Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage. He called this tendency “what you see is all there is.”

But of course a spotlight only lights a spot. Everything outside it is obscured. So, in Clive’s situation, we don’t immediately think to ask a lot of obvious questions. For instance, rather than fire Clive, why not change his role to match up better with his strengths? (After all, he’s good at improvising cheap solutions.) Or maybe Clive could be matched with a mentor who’d help him set more ambitious goals and deliver less scathing criticism.

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.”

A better decision process substantially improves the results of the decisions, as well as the financial returns associated with them.

A solid process isn’t just good for business; it’s good for our lives.

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. Research in psychology over the last 40 years has identified a set of biases in our thinking that doom the pros-and-cons model of decision making. If we aspire to make better choices, then we must learn how these biases work and how to fight them (with something more potent than a list of pros and cons).

to understand the problems we face in making decisions, essential reading would include Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned above, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.

One of the handful of books that provides advice on making decisions better is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which was written for “choice architects” in business and government who construct decision systems such as retirement plans or organ-donation policies. It has been used to improve government policies in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries.

“Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.”

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 bias,” 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.

“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books.”

At work and in life, we often pretend that we want truth when we’re really seeking reassurance: “Do these jeans make me look fat?” “What did you think of my poem?” These questions do not crave honest answers.

In his memoir, Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove recalled a tough dilemma he faced in 1985 as the president of Intel: whether to kill the company’s line of memory chips.

“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.”

This was the moment of clarity. From the perspective of an outsider, someone not encumbered by the historical legacy and the political infighting, shutting down the memory business was the obvious thing to do. The switch in perspectives—“What would our successors do?”—helped Moore and Grove see the big picture clearly. Of course, abandoning memory was not easy. Many of Grove’s colleagues were furiously opposed to the idea. Some held that memory was the seedbed of Intel’s technology expertise and that without it, other areas of research were likely to wither.

GROVE’S STORY REVEALS A flaw in the way many experts think about decisions. If you review the research literature on decisions, you’ll find that many decision-making models are basically glorified spreadsheets. If you are shopping for an apartment, for instance, you might be advised to list the eight apartments you found, rank them on a number of key factors (cost, location, size, etc.), assign a weighting that reflects the importance of each factor (cost is more important than size, for instance), and then do the math to find the answer (um, move back in with Mom and Dad).

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.

And what we’ve seen is that there is a villain that afflicts each of these stages: • 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.

We know the four top villains of decision making. We also know that the classic pros-and-cons approach is not well suited to fighting these villains; in fact, it doesn’t meaningfully counteract any of them. Now we can turn our attention to a more optimistic question: What’s a process that will help us overcome these villains and make better choices?

Seeking advice, he wrote to several colleagues he respected, including a wise and resourceful man he’d met while writing the history of electricity: Benjamin Franklin. FRANKLIN REPLIED WITH THE moral-algebra letter cited in our introduction, suggesting that Priestley use the process of pros and cons to guide his decision. Thanks to the record provided by Priestley’s letters to friends, it’s possible to imagine how Priestley would have used the moral-algebra process. The pros: good money; better security for his family. The cons were more plentiful. The job might require a move to London, which bothered Priestley, who described himself as “so happy at home” that he hated to contemplate being apart from his family.

Finally, Priestley worried that the commitments would distract him from more important work. Would he end up spending his days teaching multiplication to kids instead of blazing new intellectual paths in religion and science?

Priestley took the objection quite seriously, and at one point he reported that he was leaning against the offer. But rather than stewing over his internal pros-and-cons list, he went out and collected more data. Specifically, he sought the advice of people who knew Shelburne, and the consensus was clear: “Those who are acquainted with Lord Shelburne encourage me to accept his proposal; but most of those who know the world in general, but not Lord Shelburne in particular, dissuade me from it.” In other words, the people who knew the lord best were the most positive about the offer. Based on these converging assessments, Priestley began to consider the offer more seriously.

Third, Priestley got some distance from his short-term emotions. He sought advice from friends as well as more neutral colleagues such as Franklin. He didn’t allow himself to be distracted by visceral feelings: the quick flush of being offered a 150% raise or the social shame of being thought “dependent” by a friend. He made his decision based on the two factors he cared most about in the long term: his family’s welfare and his scholarly independence.

We believe Priestley made a good decision to work with Shelburne, though it’s impossible to say for certain. After all, it’s possible that spending time with Shelburne distracted him just enough to stop him from making yet another world-historical contribution (cinnamon rolls? the Electric Slide?). But what we do know is that there’s a lot to admire about the process he used to make the decision, because he demonstrates that it’s possible to overcome the four villains of decision making.

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. So … → Widen Your Options. How can you expand your set of choices? We’ll study the habits of people who are expert at uncovering new options, including a college-selection adviser, some executives whose businesses survived (and even thrived) during global recessions, and a boutique firm that has named some of the world’s top brands, including BlackBerry and Pentium.

You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving info. So … → Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information that you can trust? We’ll learn how to ask craftier questions, how to turn a contentious meeting into a productive one in 30 seconds, and what kind of expert advice should make you suspicious.

You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So … → Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make the best choice? We’ll discover how to triumph over manipulative car salesmen, why losing $50 is more painful than gaining $50 is pleasurable, and what simple question often makes agonizing decisions perfectly easy.

Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. So … → Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed? We’ll show you how one woman scored a raise by mentally simulating the negotiation in advance, how you can rein in your spouse’s crazy business idea, and why it can be smart to warn new employees about how lousy their jobs will be.

At its core, the WRAP model urges you to switch from “auto spotlight” to manual spotlight. Rather than make choices based on what naturally comes to your attention—visceral emotions, self-serving information, overconfident predictions, and so on—you deliberately illuminate more strategic spots. You sweep your light over a broader landscape and point it into hidden corners.

Here is our goal: We want to make you a bit better at making good decisions, and we want to help you make your good decisions a bit more decisively (with appropriate confidence, as opposed to overconfidence). We also want to make you a better adviser to your colleagues and loved ones who are making decisions, because it’s usually easier to see other people’s biases than your own.

But—and this is a critical “but”—intuition is only accurate in domains where it has been carefully trained. To train intuition requires a predictable environment where you get lots of repetition and quick feedback on your choices.

Our hope is that you’ll embrace the process we outline in Decisive and practice it until it becomes second nature. As an analogy, think of the humble grocery list. If you’re forgetful (as we are), it’s hard to imagine shopping without a list. Over time, the routine sharpens; you get better at recording, right away, the random items that occur to you, and when you shop, you begin to trust that everything you need to buy will be on the list.

Danny Kahneman: “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.”

What’s in our spotlight = the most accessible information + our interpretation of that information. But that will rarely be all that we need to make a good decision.

Our decision “track record” isn’t great. Trusting our guts or conducting rigorous analysis won’t fix it. But a good process will.

We can defeat the four villains of decision making by learning to shift our spotlights.

Villain 1: Narrow framing (unduly limiting the options we consider)

Villain 2: The confirmation bias (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs)

Villain 3: Short-term emotion (being swayed by emotions that will fade)

Villain 4: Overconfidence (having too much faith in our predictions)

The pros-and-cons process won’t correct these problems. But the WRAP process will.

To make better decisions, use the WRAP process: Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.

Finding answers to those questions—“Is there a better way? What else could we do?”—is the goal of this part of the WRAP framework, “Widen Your Options.” Can we learn to escape a narrow frame and discover better options for ourselves? The first step toward that goal is to learn to distrust “whether or not” decisions. In fact, we hope when you see or hear that phrase, a little alarm bell will go off in your head, reminding you to consider whether you’re stuck in a narrow frame. If you’re willing to invest some effort in a broader search, you’ll usually find that your options are more plentiful than you initially think.

“What do I want out of life, and what are the best options to get me there?”

“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.” Bransfield challenges them to broaden their perspective: 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?

Why is it so hard for all of us to see the bigger picture? To understand what lulls us into adopting a narrow frame, we will dig into a seemingly easy decision—a customer choosing a stereo to buy—and reveal the complexity that lies underneath it.