Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

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...