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Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work Hardcover – March 26, 2013
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Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?
In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.
Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?
Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown Currency
- Publication dateMarch 26, 2013
- Dimensions5.71 x 1.25 x 8.53 inches
- ISBN-100307956393
- ISBN-13978-0307956392
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Q&A with Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Q. People often feel overwhelmed by “Decisions, decisions, decisions …” What makes us so indecisive?
A. If you’re feeling indecisive, chances are you don’t have the right options yet. In the book we describe four key “villains” of decision-making—common traps and biases that psychologists have identified. One of them is called “narrow framing,” meaning that we tend to get stuck in one way of thinking about a dilemma, or we ignore alternatives that are available to us. With a little effort, we can break out of a narrow frame and widen our options. For instance, one expert we interviewed had a great quote: “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.”
Q. You show that the same decision process can be applied to many domains—health decisions, career decisions, business decisions—but doesn’t a decision “process” take way too much time?
A. Not necessarily. In this book, we’re not interested in complex decision models or elaborate decision trees. Often the best advice is the simplest, for instance, the suggestion to “sleep on it.” That’s great advice—it helps to quiet short-term emotion that can disrupt our choices. But it still takes 8 hours, and it doesn’t always resolve our dilemmas. Many other decision aids require only a simple shift in attention. Doctors leaning toward a diagnosis are taught to check themselves by asking, “What else could this be?” And colleagues making a difficult group decision can ask, “What would convince us, six months down the road, to change our minds about this?”
Q. Why did you call the book Decisive?
A. Being decisive isn’t about making the perfect decision every time. That isn’t possible. Rather, it’s about being confident that we’ve considered the right things, that we’ve used a smart process. The two of us have met a lot of people who tell us they agonize endlessly about their decisions. They get stuck in a cycle where they just keep spinning their wheels. To escape that cycle, we often need a shift in perspective. We describe a simple technique used by former Intel chief Andy Grove to resolve one of the toughest business decisions he ever faced, one that he and his colleagues had debated for over a year. And what was this profound technique? Nothing fancier than a single, provocative question! In the book we also highlight a second question, inspired by Grove’s technique, that can often resolve personal decisions quickly and easily.
Q. So how do I help my teenage son not to make a bad choice?
A. Unfortunately, no one has solved that problem. But we offer some simple tools that help people give better decision advice. (Often it’s easier to spot the flaws in other people’s thinking than in our own.) As an example, the phrase “whether or not” is often a warning flag that someone is trapped in a narrow frame. So if your son is debating “whether or not to go to the party tonight,” that’s your cue to widen the options he’s considering. (Horror movie? School basketball game? A head-start on trigonometry coursework?) For important decisions, even a little improvement can pay big dividends.
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The Four Villains of Decision Making
1.
Steve Cole, the VP of research and development at HopeLab, a nonprofit that fights to improve kids' health using technology, said, "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."
For one major project, Cole and his team at HopeLab wanted to find a design partner, a firm that could help them design a portable device capable of measuring the amount of exercise that kids were getting. There were at least seven or eight design firms in the Bay Area that were capable of doing the work. In a typical contracting situation, HopeLab would have solicited a proposal from each firm and then given the winner a giant contract.
But instead of choosing a winner, Cole ran a "horse race." He shrank down the scope of the work so that it covered only the first step of the project, and then he hired five different firms to work on the first step independently. (To be clear, he wasn't quintupling his budget--as a nonprofit, HopeLab didn't have unlimited resources. Cole knew that what he'd learn from the first round would make the later rounds more efficient.)
With his horse race, Cole ensured that he'd have multiple design alternatives for the device. He could either pick his favorite or combine the best features of several. Then, in round two of the design, he could weed out any vendors who were unresponsive or ineffective.
Cole is fighting the first villain of decision making, narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms. We ask, "Should I break up with my partner or not?" instead of "What are the ways I could make this relationship better?" We ask ourselves, "Should I buy a new car or not?" instead of "What's the best way I could spend some money to make my family better off?"
In the introduction, when we asked the question "Should Shannon fire Clive or not?" we were stuck in a narrow frame. We spotlighted one alternative at the expense of all the others.
Cole, with his horse race, is breaking out of that trap. It wasn't an obvious move; he had to fight for the concept internally. "At first, my colleagues thought I was insane. At the beginning, it costs some money and takes some time. But now everybody here does it. You get to meet lots of people. You get to know lots of different kinds of things about the industry. You get convergence on some issues, so you know they are right, and you also learn to appreciate what makes the firms different and special. None of this can you do if you're just talking to one person. And when all of those five firms know that there are four other shops involved, they bring their best game."
Notice the contrast with the pros-and-cons approach. Cole could have tallied up the advantages and disadvantages of working with each vendor and then used that analysis to make a decision. But that would have reflected narrow framing. Implicitly, he would have been assuming that there was one vendor that was uniquely capable of crafting the perfect solution, and that he could identify that vendor on the basis of a proposal.
2.
There's a more subtle factor involved too--Cole, in meeting with the teams, would have inevitably developed a favorite, a team he clicked with. And though intellectually he might have realized that the people he likes personally aren't necessarily the ones who are going to build the best products, he would have been tempted to jigger the pros-and-cons list in their favor. Cole might not even have been aware he was doing it, but because pros and cons are generated in our heads, it is very, very easy for us to bias the factors. We think we are conducting a sober comparison but, in reality, our brains are following orders from our guts.
Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief. And that problematic habit, called the "confirmation bias," is the second villain of decision making.
Here's a typical result from one of the many studies on the topic: Smokers in the 1960s, back when the medical research on the harms of smoking was less clear, were more likely to express interest in reading an article headlined "Smoking Does Not Lead to Lung Cancer" than one with the headline "Smoking Leads to Lung Cancer." (To see how this could lead to bad decisions, imagine your boss staring at two research studies headlined "Data That Supports What You Think" and "Data That Contradicts What You Think." Guess which one gets cited at the staff meeting?)
Researchers have found this result again and again. When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Political partisans seek out media outlets that support their side but will rarely challenge their beliefs by seeking out the other side's perspective. Consumers who covet new cars or computers will look for reasons to justify the purchase but won't be as diligent about finding reasons to postpone it.
The tricky thing about the confirmation bias is that it can look very scientific. After all, we're collecting data. Dan Lovallo, the professor and decision-making researcher cited in the introduction, said, "Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they're collecting the data, and they don't realize they're cooking the books."
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.
Or pity the poor contestants who try out to sing on reality TV shows, despite having no discernible ability to carry a tune. When they get harsh feedback from the judges, they look shocked. Crushed. And you realize: This is the first time in their lives they've received honest feedback. Eager for reassurance, they'd locked their spotlights on the praise and support they received from friends and family. Given that affirmation, it's not hard to see why they'd think they had a chance to become the next American Idol. It was a reasonable conclusion drawn from a wildly distorted pool of data.
And this is what's slightly terrifying about the confirmation bias: 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.
3.
In his memoir, Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove recalled a tough dilemma he faced in 1985 as the president of Intel: whether to kill the company's line of memory chips. Intel's business had been built on memory. For a time, in fact, the company was the world's only source of memory, but by the end of the 1970s, a dozen or so competitors had emerged.
Meanwhile, a small team at Intel had developed another product, the microprocessor, and in 1981 the team got a big break when IBM chose Intel's microprocessor to be the brain of its new personal computer. Intel's team scrambled to build the manufacturing capacity it would need to produce the chips.
At that point, Intel became a company with two products: memory and microprocessors. Memory was still the dominant source of the company's revenue, but in the early 1980s, the company's competitive position in the memory business came under threat from Japanese companies. "People who came back from visits to Japan told scary stories," said Grove. It was reported that one Japanese company was designing multiple generations of memory all at once--the 16K people were on one floor, the 64K people were a floor above, and the 256K team was above them.
Intel's customers began to rave about the quality of the Japanese memories. "In fact, the quality levels attributed to Japanese memories were beyond what we thought possible," said Grove. "Our first reaction was denial. This had to be wrong. As people often do in this kind of situation, we vigorously attacked the data. Only when we confirmed for ourselves that the claims were roughly right did we start to go to work on the quality of our product. We were clearly behind."
Between 1978 and 1988, the market share held by Japanese companies doubled from 30% to 60%. A debate raged inside Intel about how to respond to the Japanese competition. One camp of leaders wanted to leapfrog the Japanese in manufacturing. They proposed building a giant new factory to make memory chips. Another camp wanted to bet on an avant-garde technology that they thought the Japanese couldn't match. A third camp wanted to double down on the company's strategy of serving specialty markets.
As the debate continued with no resolution, the company began losing more and more money. The microprocessor business was growing rapidly, but Intel's failures in memory were becoming a drag on profits. Grove summarized the year 1984 by saying, "It was a grim and frustrating year. During that time, we worked hard without a clear notion of how things were ever going to get better. We had lost our bearings."
In the middle of 1985, after more months of fruitless debate, Grove was discussing the memory quandary in his office with Intel's chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore. They were both fatigued by the internal deliberations. Then Grove had an inspiration:
I looked out the window at the Ferris Wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?" Gordon answered without hesitation, "He would get us out of memories."
I stared at him, numb, then said, "Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?"
This was the moment of clarity. From the perspective of an outsider, someone not encumbered by the historical legacy and the political infighting, shutting down the memory business was the obvious thing to do. The switch in perspectives--"What would our successors do?"--helped Moore and Grove see the big picture clearly.
Of course, abandoning memory was not easy. Many of Grove's colleagues were furiously opposed to the idea. Some held that memory was the seedbed of Intel's technology expertise and that without it, other areas of research were likely to wither. Others insisted that Intel's sales force could not get customers' attention without selling a full range of products--memories as well as microprocessors.
After much "gnashing of teeth," Grove insisted that the sales force tell their customers that Intel would no longer be carrying memory products. The customers' reaction was, essentially, a big yawn. One said, "It sure took you a long time."
Since that decision in 1985, Intel has dominated the microprocessor market. If, on the day of Grove's insight, you had invested $1,000 in Intel, by 2012 your investment would have been worth $47,000 (compared with $7,600 for the S&P 500, a composite of other big companies). It seems safe to say that he made the right decision.
Grove's story reveals a flaw in the way many experts think about decisions. If you review the research literature on decisions, you'll find that many decision-making models are basically glorified spreadsheets. If you are shopping for an apartment, for instance, you might be advised to list the eight apartments you found, rank them on a number of key factors (cost, location, size, etc.), assign a weighting that reflects the importance of each factor (cost is more important than size, for instance), and then do the math to find the answer (um, move back in with Mom and Dad).
There's one critical ingredient missing from this kind of analysis: emotion. Grove's decision wasn't difficult because he lacked options or information; it was difficult because he felt conflicted. The short-term pressures and political wrangling clouded his mind and obscured the long-term need to exit the memory business.
This brings us to the third villain of decision making: short-term emotion. When we've got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same arguments in our head. We agonize about our circumstances. We change our minds from day to day. If our decision was represented on a spreadsheet, none of the numbers would be changing--there's no new information being added--but it doesn't feel that way in our heads. We have kicked up so much dust that we can't see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.
Ben Franklin was aware of the effects of temporary emotion. His moral algebra wisely suggests that people add to their pros-and-cons list over several days, giving them a chance to add factors as they grow more or less excited about a particular idea. Still, though, to compare options rigorously is not the same as seeing the bigger picture. No doubt Andy Grove had been compiling his pros-and-cons list about whether to exit the memory business for many years. But the analysis left him paralyzed, and it took a quick dose of detachment--seeing things from the perspective of his successor--to break the paralysis.
4.
The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years.
--Vitali Sklyarov, minister of power and electrification in the Ukraine, two months before the Chernobyl accident
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
--Harry Warner, Warner Bros. Studios, 1927
What use could this company make of an electrical toy?
--William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, in 1876, rejecting an opportunity to purchase Alexander Graham Bell's patent on the telephone
Our search for the final villain of decision making takes us back to January 1, 1962, when a young four-man rock-and-roll group named the Beatles was invited to audition in London for one of the two major British record labels, Decca Records. "We were all excited," recalled John Lennon. "It was Decca." During an hourlong audition, they played fifteen different songs, mostly covers. The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, were hopeful they'd get a contract, and they waited anxiously for a response.
Eventually they received the verdict: Decca had decided to pass. In a letter to Epstein, Dick Rowe, a prominent talent scout at Decca Records, wrote, "We don't like your boys' sound. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished."
As Dick Rowe would soon learn, the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown Currency; 1st edition (March 26, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307956393
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307956392
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.71 x 1.25 x 8.53 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Business Decision Making
- #74 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #637 in Success Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses on business strategy and organizations. He is the co-author (along with his brother, Dan) of three books. Their latest book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work was published in spring of 2013 and debuted at #1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and #2 on the New York Times. Their 2010 book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, hit #1 on both bestseller lists. Their first book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, spent two years on the Business Week bestseller list and was an Amazon Top 10 Business Book for both editors and readers. Their books have been translated into over 30 languages including Thai, Arabic, and Lithuanian. Chip has consulted with clients ranging from Google and Gap to The Nature Conservancy and the American Heart Association.
Dan Heath is the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor/author of six books, including Reset, Made to Stick, Switch, and The Power of Moments. His books have sold over four million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-five languages.
Dan also hosts the award-winning podcast What It’s Like to Be…, which explores what it’s like to walk in the shoes of people from different professions (a mystery novelist, a cattle rancher, a forensic accountant, and more). A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Business School, he lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book insightful and helpful for making decisions. They describe it as a light, entertaining read that gets straight to the point. The concepts are easy to grasp and remember with concise summaries at the end of each chapter. Readers appreciate the well-told stories that illustrate the points. They find the material quality good and the book well-constructed. They appreciate the variety of ideas presented, which keeps them turning the pages.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book helpful for making better decisions. They say it provides an insightful process and a way to approach problems. The book helps with overthinking and ruts, providing new ideas like toggling promotion vs. demotion.
"...The Heaths also introduce several tools you can use to make the process work better. I found tools I was already familiar with, such as pre-mortem...." Read more
"Decisive is structured for clarity and accessibility. Every chapter ends with a one-page synopsis of high points...." Read more
"...walk away from this book with, at the very minimum, a handful of tools that will help you (or allow you to help others) make better decisions...." Read more
"...Brothers do a great job laying out a better and more memorable process for making decisions while illustrating the principles with a wide variety of..." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and worth reading for people who want to improve their skills. They describe it as a light, entertaining read that can help you understand how to improve your skills. The title hooks you to read it and the framework is immediately put to good use.
"...Readers are cleverly given a choice of how they read the book: fast or slow...." Read more
"...I was impressed - one of the most practical, entertaining books I have picked up in a long time...." Read more
"...Definitely worth the read." Read more
"...So, definitely worth reading but somewhat lacks the central connecting theory of texts like Duckworth's Grit and Dukes' How to Decide." Read more
Customers find the book easy to read and understand. They appreciate the examples that make the concepts stick with them. The book provides a simple mental framework and specific practices for handling complex decisions. It gets straight to the point and provides real-world examples. Readers mention it provides both a mental framework and specific practices.
"...The Heaths created a simple process with an acronym to help you remember it. Then they present an array of tools to help you make the process work...." Read more
"...not entirely original, what sets it apart is its presentation and accessibility. After all, their previous book was called "Made to Stick"...." Read more
"...It's practical, entertaining, and easy to apply...." Read more
"...The Heath Brothers do a great job laying out a better and more memorable process for making decisions while illustrating the principles with a wide..." Read more
Customers find the book's storytelling engaging. They appreciate the well-told business stories that illustrate key points. The author uses real-life examples to illustrate concepts and make the narration richer. The information is presented in anecdotal form, which customers find easy to understand.
"...The authors illustrate their points with relevant, well-told business stories, some of which you probably haven’t heard before...." Read more
"...BOTTOM LINE: This is one of the best business/psychology books I have read. It's practical, entertaining, and easy to apply...." Read more
"...This is an especially powerful concept in a business context where sides may be talking past each other - this helps reset the context to analyzing..." Read more
"...It’s understandable why the authors did this (because stories are memorable, impart knowledge and inspire to act)..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's quality. They find it well-constructed, with effective reinforcement at the end of each chapter. The book arrived in perfect condition.
"...between the number of options considered and the quality of the decision were also an eye-opener. Definitely worth the read." Read more
"Quality Book." Read more
"...statements, or questions relating to specific points were effective reinforcers...." Read more
"The authors of this book continue to produce excellent material...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's variety. They find it helpful for widening their options and considering multiple options, asking probing questions, and gaining perspective. The book provides enough variety to keep them turning the pages, but the ideas are cohesive and pulled together.
"...The four strategies are W.R.A.P.: Widen Your Options, Reality Test Your Assumptions, Attain Distance Before Deciding and Prepare to Be Wrong...." Read more
"...Other crucial concepts are to avoid narrow choices, and to get perspective to reduce the impact of emotions on decision making...." Read more
"...This book helps provide ways to find good third options...." Read more
"...into the four “villains” of decision making, they use chapters on widening your options, testing your assumptions, distancing yourself from..." Read more
Customers like the WRAP concept. They say it helps them make better decisions and avoid making egregious errors. The book provides an excellent review of the WRAP process, which helps them avoid making mistakes while optimizing choices. It helps them revisit past decisions periodically.
"...By reading this you will learn the WRAP system to make better decisions, which will help you overcome the four villains of decision making: narrow..." Read more
"...were excellent: the Decisive Workbook provided an excellent review of the WRAP process...." Read more
"Love the WRAP concept and love how it can be applied to business and personal decisions. Have recommended to many, many people" Read more
"...Decisive is different. You can understand the WRAP concept and start applying it the same day in personal or business situations...." Read more
Customers enjoy the witty humor from the books.
"...They brought the same witty humor found in Made to Stick and Switch to Decisive which for me makes the subject matter easier to digest...." Read more
"The Heath Brothers have a very nice writing style: they add humor to break up a serious topic while basing their ideas on current research...." Read more
"...excellent job of bringing the content to life in a relevant, yet humorous manner." Read more
"...You also get some wry humor and just plain great story telling. Decisive is decidedly great!" Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2018Chip and Dan Heath open their book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work describing a woman considering whether to fire her firm’s IT Director. They ask you to reflect on your mental activity as you read their description. Next, they tell you what you probably did. They nailed that part for me. Finally, they show you why what you did, and what most people do, may not lead result in good decisions.
Here’s a summary of the book’s subject in two quotes from the introduction.
“Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage. He called this tendency “what you see is all there is.” In keeping with Kahneman’s visual metaphor, we’ll refer to this tendency as a “spotlight” effect. (Think of the way a spotlight in a theater directs our attention; what’s inside the spotlight is crisply illuminated.)”
And
“And that, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape beyond it.”
Decisive describes how you can make better decisions by following a simple process. The Heaths share research that shows that process is more important than analysis when reaching effective decisions. In fact, a good process can lead to better analysis.
They describe what they call the four villains of decision-making. The villains are: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence. They share a four-step process you can use to lessen the effect of the four villains.
I like the simple process represented with a few letters. The military does the best job I know of in teaching people how to decide. One key to their method is to define a simple process for analyzing an issue. The Army uses an analysis tool called METT-TC. That stands for: Mission, Enemy, Troops available, Terrain, Time, and Civilian concerns. The simple process helps a decision maker consider all the important factors.
The Heaths’ tool is a little different. They use the acronym WRAP. Each letter of the acronym represents a way to deal with one villain of decision-making. W is for “Widen your options.” R stands for “Reality-test your assumptions.” A represents “Attain distance before deciding.” And P is “Prepare to be wrong.”
Each of those elements of their process gets several chapters’ worth of coverage. The authors illustrate their points with relevant, well-told business stories, some of which you probably haven’t heard before. The Heaths also introduce several tools you can use to make the process work better. I found tools I was already familiar with, such as pre-mortem. There were tools I knew about but which had slipped away from the front of my memory. An example is Suzy Welch’s 10/10/10. And there were tools I never heard about such as book-ending.
In A Nutshell
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work is one of the best books I’ve read on decision-making. The Heaths created a simple process with an acronym to help you remember it. Then they present an array of tools to help you make the process work. If you want to improve your decision-making, or even if you think you don’t need to, this book is a must-read.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2013Decisive is structured for clarity and accessibility. Every chapter ends with a one-page synopsis of high points.
End notes offer more depth on studies. Readers are cleverly given a choice of how they read the book: fast or slow. Decisive can be scanned by the impatient or read in depth by the reflective.
Readers of other popular books on decision making such as Barry Schwartz's excellent "Paradox of Choice" will notice the Heaths use some of the same research. It's disappointing to read about the supermarket jam story yet again.However, if this book is not entirely original, what sets it apart is its presentation and accessibility. After all, their previous book was called "Made to Stick". And they have sensibly followed their own advice.
We meet the authors' four villains of decision making:
1. narrow framing blinds us to options
2. confirmation bias focuses attention on self-serving information
3. short-term emotion
4. over-confidence.
Primary points are made "sticky" with the acronym WRAP:
* Widen your options
* Reality-test your assumptions
* Attain distance before deciding
* Prepare to be wrong.
Each of these areas is fully unpacked over several chapters.
Widening options shows us how making choices with only an on-off switch keeps us from seeing that we can have this AND that. The object is to create more options.
After initial selections have been made the next stage is reality-testing assumptions. These include sniffing out any tendency for the confirmation bias. Validity testing includes examining initial assumptions, seeking out conflicting opinions and taking time to explore them. The tripwire is a warning mechanism preventing straying too far from the topic.
Decisions are based in feeling. Individuals who suffer from autism can find it particularly hard to make decisions. They fail to recognize and respond to some emotional cues. Unemotional analysis has its place, yet analysis alone is not enough. In the reality testing stage we check in with how we feel about each incremental change.The next stage addresses the tendency for our emotions to run away with us.
Attaining distance before deciding is the act of stepping back. This is easier said than done. The idea here is to distance ourselves from our emotional biases. The goal is to take a wider, deeper view. Our choices need to be aligned with our stated priorities.
Prepare to be wrong (which I've already mastered). The Heath brothers show how we are often wildly overconfident about the future.
They suggest these three fixes to get closer to what actually happens:
1. Book-ending the future is a technique for getting closer to the bulls' eye by setting low and high parameters.
2. A tripwire is a boundary beyond which you won't go before checking in and correcting course.
3. Trust the process: "Trusting a process can permit us to take bigger risks, to make bolder choices. Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn't do."
Concepts are clearly explained, and illustrated with persuasive examples. Who knew that David Lee Roth's fixation with brown M&Ms was all about security?
We all need to decide. Deciding to read Decisive shouldn't be a difficult choice.
Top reviews from other countries
- NeilReviewed in Canada on August 11, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Extremely helpful framework for personal and business decision making. I would say these principles are especially useful for evaluating the “big” decisions in life.
- Pablo RiosReviewed in Mexico on February 1, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Think different
A good book to think about deciding.
- arjun varmanReviewed in India on February 4, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Truly transformative!!
The book presents a highly actionable process for quality decision making. Definitely was worth the read!
PS: Chapter notes and one-page summaries are already provided by the authors, making it super comfortable for readers to refer back.
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LinaReviewed in Italy on January 5, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Fatto regalo
Bello
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in the Netherlands on July 13, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars I wish I read this before..
As decided to improve the skills of decision making, this book provided me with the right insights that I noted down and use dailly every time I need to make a decision, and I can say that really works..!