious and eager at once, and their ambidextrousness boosted their chance of thriving.

BLENDING THE TWO MINDSETS, in short, is a recipe for a wiser decision. That’s why we’ve got to be alert for any situation where one mindset prevails.

TO BREAK OUT OF a narrow frame, we need options, and one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem.

By encoding the advice, she’d be creating a kind of “playlist” of managerial greatest hits: questions to ask, principles to consult, ideas to consider.

Playlists should be as useful as checklists, yet your organization has many checklists and probably zero playlists.

one of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy.

Finally, if we get stuck, we should find someone who has already solved our problem. To find them, we can look inside (for bright spots), outside (for competitors and best practices), and into the distance (via laddering up).

Upton Sinclair’s observation, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”).

John Paul II eliminated the office in 1983, ending 400 years of tradition. Since then, tellingly, saints have been canonized at a rate about 20 times faster than in the early part of the twentieth century.

Devil’s Advocate

devil’s advocacy isn’t the need for a formal contrarian position; it’s the need to interpret criticism as a noble function.

Let’s stop arguing about who is right, he said. Instead, let’s take each option, one at a time, and ask ourselves: What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?

What if our least favorite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?

when the asker is already the clear “expert,” as the doctor is in the doctor/patient situation, then asking aggressive questions will only reinforce the doctor’s dominance. That can cause patients to clam up or to follow the doctor’s lead too eagerly,

“Though [the resident] regards himself as objective and scientific, he manipulates the data to fit his concept of disease, but is not aware that he does so. He does not discover a pattern; he generates one.”

ASSUMING POSITIVE INTENT AND keeping a marriage diary are two examples of what psychologists call “considering the opposite.”

20% of the women reported not liking their spouse-to-be when they first met.

three approaches for fighting the confirmation bias: One, we can make it easier for people to disagree with us. Two, we can ask questions that are more likely to surface contrary information. Three, we can check ourselves by considering the opposite.

Another technique for dissenters that we’ll explore later is setting a tripwire, a la David Lee Roth. A tripwire specifies the circumstances when the team would reconsider a decision.

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

when you need trustworthy information, go find an expert—someone more experienced than you. Just keep them talking about the past and the present, not the future.

(He didn’t ask the expert to predict what would happen in his case. Experts are great with base rates and mediocre at predictions.)

This mixture of the big-picture view and the close-up was the signature strategy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom historians consider a master of information collection.