Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

The face-flipping finding is harmless enough, though weird and surprising. But what’s more troubling is that the mere-exposure principle also extends to our perception of truth.

When the participants were exposed to a particular statement three times during the experiment, rather than once, they rated it as more truthful. Repetition sparked trust. This is a sobering thought about our decisions in society and in organizations. All of us, in our work, will naturally absorb a lot of institutional “truth,” and chances are that much of it is well proven and trustworthy, but some of it will only feel true because it is familiar.

When an organization’s leader proposes a change in direction, people will be feeling two things: Ack, that feels unfamiliar. (And thus more uncomfortable.) Also: Ack, we’re going to lose what we have today. When you put these two forces together—the mere-exposure principle and loss aversion—what you get is a powerful bias for the way things work today.

Psychologists have come to understand why this happens. In essence, when we’re giving advice, we find it easier to focus on the most important factors.

There’s another advantage of the advice we give others. We tend to be wise about counseling people to overlook short-term emotions.

All in all, it becomes clear this is a risk worth taking, and it’s easier to recognize that truth for other people than for ourselves. The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions. That’s why, in helping us to break a decision logjam, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation? It sounds simple, but next time you’re stuck on a decision, try it out. You’ll be surprised how effectively that question can clarify things.

Fleeting emotions tempt us to make decisions that are bad in the long term.

To overcome distracting short-term emotions, we need to attain some distance.

10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as much as present ones.

Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions: (1) mere exposure: we like what’s familiar to us; and (2) loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.

Loss aversion + mere exposure = status-quo bias.

This is the bias that makes us resist new ideas that change the way we already do things. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective. • Andy Grove asked, “What would our successors do?”

Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”

§In these studies, psychologists are not arguing that the forest perspective is the right one. They are simply demonstrating the phenomenon without adding a value judgment. But we want to go a step further and argue that the forest perspective really is the right one, because when people fail to prioritize the most important factor in the decision, their decision gets muddled. When we revel in complexity, we may cycle through our options constantly, changing our minds from day to day. But that kind of mental circling is risky, because it means that our choice may be determined by where we are on the merry-go-round when we’re forced to make a final call.

Ramirez continued to agonize about the decision until, eventually, she realized why she was stuck: It wasn’t just a job decision; it was a values decision. Growing up, she’d always viewed herself as an “ambitious career woman,” and from that perspective, the start-up role was a no-brainer. It offered more responsibility and more growth. She’d be able to put her stamp on the place. On the other hand, as she’d gained experience in her career, she’d come to value balance in her life: time with Josh, time with friends, time with family. For the first time, she was being forced to make a concrete choice between the two visions of herself. She said, “You can just go along for a very long time without calling into question anything like that: What did I value more?” As she waited for a counteroffer from her current company, the leaders of the start-up were e-mailing and calling her, asking about her decision. She felt awful putting them on hold. Then came the turning point. One day in late December, she went for a run at her gym. Five miles into the run, it suddenly hit her. A question. What do I work for? What’s the purpose of it? The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. “I almost fell off the treadmill,” she said. The thoughts came tumbling out: I work to make enough money to be secure, to travel with Josh, to take a photo class if I want, or to take my sister out for dinner. But if I don’t have enough time to do these things that I love, it won’t matter that I have more mone...

You know how after you ride a roller coaster, they try to sell you a photo of you shrieking during the ride? You might impulsively buy the photo because you’re flush with adrenaline. “But the next day,” she said, “do you really want that picture? Not really. No one looks good on a roller coaster.”

Even after she let her feelings settle, though, she was still confused, and this is where we move beyond the principles from the last chapter. What made Ramirez’s decision difficult wasn’t the distraction of short-term emotion; it was the need to pick between two great options. Ultimately, Ramirez recognized that she couldn’t make a decision about the job offer without first considering her preferences in life.

When you strip away all the rational mechanics of decision making—the generation of options, the weighing of information—what’s left at the core is emotion. What drives you? What kind of person do you aspire to be? What do you believe is best for your family in the long run? (Business leaders ask: What kind of organization do you aspire to run? What’s best for your team in the long run?)

Those are emotional questions—speaking to passions and values and beliefs—and when you answer them, there’s no “rational machine” underneath that is generating your perspective. It’s just who you are and what you want. The buck stops with emotion.

Two people making the same decision might make polar-opposite choices—and they might both be wise to do so! In the end, for instance, Kim Ramirez decided that she valued the “in balance” vision of herself more than the “ambitious, hard-charging” vision of herself. But another woman might have drawn the opposite conclusion.

We’re using the word “core” to capture the sense of long-term emotion we’ve been discussing; these are priorities that transcend the week or the quarter. For individuals that means long-term goals and aspirations, and for organizations it means the values and capabilities that ensure the long-term health of the enterprise.

How can you ensure that your decisions reflect your core priorities? And, going a step beyond that, how can you actually take the offensive against the less-important tasks that threaten to distract you from them?

Our intent is to build an organization where our customer is the patient, nobody else.” Tough decisions were often resolved by asking, What’s best for the patient here?

This is one of the classic tensions of management: You want to encourage people to use their judgment, but you also need your team members’ judgments to be correct and consistent. So Roberts began to study his team’s most common predicaments, in order to understand what kind of guidance to provide. He found that his consultants struggled with dilemmas like these: Should they agree informally to a small change in scope or wait for headquarters to approve it?

Roberts craved a list of simple principles that could serve as guardrails for handling those dilemmas. He sought, as he put it, “guardrails that are wide enough to empower but narrow enough to guide.” So he formulated a list of guiding principles that we will call Wayne’s Rules.

I like this definition of principles. As guardrails, not static.

One of the rules was “Have a bias for action: Do first, apologize later.” Consulting projects never go like clockwork; there are always unanticipated changes.

Another one of Wayne’s Rules was: “Be easy to do business with.”

Let’s put a customer effort score on that one 😉

Wayne’s Rules enshrined the priorities for his group. They ensured that different people would make similar decisions in similar circumstances and do so quickly. When we identify and enshrine our priorities, our decisions are more consistent and less agonizing.

Maybe this advice sounds too commonsensical: Define and enshrine your core priorities. It is not exactly a radical stance. But there are two reasons why it’s uncommon to find people who have actually acted on this seemingly basic advice.

First, people rarely establish their priorities until they’re forced to.

Second, establishing priorities is not the same thing as binding yourself to them.

The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.

To spend more time on our core priorities (which, surely, is our goal!) necessarily means spending less time on other things. That’s why Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, suggests that we create a “stop-doing list.”

It’s tempting but naive to pretend that we can make time for everything by multitasking or by working more efficiently. But face it, there’s not that much slack in your schedule. An hour spent on one thing is an hour not spent on another. So if you’ve made a resolution to spend more time with your kids, or to take a college class, or to exercise more, then part of that resolution must be to decide what you’re going to stop doing. Make it concrete: Look back over your schedule for the past week and ask yourself, What, specifically, would I have given up to carve out the extra three or four or five hours that I’ll need?

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?” He calls this a “productive interruption,” one that reminds us of our priorities and aspirations.

What we’ve seen in this section is that, if we want our choices to honor our priorities, we need to Attain Distance Before Deciding. With some distance, we can quiet short-term emotions and look past the familiarity of the status quo. With some distance, we can surface the priorities conflicts that underlie tough choices. With some distance, we can spot and stamp out lesser priorities that interfere with greater ones.

But getting distance doesn’t require delay or suffering. Sometimes it happens almost instantly. Thanks to a guardrail—Do first, apologize later—we know what the right choice is. Thanks to a simple question—What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?—we see the big picture.

What comes next is the aftermath. We’ve made a tough decision, and now we must see how it unfolds. Of course, we aren’t mere spectators. We can’t control the future, but with some forethought, we can shape it.

After we’ve made a decision, we must challenge ourselves to consider two questions: How can we prepare ourselves for both good and bad outcomes? And how would we know if it were time to reconsider our decision? In other words, we must Prepare to Be Wrong.

Quieting short-term emotion won’t always make a decision easy.

Agonizing decisions are often a sign of a conflict among your core priorities. • Core priorities: long-term emotional values, goals, aspirations. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of organization do you want to build? • The goal is not to eliminate emotion. It’s to honor the emotions that count.

By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas.

Establishing your core priorities is, unfortunately, not the same as binding yourself to them.

To carve out space to pursue our core priorities, we must go on the offense against lesser priorities.

Jim Collins’s “stop-doing list”: What will you give up so that you have more time to spend on your priorities?

Bregman’s hourly beep: Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?

How can we learn to sweep a broader landscape with our spotlights—to attend to the bookend of possibilities ahead?

The psychologist Gary Klein, inspired by this research, devised a method for testing decisions that he calls the “premortem.” A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?”

Everyone on the team takes a few minutes to write down every conceivable reason for the project’s failure. Then the team leader goes around the table, asking each person to share a single reason, until all the ideas have been shared. Once all the threats have been surfaced, the project team can Prepare to Be Wrong by adapting its plans to forestall as many of the negative scenarios as possible. The premortem is, in essence, a way of charting out the lower bookend of future possibilities and plotting ways to avoid ending up there.

Thanks to its premortem, the team was able to surface and eliminate a threat to the campaign. And that allowed them to spend less time worrying about legal issues and more time finding shelter for the most vulnerable people in the country.