Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

scenario-based exploration of a potential move to the suburbs would take the elements that are most uncertain, and imagine different outcomes for each of them.

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

confirmation bias and overconfidence just like the rest of us. Our brains naturally project outcomes that conform to the way we think the world works. To avoid those pitfalls, you need to trick your mind into entertaining alternative narratives, plot lines that might undermine your assumptions, not confirm them.

students would learn a series of techniques that they could then apply to their own lives and careers: how to build a full-spectrum map of a complex decision; how to design a scenario plan and a premortem; how to build a values model and Bad Events Table.

resilience and flexibility into their codes and conventions. But mostly those exercises in long-term planning have been all about preserving the current order, not making a preemptive choice to protect us against threats that might erupt three generations later.

be more widely utilized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. You can think of a red team as a kind of hybrid of war games and scenario plans: You sketch out a few decision paths with imagined outcomes and invite some of your colleagues to put themselves in the shoes of your enemies or your competitors in the market and dream up imagined responses.

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.

Scenario planning is a narrative art, first and foremost. It homes in on the uncertainties that inevitably haunt a complex decision and forces the participants to imagine multiple versions of how that uncertain future might actually play out.

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.