How do you know when enough is enough? You balance the cost of putting in the extra effort against the benefit of possibly coming up with a better choice. These questions will help you decide:
•Do you feel you have a reasonable grasp of your decision problem?
•Have you already thoughtfully covered each element in the decision-making process relevant to your decision?
•Would you be satisfied if you chose one of the existing alternatives?
•Could the best alternatives disappear if you wait much longer?
•Is it unlikely that you could devise a new, better alternative with additional time for thought?
•Would a perfect solution be only slightly better than your current best alternative?
•Will taking more time for this decision seriously detract from your other important activities and decisions?
Clearly, if all or almost all your answers to these questions are ‘‘yes,’’ you should quit analyzing and decide.
Sometimes you have to consciously protect yourself against overdoing it. ‘‘Analysis paralysis’’ manifests itself as an insatiable appetite for more and more information in an often-futile attempt to find a consideration that will clinch the decision one way or another or to uncover a perfect alternative. Seldom does a perfect solution exist, yet too may people endlessly (and unrealistically) pursue one. Often, the imagined need for more analysis becomes an excuse for procrastination, for avoiding a decision, because deciding will require accepting some bad along with the good.
Use Your Advisors Wisely
To make a decision beyond your sphere of expertise, you’ll often need to seek advice from others. These advisors, or experts, might include your doctor, lawyer, or accountant, to mention a few. Unfortunately, most people simply ask their advisor, ‘‘What should I do?’’ Then they follow the advice, even if they have a nagging discomfort about doing so.
Why the discomfort? If you ask your experts to decide for you, rather than help you to decide, your choices are unlikely to fully reflect your objectives, tradeoffs, and risk tolerance. If you want advice on what to decide, make sure you communicate your objectives, tradeoffs, and risk tolerance along with your perception of the problem. Better yet, decide for yourself after soliciting and incorporating their input on problem definition, alternatives, consequences, and uncertainties.
Use advisors for what they’re good at—providing information about what is or what might be. Use your own judgment about what you know much better than they can—namely, your values and objectives. Then combine it all yourself and decide. After all, it’s your choice.
Establish Basic Decision-Making Principles
Minor, routine decisions rarely warrant a full-blown analysis. But although they may be relatively inconsequential as individual decisions, the sum of all of them can be very consequential. What you choose to have for dinner tonight is relatively inconsequential, but what you choose to eat over time adds up to determine your overall nutrition.
So, although you don’t want to spend time pondering these decisions individually—whether they be personal or work-related—you will gain by making thoughtful decisions about the principles on which you make everyday choices. That way, when you decide routinely—almost on automatic pilot—your autopilot will have some policies (like eating well-balanced meals) built in that reflect your long-range values. In addition, your routine choices will be easier to make and require less effort if they are guided by these principles.
Tune Up Your Decision-Making Style
Over time, you develop a decision-making style: a set of habits that governs your decision making. Of course, you’d like your style to be as effective and efficient as possible, and you’ll want to keep working to improve it. The best way to do this is to periodically review your performance on several of your recent decisions. To facilitate the review and the resulting learning, write down the basis and logic for each of your important decisions at the time you make them. Use these notes in your evaluation. Look for patterns. What does your behavior tell you about your style? For instance,
•Are your alternatives imaginative enough?
•Do you spend too much time on less important issues?
•Do you tend to gravitate toward choices that, after the fact, seem too conservative?
•Do you feel that you are in control of your decision making, or do decisions just happen to you?
Having done a review, are you happy with your style? Does it help or hinder you in achieving what you want? What, if anything, would you change? What should you work on?
You can do the reviews by yourself, but using a partner can often provide greater insight. Ask a family member, friend, or colleague to help you evaluate some decisions with which they may be familiar. Offer to reciprocate. The benefits to each of you will be manifold: in addition to gaining an outside perspective on your decision-making techniques, you will benefit from seeing another’s approach and from doing some coaching.
But be careful not to judge your or your partner’s decision making solely by the desirability of the consequences. Remember, you must distinguish between smart choices and good consequences. It’s following a sound process that matters; smart choices are more likely to lead to good consequences, but you’ll get some bad ones, too.
It’s fair to ask, however, whether you fully anticipated the possible consequences of your decisions. Did outcomes occur that you never even thought of when you made your decision? You can’t think of everything, but if you find too many situations where you’ve completely missed something important, you aren’t being sufficiently thorough in defining your problem and in anticipating consequences.
How can you improve? Practice. All skills require practice.
Take Charge of Your Decision Making
Who should make your decisions? You should. So who should be choosing the decision problems that you face? Once again, you—whenever possible. We urge you to take the initiative in your decision making rather than wait for decision situations to come to you.
Decision problems are often dropped onto your shoulders by others (competitors, bosses, family) or by circumstances (mother nature, accidents, financial markets). Life would obviously be better if many such problems disappeared. No parent, after all, wants to see a bright child doing poorly in school, no manager wants to see a good product losing market share to an upstart competitor, and no homeowner wants to see a sound house damaged by strong winds. The decision problems arising from these situations are not appealing.
To the extent possible, therefore, it is better to proactively create your own decision problems. Decision problems created by you are decision opportunities, not problems. We all have a fundamental interest in being healthy, for example. This interest suggests numerous decision opportunities: How can one best remain or become fit? How should one learn to eat responsibly? How can one reduce driving risks?
You needn’t address these questions, but you have the opportunity to do so. Take an opportunity and use the ideas in this book to appraise, decide, and act. If you don’t take these opportunities, you lessen your chances of remaining in good health. The decision problems that you subsequently face will be less appealing: Where should one go for triple bypass surgery? How does one get around if one can no longer drive?
The spark for identifying decision opportunities is clarifying something that you want. There is a way to be systematic about this. It’s called value-focused thinking because it begins with your values, what you hold to be of worth, useful, and desirable. Begin by sitting down and defining a high-level set of objectives—your values—specifying what you want from life or from some aspect of it, such as your career, marriage, family, hobbies, or whatever. For at-work decision making, define values for your organization or your part of it.
Then use these values to seek out and create decision opportunities. For the value ‘‘have more leisure time,’’ for example, determine how best to fulfill it. By taking the initiative, you
will increase your control over your future by increasing your options.
One particularly good way to take charge is to view your life as a sequential decision problem—to think ahead. Consider Dianne Morris, a bright college junior who is considering becoming a doctor. ‘‘I’m not sure I want to be a doctor. I just think I want to be a doctor.’’
‘‘How about a biologist or psychologist?’’
‘‘Well, maybe. I know I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, or a musician, or an astronaut.’’
The truth is that Dianne, like many college students, has unclear ambitions that will change with life’s experiences. Still, she knows that she wants to be an independent woman, earning a wage that will enable her to have interesting and rewarding experiences; she knows, or thinks she knows, that she wants to help people. She knows she has taken and likes tough science courses. The fact is that she knows a lot about herself, though there’s still a lot she doesn’t know.
Without any coaching, Dianne is already looking steps ahead. At an early age she knew that if she wanted to be a doctor she’d have to go to college and therefore had to get good grades in high school. She knew that she had better study math because she would need that to take science courses. She read about some famous doctors because she wanted an idea of what their lives were like. She worked in a lab, not only to get experience but to assess whether lab work should be part of her future career. She is already a systematic, qualitative thinker—looking ahead, learning along the way, adapting, testing, making commitments, backing off, exploring new byways, gathering information to learn what new information to gather.
Should Dianne practice more formalized decision making at this point? Would she be helped by assessing probabilities for the uncertainties she faces? Should she be recording her desirability scores for different paths down her decision tree of life? No! A resounding no! We do think, however, that Dianne would profit, as we all might, from being a little more conscious of the process and a little more systematic in thinking through it. Periodically, she may wish to take stock.
•She might reexamine her interests. What does she want, really want, when she grows up?
•She might clarify some of her long-range aspirations: Does she want both a family and a career?
•She should identify and clarify some of the key uncertainties that, once better known, would help her better choose a wise direction to pursue.
•She might want to think about gathering information that could help point her in appropriate directions—information gathered from asking friends, from reading books, from electing courses, from seeking jobs, from participating in extracurricular activities, from joining clubs, from traveling, from volunteering to help others. She should try to seek information efficiently. Some information may be relevant to lots of specific uncertainties. Some types of information may be less costly than others to acquire.
•She should set some intermediate goals. Learning how to write well and enhancing her computer skills are option wideners that would provide flexibility for a wide range of intellectual pursuits. Developing interpersonal skills would stand her in good stead whether she became a doctor, a psychologist, a social worker, or something else entirely.
•She should put herself in a position so that, when surprises come, they will be more likely to enhance the quality of her future choices.
•She should further develop skill at making smart choices.
Living is a balancing act between errors of two kinds: Dianne could be so worried about the future that she doesn’t enjoy the present, or she could be so involved in the present that she doesn’t accumulate skills and intellectual capital for the future. Thinking about this, she should proactively guide herself to her own best balance.
What’s in It for You?
You have a lot to gain by using the ideas in this book to guide your decision making. To get the full benefit, though, you have to work at it. Try the PrOACT approach on several of your decisions. Begin with important decisions, but not your most critical life decisions. It may seem awkward or cumbersome at first, like changing your tennis stroke. But soon you’ll be at ease. You’ll feel as if this is how you wanted to think about decisions all along. The approach offers you a more systematic way to do what you do naturally every day.
As you come to use the method routinely, you will find that the benefits come relatively easily. You will discover that
•Most tough decision problems have one, or maybe two, difficult elements.
•Many of your tough decisions aren’t as hard as they look. By being systematic and focusing on the hard parts, you can resolve them comfortably.
•Describing the problem, clarifying objectives, and coming up with good alternatives form the foundation of good decisions. In well over half of all decisions, a good job on these three elements will lead quickly to a good decision.
•Identifying and eliminating poor alternatives almost always provides a big benefit, especially when they weren’t obviously inferior at the outset. This discipline keeps you from making a foolish choice, ensures a good choice when differences among the remaining alternatives are small, and often greatly simplifies the decision.
•When there is uncertainty, you can’t guarantee that good consequences will result when you’ve made a smart choice. But over time, luck favors people who follow good decision-making procedures.
Most important, always remember: the only way to exert control over your life is through your decision making. The rest just happens to you. Be proactive, take charge of your decision making, strive to make good decisions and to develop good decision-making habits. You’ll be rewarded with a fuller, more satisfying life.
A Roadmap to Smart Choices
1 Making Smart Choices
How to think about your whole decision problem: a proactive approach
Making decisions is a fundamental life skill.
You can learn to make better decisions.
Use the PrOACT approach to make smart choices.
There are eight keys to effective decision making.
Work on the right decision problem.
Specify your objectives.
Create imaginative alternatives.
Understand the consequences.
Grapple with your tradeoffs.
Clarify your uncertainties.
Think hard about your risk tolerance.
Consider linked decisions.
Application: to sell a business or not?
Start making your own smart choices now.
2 Problem
How to define your decision problem to solve the right problem
Be creative about your problem definition.
Turn problems into opportunities.
Define the decision problem.
Ask what triggered this decision. Why am I even considering it?
Question the constraints in your problem statement.
Identify the essential elements of the problem.
Understand what other decisions impinge on or hinge on this decision.
Establish a sufficient but workable scope for your problem definition.
Gain fresh insights by asking others how they see the situation.
Reexamine your problem definition as you go.
Maintain your perspective.
Application: to renovate or move?
3 Objectives
How to clarify what you’re really trying to achieve with your decision
Let your objectives be your guide.
Watch out for these pitfalls.
Master the art of identifying objectives.
Write down all the concerns you hope to address through your decision.
Convert your concerns into succinct objectives.
Separate ends from means to establish your fundamental objectives.
Clarify what you mean by each objective.
Test your objectives to see if they capture your interests.
Practical advice for nailing down your objec
tives.
Application: to renovate or move?
4 Alternatives
How to make smarter choices by creating better alternatives to choose from
Don’t box yourself in with limited alternatives.
The keys to generating better alternatives.
Use your objectives—ask ‘‘How?’’
Challenge constraints.
Set high aspirations.
Do your own thinking first.
Learn from experience.
Ask others for suggestions.
Give your subconscious time to operate.
Create alternatives first, evaluate them later.
Never stop looking for alternatives.
Tailor your alternatives to your problem.
Process alternatives.
Win-win alternatives.
Information-gathering alternatives.
Time-buying alternatives.
Know when to quit looking for alternatives.
Application: to renovate or move?
5 Consequences
How to describe how well each alternative meets your objectives
Describe consequences with appropriate accuracy, completeness, and precision.
Build a consequences table.
Mentally put yourself into the future.
Create a free-form description of the consequences of each alternative.
Eliminate any clearly inferior alternatives.
Organize descriptions of remaining alternatives into a consequences table.
Compare alternatives using a consequences table.
Master the art of describing consequences.
Try before you buy.
Use common scales to describe the consequences.
Don’t rely only on hard data.
Make the most of available information.
Use experts wisely.
Choose scales that reflect an appropriate level of precision.
Address major uncertainty head on.
Application: to renovate or move?
6 Tradeoffs
How to make tough compromises when you can’t achieve all your objectives at once
Smart Choices Page 19
