How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices Paperback – Illustrated, October 13, 2020

I am a public health official and leader in the coronavirus pandemic response. Decision making in the face of uncertainty, incomplete information, and time constraints is very challenging and stressful. She provides a practical, science-based approach that can be deployed in real-life scenarios, including the current disaster. She integrates concepts from probability theory, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics into a practical approach that promotes learning and continuous decision improvement. I read many books on leadership and decision making. This book is brilliant and nicely complements the more traditional books on decision making. Do not underestimate the importance of this book. Decision making is our most important daily activity. Decisions drive vision, strategy, execution, problem solving, performance, evaluation, and continuous improvement. Decisions determine destiny.

The book is very easy to read. We make decisions every day, whether big or small. Can we make better and more accurate decisions? The author offered many suggestions in her book. First, there is a six-step process for better decision-making.1. Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes.2. Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome - to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values?3. Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding.4. Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the option under consideration.5. Repeat Steps 1-4 for other options under consideration.6. Compare the options with one another.In short, identify our preference using the payoff for each outcome and estimate the probabilities. Just remember the three Ps: Preferences, Payoffs, and Probabilities.There is a lot of discussion in the book on how to avoid some of the pitfalls in decision-making. For instance, bias can influence decision-making, and we don’t see everything. If the result is good, do we call it a good decision? When bad things happen, is it still a good decision?We cannot fully understand what to learn from the outcome until we know what other things could have happened. We need to use counterfactual thinking to figure out all the what-if scenarios. Additionally, a knowledge tracker will assist us in understanding what we already knew and what we learned afterward.Having an outside view independent of our perspective can be very helpful. If you want to know what someone thinks, stop imposing your thoughts on them. Ask ourselves what the upside and downside (risk) are?Increasing accuracy in decision-making costs time. Saving time costs accuracy. The ability to go fast or go slow is a crucial decision skill to develop. To be a better decision-maker, we need to be willing to estimate these probabilities and express probabilities in percentages.This book is for anyone interested in decision-making. The only thing that might be technical is probabilities.

I’ve used Annie Duke's prequel “Thinking in Bets” to describe everything from understanding passive aggressive behavior to prioritizing work decisions. Her follow on book — part practical advice, part roll up your sleeves workbook, part behavioral science treatise - is superb and has become part of my go-to personal and business library (I read a pre-release copy of the manuscript, disclaimer, I have an acknowledgement). The book builds up your decision making acumen by forcing you to think about the frameworks — implicit or explicit — you’ve assembled over time. Some highlights: thinking about pre-mortems as a way to enumerate all possible failure modes and detect them before you end up in post-failure decision states. Differentiating earned or intentional outcomes — results of actions or decisions — from “luck” or outcomes that were not the result of a decision (whether this is losing to a 48-1 draw in poker or a confluence of bad events in the business world, it’s the same thing). Keying on decisions that are repeatable and outputs that create happiness for you; considering the impact of “free rolls” (decisions where there is limited downside for a good upside, like buying a lottery ticket or going on an informational job interview). Finally, I found the dissection of the language of probability quite powerful; it simply helps people to normalize their confidence and risk tolerance ranges using vernacular like “a lot” or “likely” and then translating that into actual, comparable ranges. My electronic copy is a ready reference; have already used the pre-mortem examples several times to play out the “This Is Us” trope of “What’s the worst that could happen?” When you examine your options using rigor, you eliminate some of those worst options.

The process laid out non only leads to better decisions but to an awareness and understanding of our own weaknesses. All of these things together help make us better at all we do.

Plenty of actionable decision frameworks. Talks about the role of cognitive biases in decision making and how to mitigate them. But I think a few long formed blog posts would suffice in explaining the core concepts