Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found 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.”

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.”

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.

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

But the analysis left him paralyzed, and it took a quick dose of detachment—seeing things from the perspective of his successor—to break the paralysis.

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

We have too much confidence in our own predictions. When we make guesses about the future, we shine our spotlights on information that’s close at hand, and then we draw conclusions from that information.

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.

“Opportunity cost” is a term from economics that refers to what we give up when we make a decision.

It suggests that being exposed to even a weak hint of another alternative—you could buy something else with this money if you want—is sufficient to improve our purchasing decisions.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy—when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.

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?

Below, we give you a generic form of the 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?

First, comparing alternatives helps executives to understand the “landscape”: what’s possible and what’s not, what variables are involved.

Second, considering multiple alternatives seems to undercut politics.

Third, when leaders weigh multiple options, they’ve given themselves a built-in fallback plan.

One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you’ve only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you’ll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.

To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct.

Similar to COA dev: must be distinguishable

We must be careful, too, to avoid sham options, which exist only to make the “real” option look better.

"throw away COA"

Generating distinct options is even more difficult when our minds settle into certain well-worn grooves. Two of those grooves are common states of mind, studied widely by researchers, that play a role in almost every decision we make. 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.

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.

In the last chapter, we saw the value of evading a narrow frame by seeking out more options. This chapter added a new wrinkle: It’s worth cultivating multiple options at the same time.

Multitracking improves our understanding of the situations we’re facing. It lets us cobble together the best features of our options. It helps us keep our egos in check.

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.

A checklist is useful for situations where you need to replicate the same behaviors every time. It’s prescriptive; it stops people from making an error. On the other hand, a playlist is useful for situations where you need a stimulus, a way of producing new ideas. It’s generative; it stops people from overlooking an option.

Dunbar said, “The use of analogies is one of the main mechanisms for driving research forward.” And the key to using analogies successfully, he said, was the ability to extract the “crucial features of the current problem.” This required the scientist to think of the problem from a more abstract, general perspective, and then “search for other problems that have been solved.”

What we’re seeing here is that, when you’re stuck, you can use a process of “laddering up” to get inspiration. The lower rungs on the ladder offer a view of situations very similar to yours; any visible solutions will offer a high probability of success, since the conditions are so similar. As you scale the ladder, you’ll see more and more options from other domains, but those options will require leaps of imagination. They’ll offer the promise of an unexpected breakthrough—but also a high probability of failure. When you start looking for cross-fertilization between the medical-plastics domain and the world of lingerie, you’re likely to find yourself at a lot of dead ends

Reminds me of book - Range also importance of vicarious experiences also expand the problem

We’ve encountered a handful of techniques for doing just that—for Widening Our Options. One of them was the Vanishing Options Test: What if you couldn’t do any of the things you’re considering—what else might you try? What if you were forced to invest your time or money in something else—what would be the next-best pick?

We also saw that multitracking—thinking “AND not OR”—is a powerful way to compare options and that we can create more “balanced” options by toggling between the prevention and promotion mindsets.

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 pract...

A checklist stops people from making an error; a playlist stimulates new ideas.

Checklist - SOPs, procedures/techniques playlist - tactics, IA drills?

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

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.

Perhaps the simplest and most intuitive advice we can offer in this chapter is that when you’re trying to gather good information and reality-test your ideas, go talk to an expert.

Here’s what is less intuitive: Be careful what you ask them. As we’ll see in the next chapter, 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.

Zooming out and zooming in gives us a more realistic perspective on our choices. We downplay the overly optimistic pictures we tend to paint inside our minds and instead redirect our attention to the outside world, viewing it in wide-angle and then in close-up.

“leadership by experiment.” Leaders, Cook believes, should stop trying to have all the answers and make all the decisions. In a 2011 speech he said, “When the bosses make the decisions, decisions are made by politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint.” None of those three P’s, Cook notes, ensures that good ideas will triumph. By making decisions through experimentation, the best idea can prove itself.

ooching has one big flaw: It’s lousy for situations that require commitment.

Ooching is best for situations where we genuinely need more information. It’s not intended to enable emotional tiptoeing, in which we ease timidly into decisions that we know are right but might cause us a little pain.

Ooching, in short, should be used as a way to speed up the collection of trustworthy information, not as a way to slow down a decision that deserves our full commitment.

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance.

Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?

To avoid that trap, we’ve got to Reality-Test Our Assumptions. We’ve seen three strategies for doing that. First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. And finally, the ultimate reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit.

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?

“mere exposure” principle, which says that people develop a preference for things that are more familiar (i.e., merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively).

Repetition sparked trust.