Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

Samuel Johnson once described a second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience.”

“Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”

“They tend not to believe that the soft stuff matters more than the hard stuff,” he said. “They don’t spend very much time on it. Everybody thinks they know how to do this stuff.”

“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:

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.

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.

When you need more options but feel stuck, look for someone who’s solved your problem.

We need to spark constructive disagreement within our organizations.

when we make decisions based on reviews, we are acknowledging two things: (1) Our ability to glean the truth about a product is limited and subject to distortion by the company that makes it; and (2) For that reason, we are smarter to trust the averages over our own impressions.

The inside view = our evaluation of our specific situation. The outside view = how things generally unfold in situations like ours.

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.

Agonizing decisions are often a sign of a conflict among your core priorities.

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

The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.

Tripwires can actually create a safe space for risk taking. They: (1) cap risk; and (2) quiet your mind until the trigger is hit.

Decisions made by groups have an additional burden: They must be seen as fair.