Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

A preference for familiar things is necessarily a preference for the status quo.

loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.

construal-level theory, shows that with more distance we can see more clearly the most important dimensions of the issue we’re facing.

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.

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?

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.

Define and enshrine your core priorities.

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

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

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

What’s interesting is that people’s estimates grew much more accurate when they were asked to explicitly consider the high and low ends of the range.‡ The researchers suggested that by considering each bookend separately, people tap different pools of knowledge. So if you think about why Jolie’s average films might be low grossing, you might remember some of the low-budget indie films she made in the mid-1990s, when she was a relatively unknown actress. Or if you’re thinking about why her average film might gross more than $100 million, you might recall Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which was such a big hit that it might inflate the average.

To prepare for the lower bookend, we need the equivalent of insurance. If you buy a new car, you’ll increase the amount of collision insurance you buy, so that if you wreck your car, you can replace it. (Have you thought about how to “insure” your organization against a wreck of a new hire?) For the upper bookend, we need a plan for dealing with unexpected success.

Catastrophic succes/failure in an operation

When we bookend the future, we anticipate and plan for the best outcomes as well as the worst.

Russo and Schoemaker have found that when people adopt the second style of thinking—using “prospective hindsight” to work backward from a certain future—they are better at generating explanations for why the event might happen.

Col Liston - what is going to cause tbis plan to fail

Prospective hindsight seems to spur more insights because it forces us to fill in the blanks between today and a certain future event (as opposed to the slipperier process of speculating about an event that may or may not happen).

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?”

The premortem is, in essence, a way of charting out the lower bookend of future possibilities and plotting ways to avoid ending up there.

“failure mode and effect analysis” (FMEA), a precursor to the premortem that has been used for decades in the military and government.

In an FMEA, team members identify what could go wrong at every step of their plans, and for each potential failure they ask two questions: “How likely is it?” and “How severe would the consequences be?” After assigning a score from 1 to 10 for each variable, they multiply the two numbers to get a total. The highest totals—the most severe potential failures—get the most attention.

That’s why, in addition to running a premortem, we need to run a “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?

REALISTIC JOB PREVIEWS TRIGGER our coping mechanisms, but they also spark us to think about how we’ll react. In other words, we don’t just think about tough situations; we think about how we’ll respond when we encounter them.

Geoff Ball - visualize the worst day

A similar “mental simulation” approach is used by counselors specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT emphasizes the value of mentally rehearsing how to respond in difficult interpersonal situations.

“partition.” It breaks up a resource (chips) by dividing it into discrete portions. Soman and Cheema have found that partitioning is an effective way to make us more thoughtful about what we consume, because it forces us to make a conscious decision about whether to continue.

In short, tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.

Organizational leaders need people to be sensitive to changes in the environment and to be brave enough to speak up. Here’s something new. Here’s a great opportunity for us.

Researchers call this sense of fairness “procedural justice”—i.e., the procedures used to make a decision were just—as distinct from “distributive justice,” which is concerned with whether the spoils of a decision were divvied up fairly. An extensive body of research confirms that procedural justice is critical in explaining how people feel about a decision. It’s not just the outcome that matters; it’s the process.

The elements of procedural justice are straightforward: Give people a chance to be heard, to present their case. Listen—really listen—to what people say. Use accurate information to make the decision, and give people a chance to challenge the information if it’s incorrect. Apply principles consistently across situations. Avoid bias and self-interest. Explain why the decision was made and be candid about relevant risks or concerns.

“I state back the other side’s position better than they could state it. And then they can relax because they feel heard.” When you can articulate someone’s point of view better than they can, it’s de facto proof that you are really listening.

7 habits of highly effective people

Being decisive is itself a choice. Decisiveness is a way of behaving, not an inherited trait. It allows us to make brave and confident choices, not because we know we’ll be right but because it’s better to try and fail than to delay and regret.