The Decision Checklist: A Practical Guide to Avoiding Problems

by Sam Kyle

“When you do as everyone else does, don’t be surprised when you get what everyone else gets.” — Peter Kaufman

The best way to avoid making poor choices is to operate where you consistently make good ones. And while making those decisions, it’s to your advantage to utilize your latticework of mental models that we talked about in Chapter 4. Each of us, through experience or study, has

don’t want a quick answer that will allow you to make a quick decision. You want to understand things in a deeper way, so you can learn what you need to know to improve your knowledge in this area. It’s not just about what questions you ask, but how you ask them. Don’t ask, “What would you do?” But ask what variables are relevant, what key things govern the situation,

“Schedule a decision follow-up in one to two months. We often forget to check in when decisions are going poorly, missing the opportunity to make corrections and learn from what’s happened.”

We pretend we want the truth, yet all we really want is reassurance.

The first five—Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences, and Tradeoffs—constitute the core of our approach and are applicable to virtually any decision. The acronym for these—PrOACT—serves as a reminder that the best approach to decision situations is a proactive one.

“Create imaginative alternatives. Remember: your decision can be no better than your best alternative.” Everything has an opportunity cost, which is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

“Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.

“I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.