How to Make Better Decisions

Notes from “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath

Tools for making better decisions, gleaned from Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Widen Your Options

• Opportunity Cost: Explicitly consider alternative uses of time and money. Make a choice between multiple attractive options, rather than deciding “whether or not” to do one thing.
• The Vanishing Options Test: Imagine that you cannot choose any of the options you are currently considering. What else might you do?
• Multitrack: Rather than considering different options in succession, consider them simultaneously, comparing and contrasting them and combining the best aspects of each. See if you can do “this and that,” rather than limiting it to “this or that.”
• Bright Spots: See what you can learn from people who have solved similar problems in the past. Search both within your own experience, and outside of your own experience.

Reality-Test Your Assumptions

• Consider the Opposite: Fight the confirmation bias by consciously playing Devil’s Advocate, considering the opposite as seriously as you consider the original option.
• Develop Disagreement: If everyone agrees that something is the right choice, develop disagreement to widen your perspective. Have each person come up with at least one other potentially attractive alternative.
• What Might Convince Me of …?: For each option, ask: “What needs to be true for this option to be my best option?” In addition, ask: “What data might convince me that my least favorite option is actually the best one?”
• Make a “Mistake”: To test your assumptions, do something that you assume will be a mistake, and see if things turn out as you assumed they would.
• Consult Experts: But keep them talking about the past and present, not the future. Experts are almost as bad at making specific predictions as we are, but they are great at assessing base rates and telling us what is generally likely to happen in a given field. (In this case, “expert” means anyone who knows more about a field than we do.)
• Zoom Out and Zoom In: Look at averages, and at specific cases. In reading the reviews of a restaurant, look at the average star rating, and several representative reviews.
• Ooch/Prototype/Experiment: Discover reality rather than just predicting it. Rather than all or nothing, try a little something — an ooch, a prototype, a little experiment. If it works, continue, and if not, go back to the drawing board. “Why predict when we can test?”

Overcome Short-Term Emotion

• 10/10/10: How will you feel about it 10 minutes from now? 10 months from now? 10 years from now? Longer perspective isn’t necessarily better, but having more perspectives is.
• The Best Friend Advice Test: “What will I tell my best friend to do in this situation?” We often give better advice to our friends in our same situation.
• Honoring Your Core Values: Discern and prioritize your core values, making decisions that honor those long-term values, rather than basing them on short-term mood swings.
• The Movie of Your Life: What would someone watching the movie of your life identify as your core values? Are those your core values? How can you more closely align the two?
• Create a Not-To-Do List: You only have 24 hours a day to devote to various activities. As you consider adding something to your life, consider what you will not do to free up available time. Convert lower fulfillment hours into higher fulfillment hours.
• Am I Doing What I Most Want to Be Doing Right Now?: Ask this question constantly.

Prepare to Be Wrong

• Bookend the Future: Identify the best and worst possible outcomes and plan for the full range of outcomes, rather than betting on a single prediction (which is likely inaccurate).
• Use Prospective Hindsight: Imagine that it’s the future and something unexpected has happened. Explain why it has happened. This is more effective than imagining reasons why something unexpected might happen, because we’re better at explaining things than we are at predicting them. This helps us prepare to be wrong.
• Use a Safety Factor: Assume that you’re being overconfident and incorporate a healthy margin for error into your plans from the outset.
• Set a Tripwire: Identify the point at which you will reconsider your decision. What evidence will need to come to light in order for you to change course?

Many thanks to Chip Heath and Dan Heath for writing such insightful books:
* Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
* Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
* Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work