Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. When we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision.Multitracking involves considering several options simultaneously. Multitracking has another advantage too, one that is more unexpected. It feels better.When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the shape of the problem. To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct.

Wide your Options withe Multitracking

It describes the process that “wraps” around your usual way of making decisions, helping to protect you from some of the villains and biases related to decision making:<ul><li>Widen your options.</li><li>Reality-test your assumptions.</li><li>Attain distance before deciding.</li><li>Prepare to be wrong.</li></ul>

The WRAP Model for Better Decision Making

To use 10/10/10, think about your decisions on three different time frames: How will I feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?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.

The 10/10/10 Technique

<ul><li>Studies found that the confirmation bias was stronger in emotion-laden domains such as religion or politics and also when people had a strong underlying motive to believe one way or the other.</li><li>Confirmation bias increases when people have previously invested a lot of time or effort in a given issue.</li><li>Confirmation bias doesn’t just affect what information we seek, but also what we notice in the first place.</li></ul>Reality-test the assumptions you’re making by developing the discipline to consider the opposite of our initial instincts. It begins with a willingness to spark constructive disagreement.

Consider the Opposite

When we make bad decisions is usually because of these 4:<ul><li>Narrow framing: the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.</li><li>Confirmation bias: we are more likely to select the information that supports our preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.</li><li>Short-term emotion: when we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn.</li><li>Over-confidence: we think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.</li></ul>

The Four Villains Of Decision Making

We sometimes make bad decisions because we are too much into the weeds in our head. There are 2 main views we hold:<ul><li>The inside view - our evaluation of our specific situation.</li><li>The outside view - how things generally unfold in situations like ours.</li></ul>The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate toward the inside view.

The Inside and Outside View

Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions:<ol><li>mere exposure to things we are used to: we like what’s familiar to us</li><li>loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.</li></ol>Loosing sucks and we subconsciously make decisions to avoid losses on the short term, even when we amplify losses on the long term.

Emotional decision failure

The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.

A good decision-maker chooses actions that give the best outcome for themselves and others. Here's how to become one.

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Leadership & Management

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Understand yourself and those around you.

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How To Become a Better Decision-Maker

Explains how to overcome natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions in work and life, drawing on extensive studies and research to outline specific strategies for enabling clear-headed thinking.

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Books

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions. 　    Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?    In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.    Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?　    Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

Chip Heath is the professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.He received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.He co-wrote a book titled Switch How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Dan Heath.

Chip Heath

Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center. Dan has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. from the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.He co-wrote a book titled Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Chip Heath.

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