The writing was so-so, and their so-called "WRAP" mnemonic seemed both contrived and uninformative:



Widen your options

Reality-test your assumptions

Attain distance before deciding

Prepare to be wrong



AND YET this was a pretty great book when it comes to offering practical advice for all sorts of decisions.



Some concepts/reminders I liked:



- Look at a wider range of possibilities. For instance, ask what you'd do if all the options you're considering disappeared. Or consider multiple options at the sam

The writing was so-so, and their so-called "WRAP" mnemonic seemed both contrived and uninformative:



Widen your options

Reality-test your assumptions

Attain distance before deciding

Prepare to be wrong



AND YET this was a pretty great book when it comes to offering practical advice for all sorts of decisions.



Some concepts/reminders I liked:



- Look at a wider range of possibilities. For instance, ask what you'd do if all the options you're considering disappeared. Or consider multiple options at the same time.



- If you can't decide, ask yourself what advice you'd give to a friend. Usually you'll have a quick answer.



- Avoid bad assumptions and confirmation bias in your analysis by seeking out more information, especially from those who have had that experience and who have an opposing perspective. Ask hard, specific questions to unearth issues. Do a "premortem" -- assume the project ends up failing, and ask yourself what the causes must have been. Then address them in the present.



- Give weight to base rates more than blind optimism about your perspective. If you open a restaurant, for instance, chances are it'll fail. That's more relevant than the fact you're a great chef.



- Run "experiments" before jumping in, like job-shadowing or making a prototype.



- Identify your values and priorities, and let them help guide your decisions.



- Deadlines ("tripwires") drive action -- whether the action is finishing, reevaluating, or quitting.





--

Misc. Kindle quotes:



An American Bar Association survey found that 44% of lawyers would recommend that a young person not pursue a career in law. - location 67





More than half of teachers quit their jobs within four years. - location 69





Samuel Johnson once described a second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience.” - location 87





A British study of more than 3,000 people found that 88% of New Year’s resolutions are broken, including 68% of resolutions merely to “enjoy life more.” - location 90





When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” - location 102





“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?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.” - location 153





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?” - location 164





I looked out the window at the Ferris Wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?” This was the moment of clarity. From the perspective of an outsider, someone not encumbered by the historical legacy and the political infighting, shutting down the memory business was the obvious thing to do. The switch in perspectives—“What would our successors do?”—helped Moore and Grove see the big picture clearly. - location 228





A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves “completely certain” about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time. - location 280





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. - location 294





Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person’s lifetime earnings don’t vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you’re smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn’t really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. - location 629





What would you do in this situation? Please circle one of the options below. (A) Buy this entertaining video. (B) Not buy this entertaining video. Given this choice, 75% bought the video and only 25% passed. Probably you’d have made the same decision—after all, it’s your favorite actor (Leonardo DiCaprio!) in your favorite type of film (sinking-ship movies!) and you’ve been considering it for a while. Later the researchers asked a different group of people the same question, but with a minor modification (printed here in bold): (A) Buy this entertaining video. (B) Not buy this entertaining video. Keep the $14.99 for other purchases. Surely the part in bold should not have to be stated. It’s obvious and even a little insulting. Do we really need to remind people that they can use their money to buy things other than videos? Nonetheless, when shown that simple, stupid reminder, 45% of the people decided not to buy the video. - location 676





Below, we give you a generic form of the Vanishing Options Test, which you can adapt to your situation: You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do? - location 718





All of the designers ultimately created the same number of ads (six) and received the same quantity of feedback (five ad critiques). The only difference was the process: simultaneous versus one at a time. - location 853





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. - location 877





Within a matter of months, under Whippy’s direction, the sepsis protocol was being actively implemented in other hospitals. By summer 2012, Kaiser Permanente Northern California, composed of 21 hospitals serving 3.3 million people, had driven down risk-adjusted mortality from sepsis to 28% below the national average. This solution has astonishing potential. If all hospitals could match Kaiser Permanente’s 28% reduction, it would be the annual equivalent, in lives saved, of saving every single man who dies from prostate cancer and every single woman who dies from breast cancer. - location 1153





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 1390





For centuries, the Catholic Church made use of a “devil’s advocate” in canonization decisions (i.e., in deciding who would be named a saint). The devil’s advocate was known inside the church as the promotor fidei—the “promoter of the faith”—and his role was to build a case against sainthood. John Paul II eliminated the office in 1983, ending 400 years of tradition. Since then, tellingly, saints have been canonized at a rate about 20 times faster than in the early part of the twentieth century. - location 1491





Ask tough questions of the lawyers you meet. When you are at a recruiting dinner with a couple of lawyers from the firm, don’t just ask them, “So, do you folks have any kind of life outside of work?” They will chuckle, say “sure,” and ask if you want more wine. Instead, ask them how many times last week they had dinner with their families. And then ask them what time dinner was served. And then ask them whether they worked after dinner. Ask them what their favorite television show is or what is the last good movie they saw. If they respond, respectively, Welcome Back, Kotter and Saturday Night Fever, you will know something’s wrong.… When a lawyer tells you that he gets a lot of interesting assignments, ask for examples. You may be surprised at what passes for “interesting” at the firm. And when a lawyer tells you that associates are happy at the firm, ask for specifics. How many associates were hired five years ago? How many of those associates remain at the firm? Who were the last three associates to leave the firm? What are they doing now? How can you contact them? Asking tough, disconfirming questions like these can dramatically improve the quality of information we collect, - location 1596





The researchers explain that probing questions signal confidence and experience in the asker. The seller knows she isn’t likely to pull one over on you. There’s a similar signaling effect with Judge Schiltz’s questions. A law student is likely to get straight answers to the questions “How many associates were hired five years ago?” and “How many of those associates remain at the firm?” - location 1615





"assume positive intent” spurs us to interpret someone’s actions/words in a more positive light. - location 1779





Often in life, though, we do the opposite: We trust our impressions over the averages. For example, many people will accept a new job without consulting a sample of people who currently or formerly held the same title. Shouldn’t their “reviews” be as valuable as a stranger’s assessment of a hotel room or restaurant? Strange to think that when we make critical decisions, we do less objective research than when we’re picking a sushi joint. - location 1818





The inside view = our evaluation of our specific situation. The outside view = how things generally unfold in situations like ours. The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate toward the inside view. - location 2098





If you can’t find the “base rates” for your decision, ask an expert. - location 2104





Think about a student, Steve, who has decided to go to pharmacy school. What makes him think that’s a good option? Well, he spent months toying with other possibilities—medical school and even law school—and he eventually decided pharmacy was the best fit. He’s always enjoyed chemistry, after all, and he likes the idea of working in health care. He feels like the lifestyle of a pharmacist, with its semireasonable hours and good pay, would suit him well. But this is pretty thin evidence for such an important decision! Steve is contemplating a minimum time commitment of two years for graduate school, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and forgone income. He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an ooch, and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’d be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job. (Certainly if he can afford several years of school without an income, he can afford to take a monthlong unpaid internship.) Surely this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: - location 2156





Imagine going to school for three or four years so you can start a career that never suited you! This is a truly terrible decision process, in the same league as an impromptu drunken marriage in Vegas. (Though maybe that’s unfair to Vegas, since a hungover annulment might be preferable to a hundred grand in student debt.) To correct this insanity, the leaders of many graduate schools of physical therapy have begun forcing students to ooch. Hunter College at the City University of New York, for instance, does not admit students unless they have spent at least a hundred hours observing physical therapists at work. That way, all incoming students are guaranteed a basic understanding of the profession they’re preparing to enter. - location 2166





Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview. - location 2355





“Often our best interviewees turn out to be our worst performers,” said Steve Cole of HopeLab. In response, HopeLab has begun to give potential employees a three-week consulting contract. - location 2375





in helping us to break a decision logjam, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation? It sounds simple, but next time you’re stuck on a decision, try it out. You’ll be surprised how effectively that question can clarify things. The two of us have talked to many people about thorny personal or professional decisions they were facing, and often they seemed flummoxed about the right thing to do. Then we’d ask them the “best friend” question, and almost always—often within a matter of seconds!— - location 2680





Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?” - location 2972





By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas. - location 2997





The psychologist Gary Klein, inspired by this research, devised a method for testing decisions that he calls the “premortem.” A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?” A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail? - location 3136





You might assume that realistic job previews succeed by scaring away people who couldn’t have handled the job. That’s true to some extent, but it’s a relatively small factor. In fact, in some of the studies Phillips reviewed, people exposed to the job preview were no more likely to drop out of the recruitment process than other recruits who didn’t get the full, unvarnished truth. Instead, the success of realistic job previews seems to be driven by what Phillips calls a “vaccination” effect. By exposing people to a “small dose of organizational reality” before they start work, you vaccinate them against shock and disappointment. So at the call center, when a new customer-service rep finds herself on a call with an angry guy, she isn’t taken aback. She was expecting it. This explains an otherwise puzzling fact: Realistic job previews have been shown to reduce turnover even when they are given after the employee is hired. 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 3294





The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money. The same phenomenon has been noted with substantially higher stakes. In Great Britain, the Economic and Social Research Council, which gives grants to university researchers in areas such as global economics, security, and education, decided to eliminate submission deadlines and accept proposals on a rolling basis. Research professors should have been relieved. Instead of having to submit proposals on a couple of fixed dates, usually smack dab in the midst of teaching commitments, they were now being given the flexibility to submit a proposal whenever they had time to do so. Proposal submissions promptly declined by 15% to 20%. This is not rational behavior: If students like the idea of getting five dollars for a survey, and if researchers need grant money, then they shouldn’t need a deadline to follow through. Yet while irrational, this behavior probably makes sense to all of us. Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you’re gonna do this, you have to do it now. - location 3536





That minor difference had a major effect. The people who got the unwrapped cookies finished them, on average, in 6 days. Meanwhile, those who got the individually wrapped cookies took 24 days! The foil wrapper was acting as a partition, forcing people to contemplate whether they wanted to keep going. (Which suggests that we might be able to help casino-addicted retirees by wrapping slot machines in foil.) - location 3567





Researchers call this sense of fairness “procedural justice”—i.e., the procedures used to make a decision were just—as distinct from “distributive justice,” which is concerned with whether the spoils of a decision were divvied up fairly. An extensive body of research confirms that 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 3787





It works much better if I start out by agreeing: “Yep. Plan Z is a reasonable plan. Not only for the reasons you mentioned, but here are two more advantages. And Plan A—the plan that we chose—not only has the flaws that you mentioned, but here are three more flaws.” The effect of this technique is amazing. It seems completely counterintuitive, but even if you don’t convince people that your plan is better, hearing you explain your plan’s flaws—and their plan’s advantages—makes them much more comfortable. Hitz’s logic defies our natural PR instincts. Aren’t we supposed to vociferously defend our positions? Won’t we spook people if we admit weakness? No. Hitz has it right. A manager’s self-criticism is comforting, rather than anxiety producing, because it signals that she is making a reality-based decision. - location 3815





We should make sure people are able to perceive that the process is just. • High-stakes mediator Mnookin: “I state back the other side’s position better than they could state it.” • Entrepreneur Hitz: “Sometimes the best way to defend a decision is to point out its flaws.” - location 3955

