Decisive
Chip Heath
1. The Four Villains of Decision Making
Cole is fighting the first villain of decision making, narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms. We ask, “Should I break up with my partner or not?” instead of “What are the ways I could make this relationship better?” We ask ourselves, “Should I buy a new car or not?” instead of “What’s the best way I could spend some money to make my family better off?”
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Date: April 25, 2016 |
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
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Date: April 25, 2016 |
Grove’s decision wasn’t difficult because he lacked options or information; it was difficult because he felt conflicted. The short-term pressures and political wrangling clouded his mind and obscured the long-term need to exit the memory business. This brings us to 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. We have kicked up so much dust that we can’t see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.
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Date: April 25, 2016 |
As Dick Rowe would soon learn, the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.
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Date: April 25, 2016 |
. If you think about a normal decision process, it usually proceeds in four steps: • You encounter a choice. • You analyze your options. • You make a choice. • Then you live with it. And what we’ve seen is that there is a villain that afflicts each of these stages: • 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 unfold . So, at this point, we know what we’re up against. We know the four top villains of decision making. We also know that the classic pros-and-cons approach is not well suited to fighting these villains; in fact, it doesn’t meaningfully counteract any of them. Now we can turn our attention to a more optimistic question: What’s a process that will help us overcome these villains and make better choices?
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Date: April 25, 2016 |
Widen Your Options
In Sausalito, California, there is a small firm called Lexicon that has coined the names for 15 billion-dollar brands, including BlackBerry, Dasani, Febreze, OnStar, Pentium, Scion, and Swiffer. These names don’t emerge from brainstorming sessions that yield sudden lightning-bolt insights—nobody gets struck by lightning 15 times. Rather, Lexicon’s magic is its creative process, which helps the team avoid getting stuck in a narrow frame
Notes:Whole section on stories or naming two products, including blackberry
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Date: April 26, 2016 |
Multitracking has another advantage too, one that is more unexpected. It feels better. After the banner-ad study concluded, both sets of designers were interviewed. Asked to rate the usefulness of the feedback they received during the design process, over 80% of the simultaneous designers said the feedback was helpful. Only 35% of the one-at-a-time designers agreed, and in fact, over half of them believed the feedback they’d received was critical of them. (None of the simultaneous designers felt criticized.) The simultaneous designers also reported that, as a result of the experience, they felt more confident in their design abilities. The one-at-a-time designers didn’t agree. Why was the experiment so frustrating for the one-at-a-time designers? The study’s authors speculated that people who work on a single track begin to take their work too personally, viewing criticism as a “rebuke of their only option.” Or as one of the authors, Scott Klemmer, said, “If I have only one design, then my ego is perfectly conflated with my design. But if I have multiple designs, I can separate the two.” This is a critical point: Multitracking keeps egos in check
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Date: April 26, 2016 |
So, given the clear benefits of multitracking, what explains the failure of most organizations to embrace it? Many executives are worried that exploring multiple options will take too long. It’s a reasonable fear, but the researcher Kathleen Eisenhardt has found that the opposite is true. In a study of top leadership teams in Silicon Valley, an environment that tends to place a premium on speed, she found that executives who weigh more options actually make faster decisions. It’s a counterintuitive finding, but Eisenhardt offers three explanations. First, comparing alternatives helps executives to understand the “landscape”: what’s possible and what’s not, what variables are involved. That understanding provides the confidence needed to make a quick decision. Second, considering multiple alternatives seems to undercut politics. With more options, people get less invested in any one of them, freeing them up to change positions as they learn. As with the banner-ad study, multitracking seems to help keep egos under control. Third, when leaders weigh multiple options, they’ve given themselves a built-in fallback plan. As an example, one company studied by Eisenhardt was pursuing negotiations with several partners simultaneously. When the negotiations with the first-choice partner failed, the president simply cut a deal with the second-choice partner.
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Date: April 26, 2016 |
CHAPTER THREE IN ONE PAGE
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Date: April 28, 2016 |