Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

I enjoyed this book all the way through. It offers several angles of approach for making better decisions, and I find myself applying the ideas in my day-to-day life. And I'm retired! It might have been even more meaningful for me if I had work decisions to make as well. Anyway, I've bought a second copy as a gift and I recommend the book in print or audiobook format. For me, it did not seem repetitive. I just found it clear.

Chip 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 NutshellDecisive: 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.

I highly recommend Decisive as a valuable aid to making more objective decisions. 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 variety of examples. They begin by discussing how the normal decision making process proceeds in 4 steps, each of which has a "villain" that can negatively impact it. To quote from their introduction:* 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 unfoldThey spend the remainder of the book detailing a process to make better decisions - the WRAP process:* Widen your options* Reality Test Your Assumptions* Attain Some Distance* Prepare to Be WrongEach part of the process has several powerful ideas that are worth chewing on and implementing in the context of one's life. I have chosen a few of the ideas to give you a flavor of what is in store: For widening your options, it is important to avoid a narrow frame. In order to make sure you challenge yourself to do this, they propose an idea called the Vanishing Options Test - what would you do if the current alternatives disappeared? Here is a key quote: "When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere - really move it - often for the first time in a long while." For Reality testing your assumptions. They have a chapter on "consider the opposite" - and there is an approach from Roger Martin that recommends for each option you are looking at, ask yourself "What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?" 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 the options rather than arguing past each other. In attaining some distance, they cover a simple but powerful question that is really helpful for a personal decision (though it applies in business contexts as well). The question is: "What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?" For preparing to be wrong, they cover the idea of a tripwire - something to make us come back and revisit the decision. This helps in making sure that past decisions get revisited periodically. This is especially important in reminding us that we have a choice in our actions and we are free to revisit those decisions we made in the past to make sure they are still meeting our needs. I find this important for reminding myself to remain actively engaged rather than passively falling into the status quo.There are many other powerful techniques and ideas spread throughout the book. Some of my favorites are: prevention versus promotion focus, zoom out/zoom in, ooching, and pre-mortems. I highly recommend purchasing the book and integrating its concepts into your life in order to make better decisions.Here are a few related thoughts and items that others may find interesting: For reality testing your assumptions, see Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" article (freely available on the internet) I have found the book Making Great Decisions in Business and Life by David Henderson and Charles L Hooper to be helpful as well. An interesting course on decision making is also made available by the Teaching Company (the course is taught by Michael Roberto who is mentioned in the book in the section on Recommendations for Further Reading) For a powerful article on choices and values, see David Kelley's article "I Don't Have To" (also available freely on the internet) The March 2013 Harvard Business Review has an article by Heidi Grant Halvorson and E. Tory Higgins related to prevention and promotion mindsetsPlease note that this review is based on an advance copy (Uncorrected Proof) of the book that the authors made available via their website (a "secret" buried in a David Lee Roth story about tripwires). I enjoyed the book so much that I pre-ordered the hardcover right after finishing the advanced copy

A good book to think about deciding.

the book brings an innovative method to improve the decision-making process. It is a significant contribution to making better decisions. The book, however, could be more objective, having been written on fewer pages.

Hadn't finished a book in a while - this one is easy to read and to the point. Concrete, real life examples were particularly helpful. And structuring the book so that the key ideas were expressed first, and then repeated in different ways, put together and illustrated throughout the book was great for true assimilation of the concepts. Easy to apply to my own life, and the additional resources on the website also allow to take things in more easily.

I loved the practical tools shared in this book. A few examples I am not sure I agree with but nothing that took away from how these techniques can help make better and safer decisions.

it gets boring towards page 30, I hope I give it another chance some other time. I placed the book on a shelf in the toilet so I can grab it at any spare time I have.