📖Decisive — Making better choices in life and work

It is more than just a book. It is a framework for a confident life.

I have found myself torn between conflicting choices and agonizing over the consequences of my decisions — over and over again in the recent past. Hence I set out to do what each of us does when we can’t answer something on our own — that’s right, I went to the internet! 😁

Decisive is one of the books I found as an answer to my quest for better decision-making frameworks — and what I found is something very insightful and applicable for decisions in your life and career — and I will recommend reading this book to everyone. This is my attempt to summarise my learnings from this book! 😉

Two roads diverged… Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

The book proposes a “WRAP” framework beyond the pros-and-cons lists to approach any kind of decision more confidently knowing that you haven’t missed anything. Of course, you won’t always end up in the right decisions but you will follow a process in reaching the best decision you can make in that time. ✅

Four Villains Of Decision Making

More often than not, we make decisions based on what is in our spotlight: the most accessible information + our interpretation of that information. But that’s not enough to make a good decision without learning to shift our spotlights due to these 4 villains of decision making:

1. Narrow Framing: limiting our options we consider by thinking ‘OR’. Eg. Should I finish my homework OR go to the party? Should I keep my job OR enroll myself in the master's program? Should I move to the new job OR focus on my relationship?
2. The Confirmation Bias: seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs. Eg. Analysing the data to back up your proposal rather than challenge it. Interviewing ex-employees to confirm the pros of a potential employer rather than seeking the complete picture.
3. Short-term Emotion: being swayed by the emotion that will fade. Eg. Not asking out someone you like in the face of rejection and embarrassment which wouldn’t matter a few months/years from now. Buying that ridiculous picture from the roller coaster ride in the adrenaline high which you wouldn’t the next day. (seriously, no one looks good on a roller coaster) 🙄
4. Overconfidence: having too much faith in your predictions. Eg. Underestimating the time required to finish a project. Overestimating the possibilities of success of your new restaurant business.

WRAP

To overcome the above-mentioned villains, it is suggested to use the WRAP process to improve the quality of your decisions:

• Widen your options
• Reality-test your assumptions
• Attain distance before deciding
• Prepare to be wrong

These seem obvious to follow. And yet, most people manage to make sub-optimal decisions because they aren’t aware of the flaws in their decision-making process. 🤷‍♀

Let’s start looking into each of these steps to understand what they entail!

Widen your options

1. Avoid a Narrow Frame: Whenever you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?” Think about the opportunity costs and what else can you achieve by investing that in other things. Or try the vanishing test: “What if your current options disappeared?” to come up with more possibilities to avoid narrow framing your choices.
2. Multitrack: Consider more than one option simultaneously — ideally 2–3 real options. Don’t use a sham option to trick your mind, use real options. Switch between Prevention and Promotion mindsets. Prevention focuses on avoiding negative outcomes however promotion focuses on pursuing positive outcomes.
3. Find someone who has solved your problem: Look outside for more options: competitive analysis, benchmarking, best practices. Use analogies to the other similar solved problems to get ideas for your own problems.

Reality-test your assumptions

1. Beware of the confirmation bias: ask disconfirming questions to gather more trustworthy information. eg. Ask “What problems does the product have?” before buying it. Spark constructive disagreement within the organizations. Try to consider the opposite of our instincts. “Assume positive intent” to interpret someone’s actions/words in a more positive light.
2. Trust averages over instincts: “From the perspective of Universe though, we are utterly typical.” Trust the average statistics apply to you more than you would like to think. Seek reviews for important decisions in life the way you seek them while booking a hotel or picking a restaurant.
3. Zoom out, Zoom in: Consider the averages to be the base rates, and try to gather more specific info to add color that’s missing from the external view.
4. “Ooch”: run small experiments to test your theories. Work in a pharmacy before deciding to enroll in a pharma degree program to decide if this indeed is your calling. Launch a pilot locally before deciding to launch a nationwide product. Use work case studies rather than interviews to make hiring decisions.

Attain distance before deciding

1. 10/10/10: Consider how action would make you feel in 10 minutes after that action? in 10 months? in 10 years? to analyze the real stakes of the decision to act in a certain way or not.
2. Status-quo bias: We tend to stick to the status quo due to mere exposure(we like what’s familiar to us) and loss aversion(losses are more painful than gains are pleasant). Challenge the “We have always done it this way” attitude.
3. Attain distance: look at your situation from an observer’s perspective. It allows us to see the forests and not the trees. Or ask: “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
4. Honor your core priorities: Agonising decisions are often a sign of a conflict among your core priorities. Identify and enshrine your core priorities to help you resolve present and future dilemmas. To honor them, you might need to cut down on the lesser priorities. Ask, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?”

Prepare to be wrong

1. Bookend the future: The future is not a point, it’s a range. Consider the range of outcomes from very bad to very good and make decisions in the favor of more upside than the downsides. Anticipating both adversity and success — we can be better prepared.
2. Prepare for the extremes: perform a pre-mortem to analyze all the reasons that a decision could end up in a failure and try to mitigate those reasons. Perform a pre-parade to figure out if you are ready in the event of success: think your startup growing from thousands to millions — do you know how will you handle that growth?
3. Set a tripwire: to avoid slipping into the autopilots, set up tripwires to wake us up and make us realize that we have a choice to make. Consider deadlines or partitions as potential tripwires. “let’s review this decision 6 months from now” or “let’s not allocate more than $10k into a new venture”. That way you can cap your risks and quiet your mind until the trigger is hit.

Closing Remarks

Trust the process: The confidence it can provide is precious. In the words of the authors themselves:

“Being decisive is itself a choice. Decisiveness is a way of behaving, not an inherited trait. It allows us to make brave and confident choices, not because we know we’ll be right but because it’s better to try and fail than to delay and regret.

Our decisions will never be perfect, but they can be better. Bolder. Wiser. The right process can steer us towards the right choice.

And the right choice, at the right moment, can make all the difference.”

This is just an attempt to capture the most actionable items from the book. I highly recommend you to read that book yourself — it is full of anecdotal insights that a book summary can’t provide. 👍

I write about Tech Products, Data Science, Product Management, Productivity, and Leadership.

• If you would like to read along with my learning journey, you can follow me on medium or LinkedIn
• To book 1/1 call with me, you can book some time here.
• If you would like to get notified of my new articles, you can use medium’s subscribe feature 📬
• If you would like to support my work, you can 👏 or buy me a coffee or both. ☕️