Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

But the emphasis on successful prophecies misses the point. Most scenarios end up failing to predict future outcomes, but the very act of trying to imagine alternatives to the conventional view helps you perceive your options more clearly.

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.

where one of the candidates or executives is asked how he or she goes about making a decision, but in the end, there may be no more valuable skill for someone in any kind of leadership position.

When facing a decision that involves multiple, independent variables, people have a tendency to pick one “anchor” variable and make their decision based on that element.

information in common with all or most group members. By contrast, other group members are cognitively peripheral; their own information is uniquely held. What they know is known by no one else, and what they may know might be really important. For that very reason, well-functioning groups need to take advantage of cognitively peripheral people. Th

While the diverse groups were better detectives—they identified the correct subject more frequently than their homogeneous equivalents—they were also far less confident in the decisions they made. They were both more likely to be right and, at the same time, more open to the idea that they might be wrong.

They’d learn the importance of sharing hidden profiles among diverse groups, and the value of measuring uncertainty. They’d learn to seek out undiscovered options and to avoid the tendency to fall back into narrowband assessments. They’d learn the importance of being other-minded, and how reading great literature can help enhance that

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, th

The three-part structure turns out to be a common refrain in scenario planning: you build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.

By defining expertise, the scientists had subtly altered the group dynamics of the decision: instead of looking for the common ground of shared knowledge, the participants were empowered to share their unique perspective on the choice.