Decisive
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Decisive is the Heath brothers' process for making better choices in life and work. It names four villains (narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence) and answers each with a step of the WRAP process: Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, Prepare to be wrong. Its claim is that process beats analysis, and its tools (the vanishing options test, ooching, 10/10/10, the premortem and tripwires) are usable the day you read them.
You decide with a gut feeling and a pros-and-cons list. The Heaths show that the list defends against none of the four ways decisions fail, and hand you a process that does.
The book in essence
The book starts from Paul Nutt's study of organisational decisions: seventy-one percent considered only one option, and those whether-or-not decisions failed more than half the time. They also cite Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony's study of more than a thousand business decisions, in which process mattered six times as much as analysis. How options are generated and tested, the Heaths argue, matters far more than the analysis of the options you happen to have. Their four villains map onto four steps. Widen your options with the vanishing options test, multitracking and finding someone who has solved your problem. Reality-test with disconfirming questions, the outside view and small experiments they call ooching. Attain distance with 10/10/10, the friend question and core priorities. Prepare to be wrong with premortems, bookending the future and tripwires that force a review.
Published in 2013 after Made to Stick and Switch, Decisive is the most practical of the three. Every tool comes with the research behind it and a story of someone using it, from a non-profit choosing a design firm to people weighing a job or a move.
Who it's for
- Anyone facing a job, a home, a hire or a treatment decision this year
- Managers who want a process their team can follow rather than a hero's instinct
- Readers who found Kahneman's catalogue of biases true but unusable
Who it's not for
- — Readers wanting the psychology in depth; the Heaths cite it and move on
- — Anyone hoping for a formula that guarantees the right answer; the book promises a better process
Key lessons
01
Never decide between one option and nothing
Whether-or-not decisions fail more than half the time. Add a real option before evaluating anything, using the vanishing options test: if these choices were gone, what would you do?
A family torn between two schools asks what they would do if neither existed, and finds a third: the public school nearby, plus an after-school programme in the subject they cared about.
02
Test the assumption with a small experiment
Confirmation bias makes research feel like proof. Ask the question whose honest answer could hurt, find the base rate for cases like yours, and ooch: run a small, cheap trial before the full commitment.
Before signing a three-year lease on a shop, a café owner rents a market stall in the same neighbourhood for two months to see who actually buys.
03
Decide from ten months away
Short-term emotion votes loudest and is gone in a week. Ask how you will feel in ten minutes, ten months and ten years, and what you would tell your best friend to do.
A teacher offered a post in another city feels panic at ten minutes. At ten months the move is ordinary life, and at ten years the only question is whether the work was better.
04
Write how it failed before it does
Overconfidence survives every other fix. Run a premortem (it is a year later and this failed; why?) and set a tripwire: a date or a number that forces a review.
A team about to launch an app writes, 'It is a year later and the launch failed.' The most common reason, a payment provider nobody had tested, is fixed before launch.
Try this today
Take one decision you are facing and run the vanishing options test: if your current options disappeared, what would you do? Write down two new options you would genuinely consider.
Quick check
What are the four steps of WRAP?
What is ooching?
Selected quotes
“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?'”
“The first villain of decision making — narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.”