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[Page 2] ALSO BY CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH Switch Made to Stick [Page 4] Copyright © 2013 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heath, Chip. Decisive / Chip Heath and Dan Heath. — 1st ed. p. cm. 1. Decision making. I. Heath, Dan, 1973– II. Title. HD30.23.H395 2013 153.8′3—dc23 2012038225 eISBN: 978-0-30795641-5 Jacket design by Justin Gammon v3.1 [Page 5] To our wives, Susan and Amanda, the best decisions we ever made [Page 6] CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction 1. The Four Villains of Decision Making WIDEN YOUR OPTIONS 2. Avoid a Narrow Frame 3. Multitrack 4. Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem REALITY-TEST YOUR ASSUMPTIONS 5. Consider the Opposite 6. Zoom Out, Zoom In 7. Ooch ATTAIN DISTANCE BEFORE DECIDING 8. Overcome Short-Term Emotion 9. Honor Your Core Priorities PREPARE TO BE WRONG 10. Bookend the Future 11. Set a Tripwire 12. Trusting the Process Next Steps Recommendations for Further Reading Clinics Overcoming Obstacles Endnotes Acknowledgments [Page 7] Introduction Shannon, the head of a small consulting firm, is agonizing about whether to fire Clive, her IT director. Over the past year, Clive has consistently failed to do more than the minimum required of him. He’s not without his talents—he’s intelligent and has a knack for improvising cheap solutions to technical problems—but he rarely takes any initiative. Worse, his attitude is poor. In meetings, he is often critical of other people’s ideas, sometimes caustically so. Unfortunately, losing Clive would cause problems in the short-term. He understands how to maintain the company’s database of clients better than anyone else. What would you advise her to do? Should she fire him or not? IF YOU REFLECT ON the past few seconds of your mental activity, what’s astonishing is how quickly your opinions started to form. Most of us, reflecting on the Clive situation, feel like we already know enough to start offering advice. Maybe you’d advise Shannon to fire Clive, or maybe you’d encourage her to give him another chance. But chances are you didn’t feel flummoxed. “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped,” said Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research on the way that people’s decisions depart from the strict rationality assumed by economists. In his fascinating book, Thinking, Fast and Slow , he describes the ease with which we draw conclusions: “The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise