Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

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.

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.

To me, the parable of the basement fire teaches us how important it is to be aware of our blind spots, to recognize the elements of a situation that we don’t understand.

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

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.

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.

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.

What began as an explicit search for contradictory evidence—evidence that might undermine the interpretation around which the group was slowly coalescing—turned out, in the end, to generate evidence that made that interpretation even stronger.

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.