Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip and Dan Heath, is a great read. Plus, as of the date of this post (February 3, 2020), the Kindle edition is bargain-priced at only $1.99 on Amazon! This is an amazing 93% discount from the original publisher’s price of $28.00. The Heaths are well-researched and thought-provoking authors with a great track record. Made to Stick and Switch are among some of their other titles.
Why Don’t We Make Better Decisions?
The Heath brothers pin the blame for bad personal and professional decisions on what they call “The Four Villains of Decision Making.”
- Narrow Framing. This tendency to define choices too narrowly causes us to miss better options. The Heath brothers write, “Learn to distrust ‘whether or not’ decisions.” They add “If you’re willing to invest some effort in a broader search, you’ll usually find that your options are more plentiful than you initially think.”
- Confirmation Bias. “Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation . . . When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision. Oops.”
- Short-term Emotion. “Perhaps our worst enemy . . . 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.”
- Overconfidence. “People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold . . . The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know . . . The future has an uncanny ability to surprise. We can’t shine a spotlight on areas when we don’t know they exist.”
Better Decisions Require A Process
The Heath brothers insist “folk wisdom advises that when we’ve got an important decision to make, we should sleep on it . . . For many decisions, though, sleep isn’t enough. We need strategy.” Therefore, the balance of the book unpacks what the Heaths call the WRAP process for decision making. Below are brief summaries of each sequential step in this helpful model.
W – Widen Your Options. Three entire chapters are devoted to this part of the process. Obviously, the goal is to avoid the error of “Narrow Framing.” Therefore, the Heaths offer several insightful questions such as, “Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.” They also suggest we consider Opportunity Cost, “What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?” The Vanishing Options Test is another way to break out of a narrow frame. This technique assumes you cannot choose any of the current options you are considering and asks, “What else could you do?” And finally, they suggest, “ . . . one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem.”
R – Reality-Test Your Assumptions.
In order to overcome the villain of “Confirmation Bias,” several broad strategies are suggested. “One, we can make it easier for people to disagree with us. Two, we can ask questions that are more likely to surface contrary information. Three, we can check ourselves by considering the opposite.” The Heaths also suggest zooming out for the “big picture” and “outsider” point of view and zooming in for close-up information that can educate and inform your intuition. Finally, they suggest what they call “ooching.” This means testing an idea in a small or incremental way in the real world. In other words, “Dip a toe in before you plunge headfirst.”
A – Attain Distance Before Deciding. To diffuse short-term emotions, the Heaths endorse using Suzy Welch’s “10/10/10” approach. They explain, “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? The three time frames provide an elegant way of forcing us to get some distance on our decisions.” The Heaths also suggest we consider the advice we would give a friend. “The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions . . . the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
P – Prepare to Be Wrong. “Overconfidence about the future” is the final villain addressed by the WRAP process. The Heaths suggest we “treat the future as a spectrum, not a point.” Consideration should be given to “bookending” our possible future outcomes by realistically envisioning both worst case scenarios and better-than-expected success. In addition, “tripwires” can be set to “encourage risk taking by letting us carve out a ‘safe space’ for experimentation.”
Make Better, Bolder, Wiser Decisions
The authors note that when researchers ask older adults about what they reqret at the end of life, it is seldom about something they did. More often seniors “regret things they didn’t do. They regret not seizing opportunities. They regret hesitating. They regret being indecisive.” Therefore, the paragraph below is a powerful and fitting summary of the book:
What a process provides . . . (is) confidence. Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you’ve made the best decision that you could . . . You can stop the cycle of agonizing . . . trusting the process can give you the confidence to take risks . . . A process . . . can actually give you the comfort to be bolder.
A Highly Recommended Read
I found Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work a stimulating read. At the end of the book a number of free resources are listed that can be accessed on the Heath Brothers website including an overview of the WRAP framework, a PDF workbook, audio podcasts, and discussion suggestions for book clubs or teams.