Decisive (book)

✒️ Note-Making

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Decision Making (MOC)

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Widen your options - instead of binary thinking, look for other options, especially win win situations. Use reframing, seek opportunity costs, pose self limitations (what if), and think as an external viewer. Create multiple options using multitrack to increase creativity and avoid attachment, while looking for existing solutions elsewhere.
2. Reality test your assumptions - to combat conformation bias, consider the opposite by having a devils advocate and reverse your framing. Look for quantitative (base rates of success) and qualitative (interviews, stories) information. Test your assumptions by running small pilot experiments.
3. Attain distance - to avoid short term emotions, try to think long term, or through the eyes of another, and remind yourself of your core values.
4. Prepare to be wrong - instead of predicting and preparing for a single future scenario, predict a range of negative and positive results and be ready for both ends, add buffers to combat over confidence and uncertainty, and set tripwires to trigger decision points on critical situations, such as based on deadlines or budget used.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

1. Decision making is a process - instead of a single moment of making a decision, it is a process, with different steps, which develops with time, and that can be perfected. I.e use the WRAP

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

1. Fewer errors - we would be less prone to biases and errors when we make our decisions
2. Better solutions - we would be able to take a step back, and come up with better solutions to the situation

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... Some decisions can't use this process, as explained in the book. In areas that require fast decisions to be made, or in limited scope decisions such as which move to make in a game.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

1. The book is easy to read, well structured, and even enjoyable.
2. The division and connection between topics is clear, everything connects back to the main topic.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Introduction

Decision making is a process. Why a process and not an individual moment? Because we are as default bad at decision making. We fall to biases, especially the Availability Bias, narrowing down our thinking to limited information and options because it was the easiest available information, rather than explore different points of view, additional information and potential options.

This book is relevant only for decisions that are not immediate (like a doctor), or that relies heavily on intuition (like chess players)

Four Villains of Decision Making

1. Narrow thinking - we think in binary terms, instead of looking outside the box and searching for the win win solution Binary Thinking
2. Confirmation bias - we get locked on information that supports our gut decision, ignoring countering information/ Conformation Bias
3. Emotions - either Sunk Cost, Attachment, Attachment, or any kind of emotional surge that sways our decision, even though there was no change in information.
4. Overconfidence - we think how the future will roll out although in fact we don't. over confidence

These 4 villains have 4 solutions (aka WRAP), each one tailored to a villain:

1. Widen your options
2. Reality test your assumptions
3. Attain distance before deciding
4. Prepare to be wrong

These will be the following chapters. Lastly, we need to be aware when we need to make a decision, and how to know we made a good one. This we can do with "tripwires", which is the final section.

Quotes

• we find it very easy to take that readily available set of information and start drawing conclusions from it. But of course a spotlight only lights a spot. Everything outside it is obscured. (Location 58)
• 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. (Location 66)
• Why a process? Because understanding our shortcomings is not enough to fix them. (Location 123)
• “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?’ (Location 155)
• the first villain of decision making, narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms. (Location 166)
• 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. (Location 184)
• 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. (Location 190)
• 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. (Location 248)
• the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold. (Location 271)
• The future has an uncanny ability to surprise. We can’t shine a spotlight on areas when we don’t know they exist. (Location 283)
• Rather than make choices based on what naturally comes to your attention—visceral emotions, self-serving information, overconfident predictions, and so on—you deliberately illuminate more strategic spots. You sweep your light over a broader landscape and point it into hidden corners. (Location 385)
• Sometimes the hardest part of making a good decision is knowing there’s one to be made. (Location 448)

Widen Your Options

Avoid a Narrow Frame

We should mistrust a "whether or not" questions, since they narrow our thinking . While it does focus us on the question at hand, increasing our chances for a deep analysis, we are being blinded to all other options.

To escape this, we should use the following:

1. Reframing - ask things like "how can we do it better?" "What else can we do"? Covert the question from a either or option to a wide multiple options. Framing
2. Opportunity cost - think about what are you missing by making this choice. Is there anything else better to do with your time and resources? Alternative cost
3. Vanishing options test - for the sake of the example, pretend you can't make any of the either or options, what will you do now? Usually the first two methods will shift the spotlight a few inches, this will make the greatest shift because we can't stick to our previous "favorite/default" answer anymore, we have to think outside the box. Limits
4. Be an external viewer - think as if it is not you who is making the decision, but rather you are consulting someone else, like "what would my successor do". Cognitive Distancing

Quotes

• statements of resolve and “whether or not” decisions—composed about 65% of teenagers’ decisions. In other words, if a teenager is making a “decision,” chances are there’s no real choice being made at all! (Location 516)
• most organizations seem to be using the same decision process as a hormone-crazed teenager. (Location 566)
• Finding answers to those questions—“Is there a better way? What else could we do?”—is the goal of this part of the WRAP framework, “Widen Your Options.” (Location 571)
• You won’t think up additional alternatives if you aren’t aware you’re neglecting them. Often you simply won’t recognize you’re stuck in a narrow frame. (Location 675)
• Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. (Location 680)
• What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money? (Location 692)
• When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere—really (Location 723)
• Until we are forced to dig up a new option, we’re likely to stay fixated on the ones we already have. (Location 726)

Multitrack

When we only have one option to consider, we are most likely missing a more creative solution. To increase our chances, we can use multitracking Multitrack,

Note that too many options is also not good. Having more than 2-3 will cause confusion, harder division of scarce resources. Also, your options should be different enough from each other to offer the advantages, and be careful of fake alternatives only made the make the first one look better. Best to have a mixture of protective (loss aversion) and prosperous options (growth seeking), and don't be afraid to look for the "this and that" option.

Quotes

• it’s precisely this willingness to work in parallel, and to endure inefficiency, that often leads to a break in the case. (Location 803)
• the simple act of surfacing another option—even if we ultimately decide against it—helps us to make better choices. (Location 817)
• Direct comparison perhaps helped them better understand key design principles and led to more principled choices for subsequent prototypes.” (Location 831)
• people who work on a single track begin to take their work too personally, viewing criticism as a “rebuke of their only option.” (Location 842)
• One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. (Location 862)
• you don’t need a plethora of choices to improve your decisions. You just need one extra choice, or two. (Location 894)
• To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct. (Location 898)
• We must be careful, too, to avoid sham options, which exist only to make the “real” option look better. (Location 899)
• How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. (Location 935)
• WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a “this or that” choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be “both.” (Location 1004)

Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem

There's often no need to reinvent the wheel. Search for cases where it has already been solved/tested. The best method is to "ladder up", which means to search for answers in increasingly larger circles, both in terms of size/scale, and levels of abstractions. Imitation

For example:

• Level 1 can be you: similar decisions you have done in the past, known best practices from your own field/expertise.
• Level 2 could be your surroundings, friends, your company, co-workers, who had similar, if slightly different cases.
• Level 3 could be your city, competitors from the same field, and lastly completely different fields/cases with a small abstract connection.

This is the strength of Analogies, which store the same logic power from one field to another, for example, you can design a swimwear by the way fish move around the water - low level analogy, or design a medical drug based on military logic - high level analogy. From those,  you can create a checklist of best practices, of benchmarks, to reduce error and increase creativity.

Quotes

• TO BREAK OUT OF a narrow frame, we need options, and one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem. (Location 1066)
• A checklist is useful for situations where you need to replicate the same behaviors every time. It’s prescriptive; it stops people from making an error. (Location 1216)
• when you’re stuck, you can use a process of “laddering up” to get inspiration. The lower rungs on the ladder offer a view of situations very similar to yours; any visible solutions will offer a high probability of success, since the conditions are so similar. As you scale the ladder, you’ll see more and more options from other domains, but those options will require leaps of imagination. (Location 1266)
• if we get stuck, we should find someone who has already solved our problem. To find them, we can look inside (for bright spots), outside (for competitors and best practices), and into the distance (via laddering up). (Location 1344)

Reality-Test Your Assumptions

Consider the Opposite

There is always the chance you are wrong. That all you think is true is a result of conformation bias.

In order to protect yourself from it:

1. Devil's advocate - Have someone else as the devil's advocate, so that you won't be in a conflict of interests
2. Reverse your framing - ask in what conditions this decision will be true. For example, "We did x and we succeeded, why?"
3. Ask signaling questions - instead of "what do you think", look for objective metrics to see if that person is lying to you.

Quotes

• if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes.… This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.” (Location 1513)
• ASKING probing questions is useful when you are trying to pry information from people who have an incentive to spin you: (Location 1564)
• three approaches for fighting the confirmation bias: 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. (Location 1691)

Zoom Out, Zoom In

In every decision, we often have precedents, known statistics about the possible results, these are called the base rates, or the "outside view". For example, if you are considering opening a restaurant, it would be helpful to know that 70% are closed with 3 years. In contrast, we have the "inside view ", the belief that our case is different, that we are special, that the statistics don't apply to us. This is dangerous thinking.

We should stick to the outside view, to get the base rates for our decision. Even when speaking to experts, don't ask "what are my chances", ask "what is the usual success rates for these kinds of cases".

This is the Zoom out case, where we seek the descriptive statistics for the decision. But statistics can only give quantitative information. To have a complete picture, we also need the qualitative information, the stories, personal reviews, a "connection" to the surface, the stakeholders of the decision. This is the zoom in view. experience knowledge. McNamara Fallacy Optimally, you will have both.

For example, don't only ask what are the survival rates of the surgery, but also talk to those who experienced it, hear their stories, how life looked like after the surgery, what were the main difficulties, was it worth it, etc...

Quotes

• The outside view is more accurate—it’s a summary of real-world experiences, rather than a single person’s impressions—yet we’ll be drawn to the inside view. (Location 1763)
• experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates. (Location 1808)
• The base rates obscured the texture of the reviews, but the close-up view revealed it. (Location 1960)
• When we zoom out, we take the outside view, learning from the experiences of others who have made choices like the one we’re facing. When we zoom in, we take a close-up of the situation, looking for “color” that could inform our decision. (Location 2011)

Ooch

We are very bad at predicting the future. Base rates (from previous chapter) are better than expert predictions, which are better than novice predictions. Therefore, we need to validate the information we have. The way to do that is through experimentation, small tests to see if our assumptions hold true. Pivot

For example, instead of committing for a 4 year degree, shadow a person who works in the field, do an internship, see if that really interests you. Instead of just opening a business, try to find one customer, sell one instance of the product, see if it's viable. Start Small

For example, interviews are a horrible way to filter candidates because it is a form of prediction, instead we should experiment, create tests and mock projects to see the quality of their work - simulations An experiment is useful when we need more information, not when we try to use it as a way to procrastinate. Experimentation gives us a window between all of nothing decisions, a compromise to pilot, to gather more data and make a decision after. Useful for parenting as well.

Quotes

• That strategy—finding a way to ooch before we leap—is another way we can reality-test our assumptions. When we ooch, we bring real-world experience into our decision. (Location 2078)
• … it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms.” (Location 2162)
• applied base rates are better than expert predictions, which are better than novice predictions. (Location 2175)
• Ooching provides an alternative—a way of discovering reality rather than predicting it. (Location 2180)
• By making decisions through experimentation, the best idea can prove itself. (Location 2213)
• Ooching is best for situations where we genuinely need more information. It’s not intended to enable emotional tiptoeing, in which we ease timidly into decisions that we know are right but might cause us a little pain. (Location 2237)
• Ooching, in short, should be used as a way to speed up the collection of trustworthy information, not as a way to slow down a decision that deserves our full commitment. (Location 2246)
• interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. (Location 2272)
• First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. And finally, the ultimate reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit. Where does this leave us? Armed with better information to make a good choice. (Location 2303)

Attain Distance Before Deciding

Overcome Short-Term Emotion

Short term emotions are not always the enemy, but they can't be the only voice at the table. They might:

1. Impulsivity - cause us to make drastic, quick decisions. anger, for example, is a main cause of that. Impulsivity
2. procrastination - Cause us to avoid making a decision. a combination of Risk Management and our bias towards what is familiar, can cause us a Status-quo bias Procrastination.

To prevent those, we can:

1. Do the 10/10/10 - how would it feel 10 minutes, months and years about this decision
2. What would you recommend your friend - instead of making it for yourself, act as if you are advising your friend, what should he do?

These two will allow to gain distance and counteract short term emotions.

Quotes

• many decisions don’t really have a “choice” stage. Often in the course of exploring our options, we find that one of them is so obviously right that we don’t deliberate much about it. (Location 2393)
• Perhaps our worst enemy in resolving these conflicts 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: (Location 2399)
• We need to downplay short-term emotion in favor of long-term values and passions. (Location 2407)
• 10/10/10 helps to level the emotional playing field. What we’re feeling now is intense and sharp, while the future feels fuzzier. That discrepancy gives the present too much power, because our present emotions are always in the spotlight. 10/10/10 forces us to shift our spotlights, (Location 2437)
• short-term emotion isn’t always the enemy. (In the face of an injustice, it may be appropriate to act on outrage.) Conducting a 10/10/10 analysis doesn’t presuppose that the long-term perspective is the right one. It simply ensures that short-term emotion isn’t the only voice at the table. (Location 2448)
• This mere-exposure principle, then, represents a subtler form of short-term emotion. It’s not as vivid as emotions like fear or lust or embarrassment, but it tugs at us nonetheless, and usually it’s tugging us backward (Location 2477)
• our advice to others tends to hinge on the single most important factor, while our own thinking flits among many variables. (Location 2568)

Honor Your Core Priorities

Even after we cleared the short term emotions, we might be stuck at a crossroads, this is often a sign of conflict between two or more competing values. In those cases, we need to define, reexamine, and honor our core values, and see which decision is closer to those values.

Quotes

• The goal of the WRAP process is not to neutralize emotion. Quite the contrary. When you strip away all the rational mechanics of decision making—the generation of options, the weighing of information—what’s left at the core is emotion. (Location 2689)

Prepare to Be Wrong

Bookend the Future

As we've mentioned, we are bad at predicting the future, and some of it is due to the fact that we treat the future as a single point, we try to sum up in our minds all possible factors into a single future, instead of treating it as a range of possibilities that we can prepare for.

To bookend, is to create a scale from worst to best outcome:

1. worst scenario - we try to analyze all the possible ways we could fail, and try and come up with a preemptive or insurance for that. Pre-Mortem.
2. Best scenario - consider all that we need to keep up with our success, reduce bottlenecks.

These two utilize two sided thinking Balance Extremes, similar to the first sections, by changing viewpoints we can increase our chances of creative thinking. Idea Compass But these are relevant only for what we expect from the future. Since over confidence is an issue, we also need a safety factor, a "what if" we are bad at planning planning fallacy. For example the add Buffers to schedules, budgets, etc. A buffer that isn't based on what we know (otherwise it would have come up in the premortem), but rather to plan for the unexpected. To improve our chances of sticking to the plan and getting closer to the higher bookend, we need to set expectations, which can act as an immunity to potential challenges that can rise. Emotional Resilience.

Quotes

• When we think about the extremes, we stretch our sense of what’s possible, and that expanded range better reflects reality. (Location 2996)
• When we bookend the future, we anticipate and plan for the best outcomes as well as the worst. (Location 3002)
• The premortem is, in essence, a way of charting out the lower bookend of future possibilities and plotting ways to avoid ending up there. (Location 3031)
• A preparade asks us to consider success: Let’s say it’s a year from now and our decision has been a wild success. It’s so great that there’s going to be a parade in our honor. Given that future, how do we ensure that we’re ready for it? (Location 3088)
• PREMORTEMS AND PREPARADES ARE most effective at tackling problems and opportunities that can be reasonably foreseen. There’s another technique that is useful in guarding against the unknown. It’s surprisingly simple, in fact: Just assume that you’re being overconfident and give yourself a healthy margin of error. (Location 3107)
• The previews are not just helping the “wrong” people opt out of the hiring process; they’re helping all people cope better when they confront the inevitable difficulties of the role. In fact, realistic job previews not only reduce turnover but also increase job satisfaction.‖ (Location 3184)
• To bookend the future means that we must sweep our spotlights from side to side, charting out the full territory of possibilities. Then we can stack the deck in our favor by preparing for both bad situations (via a premortem) and good (via a preparade). (Location 3226)

Set a Tripwire

We often get complicancy with our decisions, we feel constrained by Path Dependence and avoid reexamine our decisions, we stick to a "wait and see" strategy, or to Defaults. Setting a tripwire is a method that forces us to review our decision, and perhaps make changes easier, like giving new employees a "no hard feelings" quit paycheck if they want to leave, to make sure people don't stay even though they don't want to, when it is also harms the company Decision points. It is also useful to allow more risk taking because now we will have conditions where we stop the process before it's too late, like thinking about your budget size before entering the casino.

Quotes

• One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. (Location 3330)
• Because of this inertia—the deep footprints of past decisions—it can be hard for leaders to change even when they know they must. (Location 3340)
• even imperceptible, it’s hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump. (Location 3395)
• tripwires at least ensure that we are aware it’s time to make a decision, that we don’t miss our chance to choose because we’ve been lulled into autopilot. (Location 3397)
• One option is to set a deadline, the most familiar form of a tripwire. (Location 3404)
• partitioning is an effective way to make us more thoughtful about what we consume, because it forces us to make a conscious decision about whether to continue. (Location 3435)
• tripwires encourage risk taking by letting us carve out a “safe space” for experimentation. (Location 3467)

Trusting the Process

Implementing the WRAP process, we are much more likely to make better, fairer, and easier to execute decisions.

Quotes

• compromise is a necessary evil. Rather, compromise can be valuable in itself, because it demonstrates that you’ve made use of diverse opinions, which is a way of limiting risk. (Location 3615)
• That’s why the initial slowness of bargaining may be offset by a critical advantage: It speeds up implementation. (Location 3630)
• procedural justice is critical in explaining how people feel about a decision. It’s not just the outcome that matters; it’s the process. (Location 3653)
• That’s what a good decision process looks like. It’s not a spreadsheet that spits out “the answer” when we plug in the numbers. It’s not a tallied list of pros and cons. It’s a guardrail that guides us in the right direction. (Location 3771)
• doesn’t mean that your choices will always be easy, or that they will always turn out brilliantly, but it does mean you can quiet your mind. (Location 3790)
• 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 toward the right choice. (Location 3797)