Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves “completely certain” about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

in our cars, we may spend 95% of our time going straight, but it’s the turns that determine where we end up.

the largest acquisition in its history, with deal terms that had been mocked widely by industry analysts, and yet, unbelievably, there was no one within Quaker arguing against the acquisition!

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them.

Teenagers get trapped in a narrow frame. They are blind to their choices. “Should I go to the party or not?” 2. Unfortunately, most organizations tend to make decisions like teenagers. • Quaker lost $1.5 billion in three years on the Snapple acquisition. • Nutt research: Only 29% of organizations considered more than one alternative (versus 30% of teens). 3. Often our options are far more plentiful than we think. • College-selection counselor Price helps students explore their full range of options. 4. Why do we get stuck in a narrow frame? Focusing on our current options means that other things are out of our spotlight. • Frederick got stuck choosing between two stereos—he failed to consider his other options. 5. How do we escape a narrow frame? Think about opportunity cost. • Keep the $14.99 for other purchases. • Eisenhower: One bomber = a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. 6. Or try the Vanishing Options Test: What if your current options disappeared? • Margaret Sanders realized she had a better option than firing Anna, the introverted receptionist. • When our options “disappear,” we’re forced to move our spotlights. 7. It’s easier to spot a narrow frame from the outside—watch for it as a decision adviser. “Whether or not” decisions should set off warning bells.

Now what’s your gut reaction to the position? This time, you might feel a bit more open and enthusiastic. You’re being trusted to lead a new product with great potential! Nothing ventured, nothing gained. How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. 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.

Yet the wisest decisions may combine the caution of the prevention mindset with the enthusiasm of the promotion mindset. Consider a study of the way 4,700 public companies navigated three global recessions (1980 to 1982, 1990 to 1991, and 2000 to 2002). Three Harvard researchers—Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen—pored over the companies’ financial statements, analyzing the way they’d responded to the tough market conditions. The top-level findings were sobering: 17% of the companies didn’t survive the relevant recession, and another 40% of them, three years after the recession ended, hadn’t returned to their prerecession levels of sales and profits. The researchers sorted the companies into categories based on how they reacted to the recession, and two of the categories were inspired by the promotion and prevention mindsets. Prevention-focused companies made primarily defensive moves—they tightened their belts and tried to reduce risks. Promotion-focused companies went on the offensive, continuing to make strategic bets and investments. Both categories of companies tended to suffer because of their disproportionate focus on one set of tools. The researchers report that prevention-focused companies, with their focus on cost cutting, tended to adopt a “siege mentality.” Inside these companies, they write, “pessimism permeates the organization. Centralization, strict controls, and the constant threat of more cuts build a feeling of disempowerment. The focus b...

While Doreen was dwelling on ways to prevent or minimize stress (quitting her job, cutting back parental responsibilities), Frank pushed her to think about ways she could increase her happiness (by working out or listening to good music). He added the promotion mindset to her prevention mindset. Encouraging our loved ones and colleagues to blend the two mindsets can help them escape from an emotional cul-de-sac.

Multitracking also keeps egos in check—and can actually be faster! • When you develop only one option, your ego is tied up in it.

One diagnostic: If people on your team disagree about the options, you have real options.

Toggle between the prevention and promotion mindsets. • Prevention focus = avoiding negative outcomes. Promotion focus = pursuing positive outcomes. • Companies who used both mindsets performed much better after a recession

What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?

Some ask the references for additional people to contact who weren’t on the original list. Those secondary interviews will tend to yield more neutral information.

Other people have reconsidered the kinds of questions they ask in reference calls. Rather than ask for an evaluation of the candidate (“Would you say Steve’s performance was closer to ‘stunning’ or ‘breathtaking’? Be honest.”), many firms now seek specific factual information. For example, Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist with Venrock, says that one of the best diagnostic questions he’s discovered in assessing entrepreneurs is “How many secretaries has this entrepreneur had in the past few years?” If the answer is five, chances are you’ve got someone with some issues. This same strategy of fishing for specific information was endorsed in a brilliant article called “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession,” published in 1999 by U.S. District Court judge Patrick J. Schiltz. In the piece, Schiltz urges law students to ask tough, disconfirming questions before taking a job with a big corporate law firm: Every big firm claims that it is different. Every big firm denies that it is a sweatshop. Every big firm insists that, although its attorneys work hard, they lead balanced lives. This is almost always false. It has to be. There is no free lunch.… Ask tough questions of the lawyers you meet. When you are at a recruiting dinner with a couple of lawyers from the firm, don’t just ask them, “So, do you folks have any kind of life outside of work?” They will chuckle, say “sure,” and ask if you want more wine. Instead, ask the...

In situations like this, the therapist Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, advises that couples consciously fight the tendency to notice only what’s wrong. To avoid that trap, he advises couples to keep “marriage diaries,” chronicling the things their mates do that please them. In his book Love Is Never Enough, he describes a couple, Karen and Ted, who kept such a diary. One week, Karen noted several things that she appreciated about Ted: He sympathized with me about some bad behavior by one of my clients. He pitched in to help clean up the house. He kept me company while I was doing laundry. He suggested we go for a walk, which I enjoyed. Beck said, “Although Ted had done similar things for Karen in the past, they had been erased from her memory because of her negative view of Ted.” The same effect held true for Ted’s memory of the nice things Karen had done. Beck cites a research study by Mark Kane Goldstein, who found that 70% of couples who kept this kind of marriage diary reported an improvement in their relationship. “All that had changed was their awareness of what was going on,” Beck wrote. “Before keeping track, they had underestimated the pleasures of their marriage.”

If you are an overachiever—and single—you might even consider applying this “consider the opposite” principle to your dating life. One research team, interested in why some people find someone to marry and others don’t, interviewed women who were exiting the office where they’d just received their marriage license. To their surprise, 20% of the women reported not liking their spouse-to-be when they first met. (This also implies that there are millions of other people who met their future spouse and then walked away because their gut instinct led them to abandon the interaction too early.) The researcher who led that study, John T. Molloy, reported that some of the single women on his research team were surprised and intrigued by this result. Almost all of them could think of men whose interest they’d rejected—and some of these men were continuing to express their interest (in acceptable, non-stalkerish ways). Now the women wondered if these men might be overlooked potential mates. So they decided to try their own version of a “deliberate mistake” strategy, accepting a date with a guy they’d turned down multiple times in the past. Molloy said that “most women decided they were right the first time.” But one of his team members liked the first date enough to go on a second, and a third, and a fourth. She ended up marrying the guy!

This was something Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, experienced himself early in his career. He and his colleagues were exploring the idea of writing a high-school textbook on the subject of judgment and decision making. They would be the first to develop curricula on those subjects, so they roped in the dean of the School of Education, who was a curriculum expert, to work with them. The team began to write some sample chapters, and they met every Friday to review their progress. One Friday, they were discussing research about how groups think about the future, and it occurred to Kahneman that they should take their own advice. He said, “Let’s see how we think about the future.” He asked his colleagues to write down the date when they thought the textbook would be completed. The range of estimates was quite narrow—everyone’s projections, including Kahneman’s and the dean’s, ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 years into the future. Then Kahneman suddenly recalled the idea of base rates from his statistics training, so he asked the dean whether he could recall other groups similar to theirs that had written a new curriculum from scratch. The dean said, yes, he could remember quite a few of them. Kahneman asked him to quantify the base rate: How long did it take them to finish? After some back-and-forth, two disturbing facts had surfaced. One: According to the dean, 40% of the groups never finished writing the curriculum. Two: Of the groups that did finish, all of t...

The “ooching” terminology is our favorite, but we wanted to be clear that these groups are all basically saying the same thing: Dip a toe in before you plunge in headfirst. Given the popularity of this concept, and given the clear payoff involved—little bets that can improve large decisions—you might wonder why ooching isn’t more instinctive. The answer is that we tend to be awfully confident about our ability to predict the future.

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 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. Consider two men, Marshall and Jason, who both quit college after two years and now, in their mid-twenties, find that they’re getting nowhere in their careers. Marshall knows for sure that he needs a degree to advance in his career, but he puts it off. He doesn’t like school very much, so it’s always easy to find a reason to delay. For him, ooching—by, say, taking one class per semester—would be a cop-out, a way of stalling. It would also be likely to end poorly. At that pace of course work, he’d need many years to complete his degree, and with each passing year, it would be easier and easier to quit altogether. Jason, meanwhile, has always been fascinated by marine biology, but he is wise enough to know that he doesn’t fully understand what it entails. He should ooch. He should shadow a marine biologist for a few hours a week—does the work appeal to him?—and also audit a class or two at a local university to see if he can handle the course work. If, after he ooches, he becomes convinced that marine biology is a good fit, then he should stop ooching and leap headfirst! 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.

By way of comparison, 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.

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.

Intuit’s Scott Cook believes in “leadership by experiment,” not by “politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint.” The successful India mobile-phone service would have failed a debate.

Perhaps our worst enemy in resolving these conflicts is short-term emotion, which can be an unreliable adviser. When people share the worst decisions they’ve made in life, they are often recalling choices made in the grip of visceral emotion: anger, lust, anxiety, greed. Our lives would be very different if we had a dozen “undo” buttons to use in the aftermath of these choices.

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?

She’d be proud of herself for doing it, and she doesn’t think she’d regret it, even if the relationship ultimately didn’t work out. But without consciously doing the 10/10/10 analysis, it didn’t feel like an easy decision. Those short-term emotions—nervousness, fear, and the dread of a negative response—were a distraction and a deterrent.

10/10/10 helps to level the emotional playing field. What we’re feeling now is intense and sharp, while the future feels fuzzier. That discrepancy gives the present too much power, because our present emotions are always in the spotlight. 10/10/10 forces us to shift our spotlights, asking us to imagine a moment 10 months into the future with the same “freshness” that we feel in the present.

If you’ve been avoiding a difficult conversation with a coworker, then you’re letting short-term emotion rule you. If you commit to have the conversation, then 10 minutes from now you’ll probably be anxious, but 10 months from now, won’t you be glad you did it? Relieved? Proud?

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.

Research suggests that we set ourselves up for loss aversion almost instantly. In a brilliant series of studies, researchers walked into university classrooms and gave a gift at random to roughly half of the students: a coffee mug with the university’s logo. The students who weren’t given a mug were asked, “How much would you pay for one of those?” On average, they said $2.87. But the surprise came from the students who’d received the mugs. Asked at what price they’d sell the mugs, they reported that they couldn’t part with them for less than $7.12. Five minutes earlier, all the students in the class would presumably have valued the mugs at $2.87. Yet the students who received mugs grew attached to them in the span of a few minutes! The perceived pain of giving up their new gift made it unthinkable for them to sell at $2.87.

So when we are advising a friend, we think, Job B is going to make her happier and more satisfied over the long term. It seems relatively simple. But when we think about ourselves, we let complexity intrude. Wait, wouldn’t it disappoint Dad if I gave up the prestige of Job A? Could I really live with myself if that moron Brian Moloney ended up making more money than me?

The two of us have talked to many people about thorny personal or professional decisions they were facing, and often they seemed flummoxed about the right thing to do. Then we’d ask them the “best friend” question, and almost always—often within a matter of seconds!—they’d come up with a clear answer. Usually, they were a bit surprised by their own clarity. When we’d ask, “Do you think maybe you should take your own advice?” they’d admit, “Yes, I guess I should.”

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?

EVERY DAY, ALL OF us struggle to stay off List B and get back to List A. It’s not easy. Remember that MIT study showing that, over the course of a week, managers spent no time whatsoever on their core priorities? 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?”

Establishing your core priorities is, unfortunately, not the same as binding yourself to them. • MIT study: Managers had done no work on their core priorities in the previous week!

To carve out space to pursue our core priorities, we must go on the offense against lesser priorities. • On the USS Benfold, the crew actively fought the List B items like repainting (e.g., by using stainless-steel bolts that wouldn’t leave rust stains). • Jim Collins’s “stop-doing list”: What will you give up so that you have more time to spend on your priorities?

For one thing, you’re competing against full-time professionals like Penstock who are waking up at 3:00 a.m. to work on their analyses—and even so, 96% of them manage to underperform a simple index fund. (See the endnotes if you want our full soapbox rant on why your retirement dollars are better off in index funds than in individual stocks or mutual funds.)

A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?” A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail? 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.

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?

The call center’s “warts and all” hiring approach is called a “realistic job preview.” Max Simkoff, the CEO of Evolv, the company that built the realistic job preview described above, said that many hiring professionals don’t understand the power of setting expectations. In a typical call center, Simkoff said, “there are seats that turn over three or four times a year. So then the call-center people immediately react: ‘We’re hiring the wrong people. We need to revisit our competency model.’ And we say, ‘No, you’re actually not doing a good job of explaining the job situation to the people that you hire.’

The idea has been tried with a host of professions, including grocery baggers, customs inspectors, nurses, army and navy recruits, life-insurance agents, bank tellers, and hotel desk clerks. Analyzing 40 different studies of realistic job previews, researcher Jean Phillips found that, as in the case of the call center, the practice consistently reduces turnover. But the reason why may be different from what you’d guess.

Instead, the success of realistic job previews seems to be driven by what Phillips calls a “vaccination” effect. By exposing people to a “small dose of organizational reality” before they start work, you vaccinate them against shock and disappointment. So at the call center, when a new customer-service rep finds herself on a call with an angry guy, she isn’t taken aback. She was expecting it.

Her decision was made; she knew she needed to ask for a raise. Given the decision, how could she best improve her odds? She found that anticipating the future, including its potential unpleasantness, helped her prepare. That’s a strategy we can all emulate.

Anticipating problems helps us cope with them. • The “realistic job preview”: Revealing a job’s warts up front “vaccinates” people against dissatisfaction. • Sandra rehearsed how she would ask her boss for a raise and what she’d say and do at various problem moments.

By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions.

Zappos’s culture is fun and intense. For some people it’s heaven, and for others it’s just too much. As a result, in hiring new employees, the company pays a lot of attention to “fit.” Consider the experience of Jon Wolske, who interviewed in 2007 for a customer-service job. He was 30 years old and had spent the previous few years working in the production of live Vegas shows.

Do you feel lucky in life? On a 10-point scale, how weird are you? (He gave himself a 7 or 8.)

His fellow trainees in the four-week program included a wide range of people, even the incoming head of IT. (Everyone at Zappos, no matter what role, begins their job with customer-service training.)

Of course, the same idea is applicable to opportunities as well as threats. Organizational leaders need people to be sensitive to changes in the environment and to be brave enough to speak up.

By coaching people to recognize patterns of threat or opportunity, you can take advantage of a phenomenon we’ve all experienced, the “seeing it everywhere” effect: You learn a new concept or word and suddenly you start to notice it everywhere. The Web site 1000 Awesome Things identifies this phenomenon as Awesome Thing #523.