Decisive Quotes

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“1. 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.     •  Investor Penstock bet on Coinstar when his bookend analysis showed much more upside than downside. • Our predictions grow more accurate when we stretch our bookends outward. 2. To prepare for the lower bookend, we need a premortem. “It’s a year from now. Our decision has failed utterly. Why?” • The 100,000 Homes Campaign avoided a legal threat by using a premortem-style analysis. 3. To be ready for the upper bookend, we need a preparade. “It’s a year from now. We’re heroes. Will we be ready for success?”     •  The producer of Softsoap, hoping for a huge national launch, locked down the supply of plastic pumps for 18 to 24 months. 4. To prepare for what can’t be foreseen, we can use a “safety factor.”     •  Elevator cables are made 11 times stronger than needed; software schedules include a “buffer factor.” 5. 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. 6. By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“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! 5. 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?     •  Bregman’s hourly beep: Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now? Widen Your Options Reality-Test Your Assumptions Attain Distance Before Deciding Prepare to Be Wrong”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as much as present ones. • A 10/10/10 analysis tipped Annie toward saying “I love you” first to Karl. 4. 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.     •  How many of our organizational truths are ideas that we like merely because they’ve been repeated a lot?     •  Students given a mug won’t sell it for less than $7.12, even though five minutes earlier they wouldn’t have paid more than $2.87! 5. Loss aversion + mere exposure = status-quo bias. • PayPal: Ditching the PalmPilot product was a no-brainer—but it didn’t feel that way. 6. We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective. • Andy Grove asked, “What would our successors do?”     •  Adding distance highlights what is most important; it allows us to see the forest, not the trees. 7. Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“CHAPTER THREE IN ONE PAGE Multitrack 1. Multitracking = considering more than one option simultaneously.     •  The naming firm Lexicon widens its options by assigning a task to multiple small teams, including an “excursion team” that considers a related task from a very different domain. 2. When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the “shape” of the problem. • When designers created ads simultaneously, they scored higher on creativity and effectiveness. 3. Multitracking also keeps egos in check—and can actually be faster! • When you develop only one option, your ego is tied up in it.     •  Eisenhardt’s research on Silicon Valley firms: Multitracking minimized politics and provided a built-in fallback plan. 4. While decision paralysis may be a concern for people who consider many options, we’re pushing for only one or two extra. And the payoff can be huge.     •  We’re not advocating 24 kinds of jam. When the German firm considered two or more alternatives, it made six times as many “very good” decisions. 5. Beware “sham options.” • Kissinger: “Nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.”     •  One diagnostic: If people on your team disagree about the options, you have real options. 6. 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. • Doreen’s husband, Frank, prompted her to think about boosting happiness, not just limiting stress. 7. Push for “this AND that” rather than “this OR that.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER ONE IN ONE PAGE
The Four Villains of Decision Making 1. Danny Kahneman: “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.” • Should Shannon fire Clive? We form opinions effortlessly. 2. What’s in our spotlight = the most accessible information + our interpretation of that information. But that will rarely be all that we need to make a good decision. 3. Our decision “track record” isn’t great. Trusting our guts or conducting rigorous analysis won’t fix it. But a good process will. • Study: “Process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” 4. We can defeat the four villains of decision making by learning to shift our spotlights. 5. Villain 1: Narrow framing (unduly limiting the options we consider)     •  HopeLab had five firms work simultaneously on stage 1; “Can I do this AND that?” 6. Villain 2: The confirmation bias (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs) • The tone-deaf American Idol contestant … • Lovallo: “Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business.” 7. Villain 3: Short-term emotion (being swayed by emotions that will fade) • Intel’s Andy Grove got distance by asking, “What would our successors do?”     8. Villain 4: Overconfidence (having too much faith in our predictions)
• “Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” 9. The pros-and-cons process won’t correct these problems. But the WRAP process will. • Joseph Priestley conquered all four villains. 10. To make better decisions, use the WRAP process: Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“At work and in life, we often pretend that we want truth when we’re really seeking reassurance: “Do these jeans make me look fat?” “What did you think of my poem?” These questions do not crave honest answers.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: “Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“In his memoir White House Years, he discusses a classic bureaucratic trick that was played on President Richard Nixon, who was considering what policy to adopt on a particular issue in Europe. The State Department presented a memo to Nixon with three “options.” Kissinger noted that two options were obvious losers, leaving only one plausible choice: Here was the standard bureaucratic device of leaving the decision-maker with only one real option, which for easy identification is placed in the middle. The classic case, I joked, would be to confront the policymaker with the choices of nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“LET’S SUM UP WHERE we are. If you think about a normal decision process, it usually proceeds in four steps: • You encounter a choice. • You analyze your options. • You make a choice. • Then you live with it. And what we’ve seen is that there is a villain that afflicts each of these stages: • You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you’re gonna do this, you have to do it now. In”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Entrepreneurs don’t seem to believe that forecasting is worth the bother: One survey found that 60% of Inc. 500 CEOs had not even written business plans before launching their companies. To”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Another variety of close-up involves going to the genba, a Japanese term meaning “the real place” or, more loosely, the place where the action happens. Japanese detectives, for instance, call the crime scene the genba. In a manufacturing firm, the genba would be the factory floor, and for a retailing company it would be the store. Practitioners of Total Quality Management encourage leaders to “go to the genba” to understand problems.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Warren Buffett said, “In the past, I’ve observed that many acquisition-hungry managers were apparently mesmerized by their childhood reading of the story about the frog-kissing princess. Remembering her success, they pay dearly for the right to kiss corporate toads, expecting wondrous transfigurations.” Unfortunately, said Buffett, “We’ve observed many kisses but very few miracles.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“When you use analogies—when you find someone who has solved your problem—you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions. But when you don’t bother to look, you’ve got to cook up the answer yourself. Every time. That may be possible, but it’s not wise, and it certainly ain’t speedy. DUNBAR”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“This is a critical point: Multitracking keeps egos in check. If your boss has three pet projects in play, chances are she’ll be open to unvarnished feedback about them, but if there’s only one pet project, it will be harder for her to hear the truth. Her ego will be perfectly conflated with the project. So,”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective.     •  Andy Grove asked, “What would our successors do?”     •  Adding distance highlights what is most important; it allows us to see the forest, not the trees.     7.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person’s lifetime earnings don’t vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you’re smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn’t really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. The”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: “Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.” To”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. (“Dissenting” meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“and the wrong one for others, depending on their bank account and their movie lust.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“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. 3”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000 people. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support. Take the tradition of calling people’s references when you want to hire them. It’s an exercise in self-justification: We believe someone is worth hiring, and as a final “check” on ourselves, we decide to gather more information about them from past colleagues. So far, so good. Then we allow the candidate to tell us whom we should call, and we dutifully interview those people, who say glowing things about the candidate, and then, absurdly, we feel more confident in our decision to hire the person.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“What do you expect?” she said. “Kids get to their teen years, the hormones kick in, and they spend a few years operating without a frontal lobe.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

“Establishing your core priorities is, unfortunately, not the same as binding yourself to them.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work