Challenging assumptions, seeking out contradictory evidence, ranking certainty levels—all these strategies serve the divergent stage of the decision process well, helping to expand the map, propose new explanations, and introduce new variables. The analysts in the intelligence agency had extensively reviewed the obvious variables that the compound mystery presented—the design of the structure, its geographic location, the information (or lack thereof) flowing in and out of the residence—but it took an extra step of probing uncertainty to get them to think about the pets on the property, which turned out to be an important clue. Of course, spending too much time probing uncertainty risks leaving you in a Hamlet-like limbo of indecisiveness. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously adheres to a “70 percent rule” in making decisions that involve uncertainty: instead of waiting for total confidence in a choice—a confidence that may never arrive, given the nature of bounded rationality—Bezos pulls the trigger on decisions once he has reduced his uncertainty level to 30 percent. Instead of adopting the rational choice myth of perfect certainty, the 70 percent rule acknowledges that our vision is inevitably going to be somewhat blurry. By measuring the known unknowns and the blind spots, we avoid the pitfalls of simply trusting our initial instincts. But at the same time, the 70 percent threshold keeps us from the paralysis of requiring perfect clarity.
By the end of 2010, as the investigation into the compound’s occupants continued, a second decision process opened up, this one revolving less around interpretation and more around action. Having decided that there was at least a reasonable likelihood that Osama bin Laden had been located, President Obama and his advisors now had to decide what to do about it. This stage involved many of the elements that were crucial to the first stage: uncertainty levels were probed, diverse perspectives embraced. But the divergent explorations of this stage were searching for something fundamentally different this time around. They weren’t just trying to uncover previously hidden clues that might explain the mystery of the Abbottabad compound. They were also now trying to uncover new options for getting to bin Laden himself. Part of the art of mapping a complex decision is creating a full-spectrum portrait of all the variables that might influence your choice. But part of that mapping process is also coming up with new choices.
THE UNDISCOVERED PATH
In the early 1980s, a business school professor at Ohio State named Paul Nutt set out to catalogue real-world decisions the way a botanist might catalog the various types of vegetation growing in a rain forest. Decision theorists had been talking about the phases of the decision process for years: identifying the choice, evaluating the options on the table, and so on. Nutt wanted to see how these abstract phases played out in the wild. In his initial study, published in 1984, he analyzed seventy-eight different decisions made by senior management at a range of public and private organizations in the United States and Canada: insurance companies, government agencies, hospitals, consulting firms. Nutt conducted extensive interviews with the participants to reconstruct each decision, and then cataloged each one using a preexisting taxonomy of decision phases. Some choices were made almost reflexively by looking to some historical precedent and simply adopting that proven strategy; others sought out active feedback on a proposed path, but never contemplated alternate paths. (Nutt called these “whether or not” decisions.) Some of the more sophisticated teams deliberated multiple choices and made some attempt to weigh their respective pros and cons.
The most striking finding in Nutt’s research was this: Only 15 percent of the case studies involved a stage where the decision-makers actively sought out a new option beyond the initial choices on the table at the outset. In a later study, Nutt found that only 29 percent of organizational decisions contemplated more than one alternative at all. In their book Decisive, Dan and Chip Heath compare Nutt’s study to one that found that teenagers make choices with almost the exact same limitations: only 30 percent of teenagers considered more than one alternative in confronting a personal choice in their lives. (As they put it, “most organizations seem to be using the same decision process as a hormone-crazed teenager.”) Over the years, Nutt and other researchers have convincingly demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that contemplated at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time. If you find yourself mapping a “whether or not” question, you’re almost always better off turning it into a “which one” question that gives you more available paths.
The search for additional options is yet another realm in which diversity proves to be a key asset. Having different perspectives on a problem not only sheds more light on all the factors that shape the decision; it also makes it easier to see previously unimagined alternatives. (This is one space in which the literature on innovation overlaps with the literature on decision-making: in both fields, diversity turns out to be key in widening the possibility space, generating new ideas.) What Nutt’s research made clear was how important it is to deliberately carve out a phase of the decision process within which entirely new alternatives are explored, to resist the easy gravitational pull toward the initial framing of the decision, particularly if it happens to take the form of a “whether or not” single alternative.
If you do find yourself stuck with a single path decision, Chip and Dan Heath suggest an intriguing—and somewhat counterintuitive—thought experiment to get outside that limited perspective: deliberately reduce your options. If your organization seems to have settled into the comfortable assumption that Path A is the only route available to them, then imagine a world where Path A is roadblocked. What would you do then? “Removing options can in fact do people a favor,” the Heath brothers write, “because it makes them notice that they’re stuck on one small patch of a wide landscape.” Think of the map of Brooklyn in 1775: Washington had mapped out two primary paths that the British might take in their assault on New York: a direct naval attack on lower Manhattan, and a land-based attack through the Heights of Gowan. But if he had gone through the mental exercise of taking those two options off the table, he might have been able to anticipate the flanking move through Jamaica Pass, even without the aid of Nathanael Greene.
OPTIMAL EXTREMISM
The stretch of Tenth Avenue running along Manhattan’s West Side south of Thirty-Third Street used to be known as “Death Avenue,” a tribute to the many pedestrians and vehicles that met their demise colliding with the New York Central freight trains that ran parallel to the street. In 1934, the railway moved to an elevated viaduct that carried goods from the manufacturing and meatpacking centers above Houston Street up to Midtown, carving its way through several buildings along the route. As Lower Manhattan lost its manufacturing base, the railway grew increasingly irrelevant. In 1980, a train with three boxcars porting frozen turkeys made the final run on the tracks.
In the two decades that followed, the viaduct was officially closed to public use, and in those vacant years, the rail lines were slowly reclaimed by nature: waist-high grasses and weeds rose between the ties. Graffiti artists covered the iron and concrete with spray-paint tags; at night, kids would sneak up onto the tracks to drink beer or smoke pot, and enjoy this strange parallel universe thirty feet above the bustling streets of Chelsea. But for most of the “official community” that surrounded the train line, the viaduct was an eyesore and, worse, a threat to public safety. A group of local business owners sued the line’s owner, Conrail, to have the viaduct removed. In 1992, the Interstate Commerce Commission sided with the business group and decreed that the tracks had to be demolished. For ten years a debate raged over who would pay for the demolition.
And then something surprising happened. At a community meeting, a painter named Robert Hammond and a writer named Joshua David happene
d to strike up a conversation and began tossing around ideas for revitalizing the elevated tracks—not as a transportation platform but as a park. The idea was dismissed as fanciful by the Giuliani administration when it was first proposed, but rapidly gathered momentum. A photographer named Joel Sternfeld took a series of haunting photographs of the abandoned tracks, the rogue grasses shimmering between them like some kind of wheat field transported from the Great Plains into postindustrial Manhattan. Within a few years the plan had the blessing of the visionary commissioner of planning under Mayor Bloomberg, Amanda Burden, and a public-private partnership raised millions to support the transformation. By the end of the decade, the first stretch of the High Line Park was open to the public: one of the most inventive and widely admired twenty-first-century urban parks built anywhere in the world, and a major new tourist attraction for New York City.
The High Line was not a natural resource like Collect Pond, but the basic outline of its history is not dissimilar: an urban resource that once served a vital function for the city’s population, now rendered impractical and even dangerous thanks to neglect and the shifting industrial activities of a growing city. But the way the city ultimately wrestled with the decision of what to do with this derelict structure turned out to be much more creative than the choice to fill Collect Pond. For a decade, the decision was framed entirely in terms of an inevitable demolition. It was a classic “whether or not” decision. The structure was obviously useless—freight trains were not returning to Lower Manhattan—and so the only real question was how to get rid of it. Was it the city’s responsibility or was it Conrail’s? But lurking in that binary choice was a hidden third option, one that forced the participants to think about the viaduct in an entirely new way. Seen from street level, the High Line was an obvious eyesore. But seen from the tracks itself, it offered a captivating new perspective on the city around it.
We have already seen how doubt and uncertainty need to be actively confronted in making a hard choice. But often the most essential form of doubt involves questioning the options that appear to be on the table. Making complex decisions is not just about mapping the terrain that will influence each choice. It’s also, as Paul Nutt’s research made clear, a matter of discovering new choices. This is the definitional myopia of pros-vs.-cons lists like the one Darwin sketched out in his journal before getting married. When you sit down to tabulate the arguments for and against a particular decision, you have already limited the potential range of options to two paths: get married, or don’t get married. But what if there are other, more inventive ways of reaching our objectives or satisfying the conflicting needs of the stakeholders? Maybe it’s not a choice between tearing the viaduct down or letting it continue as a dangerous ruin. Maybe it could be reinvented?
The challenge, of course, is how you trick your mind into perceiving that third option, or the fourth and fifth options lurking somewhere behind it. The multidisciplinary structure of the charrette can certainly help with this. Other stakeholders in the situation are likely to perceive options that you might not naturally hit upon, given the narrow bands of your own individual perspective. Reducing your options as a thought experiment, as Chip and Dan Heath suggest, can also be a useful strategy. But there’s another way of thinking about this problem, one that connects directly to the kinds of decisions we wrestle with collectively in democratic societies. The first people to realize that the High Line might have a second act as a recreational space were not the establishment decision-makers of urban planning and local business groups. They were people living—and playing—at the margins of society: graffiti artists, trespassers looking for the thrill of partying in a forbidden space, urban adventurers seeking a different view of the city. In a very literal sense, those first High Line explorers occupied an extreme position in the debate over the High Line’s future, in that they were occupying a space above the streets that almost no one else had bothered to experience. They were extreme and marginal both in the sense of their social identities and lifestyle choices, and in the sense of where they were standing. And even when the idea for a park emerged among more traditional sources, it was not a city planner or business leader who first proposed it—it was instead a writer, a painter, and a photographer.
Extremism is not only a potential defense of liberty; it’s also often the source of new ideas and decision paths that aren’t visible to the mainstream. Most significant social change first takes the form of an “extreme” position, far from the centrist fifty-yard-line of conventional wisdom. A society where extreme positions are not granted a meaningful voice is a society incapable of fundamental change. Universal suffrage, climate change, gay marriage, marijuana legalization—these are all ideas that came into the world as “extremist” positions, far from the mainstream. But over time they found their way into supra-majority-level consensus. It was an extreme position in 1880 to suggest that women should vote, but now the idea of a male-only electorate seems absurd to all but the most unrepentant sexist. Of course, there are many extreme positions that turn out to be dead-ends, or worse: 9/11 deniers and white supremacists are also extremists in the current political spectrum. But we are far less likely to stumble across truly inventive new paths—in civic life as in urban parks—if we mute all the extreme voices in the mix.
DOWNSTREAM
Outsiders are not the only ones who can reveal previously unimagined options. Sometimes the new pathways get discovered by those at the top of the chain. As president, Barack Obama apparently had a gift for discerning alternate choices. “Advisers had a way of narrowing the choice to option A or option B, and then steering the president to the one they preferred,” Mark Bowden writes in his account of the bin Laden raid. “It was all in how the issue was framed. This method didn’t have a chance with Obama. He would listen to A and B, ask a lot of good questions, and more often than not propose an entirely different course, option C, which seemed to emerge wholly formed from his head.”
In the late winter of 2011, the bin Laden investigation switched from a decision about the identity of the compound’s occupants to a decision about how best to attack the compound. No one knew for certain if the mysterious figure that had been observed pacing on the compound grounds—though always partially concealed from satellite view—was in fact the al-Qaeda mastermind, but the odds were good enough to justify some kind of military assault. The question was, what kind of assault? Initially, Obama had been presented with two options: a helicopter raid, where Special Ops forces might be able to kill or capture bin Laden without destroying the compound, or a B-2 bombing run, where thirty precision bombs would be dropped on the compound, destroying the structure and any underground tunnels beneath it. Neither option was ideal: the helicopter raid involved flying into Pakistani airspace without notifying the Pakistanis themselves, and had an unmistakable echo of Jimmy Carter’s disastrous 1980 helicopter raid to rescue the Iranian hostages. The bombing run was far easier to execute, but would likely destroy many nearby homes with dozens of civilian casualties, and would immolate all of the potential evidence on the compound site—most important, the evidence that bin Laden himself had been killed.
Faced with those two options, each with its own distinct drawbacks, Obama pushed the team to look for other possibilities, just as they had been pushed to look for contradictory evidence in identifying the compound’s residents. In the end, the team settled on four options: the B-2 bombing; the Special Ops raid; a drone strike that would use an experimental highly accurate guided missile to take out “the pacer” directly but do little collateral damage to the compound or the surrounding neighborhood; and a coordinated attack with the Pakistanis, which would eliminate the risk of flying through their airspace without their consent.
Having conducted a full-spectrum analysis of the compound itself and mapped the potential options that would allow them to attack the compound, Obama and his team then shifted gears. They were no longer collecting evidence about the situation on th
e ground in Abbottabad, exposing hidden profiles, charting potential paths. Their minds had turned to the consequences of the choices they faced. Each path suggested a series of possible futures, with downstream effects that could reverberate for years. As in all farsighted decisions, the choice Obama and team confronted in the decision to go after bin Laden forced them to think rigorously about what would come next.
The metaphor of a decision map is a powerful one. In confronting a hard choice, you are trying to describe the literal and figurative terrain around you: taking inventory of all the forces at play; sketching out all the regions that are visible, and at least acknowledging the blind spots; charting the potential paths you can take in navigating the space. But, of course, in one respect, the concept of a decision map is misleading. Maps define the current lay of the land. They are, in a sense, frozen in time. Decisions, on the contrary, unfold over days, weeks, or years. Choosing the right path depends not just on our ability to understand the current state of the system but also our ability to predict what comes next. To make complex choices, you need a full-spectrum appraisal of the state of things and a comprehensive list of potential choices available to you. But you also need an informed model of how that state is likely to change based on the choice you eventually make. It may seem challenging to build a mental map of a complicated, multivariable system. But it’s even harder to predict the future.
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PREDICTING
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