Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

To make good decisions, CEOs need the courage to seek out disagreement. Alfred Sloan, the longtime CEO and chairman of General Motors, once interrupted a committee meeting with a question: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?” All the committee members nodded. “Then,” Sloan said, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.”

let’s take each option, one at a time, and ask ourselves: What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?

For business executives, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen advocate a strategy they call “firing bullets then cannonballs,” that is, running small experiments and then doubling down on the ones that work best.

“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.

imagine if the U.S. Olympic track coach used two tests in selecting the men who’d run on the 4×100 relay team. Test 1: Get the man on the track to see how fast he runs. And test 2: Meet him in a conference room and see if he answers questions like a fast runner would. Note that in most of Corporate America, our hiring process looks more like test 2 than test 1. Let’s all slap our foreheads in unison.

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.

fate had created a perfectly designed horse race between the good interviewees and the lousy ones. The performance difference? Nada. Both groups graduated and received honors at the same rate.

With so little proof that interviews work, why do we rely on them so much? Because we all think we’re good at interviewing. We are Barbara Walters or Mike Wallace. We leave the interview confident that we’ve taken the measure of the person. The psychologist Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion”: our certainty that we’re learning more in an interview than we really are.

“Often our best interviewees turn out to be our worst performers,” said Steve Cole of HopeLab. In response, HopeLab has begun to give potential employees a three-week consulting contract. Cole said, “It’s unbelievably effective. No more fear. How are we going to make our hiring decisions? We make our decisions based on the empirical performance of the employee in our community, on the kinds of jobs that we do.

Next time you’ve got a job opening to fill, consider Steve Cole’s advice. What’s the best way you could give your potential hires a trial run?

organizational decisions will be subject to a powerful emotional distortion. 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.

STATUS-QUO BIAS MIGHT be most evident in big, bureaucratic institutions.

Our calendars are the ultimate scoreboard for our priorities.

To spend more time on our core priorities (which, surely, is our goal!) necessarily means spending less time on other things.

Inside organizations, though, it can be hard to change course, because an infrastructure gets built up around past decisions. A decision to launch a new product, for instance, creates a budget and a staff and a set of processes, all of which will tend to deter a change in direction. Because of this inertia—the deep footprints of past decisions—it can be hard for leaders to change even when they know they must.

Using a process for decision making doesn’t mean that your choices will always be easy, or that they will always turn out brilliantly, but it does mean you can quiet your mind. You can quit asking, “What am I missing?” You can stop the cycle of agonizing. Just as important, trusting the process can give you the confidence to take risks. A process can be the equivalent of a mountain climber’s harness and rope, allowing you the freedom to explore without constant worry. A process, far from being a drag or a constraint, can actually give you the comfort to be bolder.