How to Decide

Looking back from an imagined future at the route that got you there is called prospective hindsight.

A premortem combines prospective hindsight with mental contrasting.

Decision Exploration Table, the first thing to ask is whether you should modify your goal or change your decision.

This desire for people to agree with what other people are saying is so strong that you can even get people to express agreement with a belief that’s objectively, clearly incorrect.

You’ve probably also figured out that the exciting stuff happens where those maps diverge. That’s where you find corrective information and the stuff you don’t know. Exploring that divergence allows you to get closer to what’s objectively true.

The objective truth lies somewhere between the two beliefs.

a little bit of pain in exchange for higher-quality decisions for the rest of your life.

you benefit from the exchange as well because the act of explaining your belief and conveying it to someone else will improve how well you understand it.

even if their belief doesn’t change at all upon hearing yours, they still may not tell you their true opinion.

when you tell someone what you think before hearing what they think, you can cause their opinion to bend toward yours,

Don’t let them know what you think before you find out what they think.

keeping the outcome of a decision to yourself is harder to execute than you might think because, intuitively, we all feel that how the decision turned out is relevant information for the other person to know.

Get their opinion prior to telling them the method you chose. After that, you can give them the information

To get high-quality feedback, it’s important to put the other person as closely as possible into the same state of knowledge that you were in at the time that you made your decision.

that the way you’re asking the question signals your belief.

Try to stay in a neutral frame as much as possible.

FRAMING EFFECT A cognitive bias in which the way that information is presented influences the way that the listener makes decisions about the information.

when people are in group settings, the decision quality often isn’t better,

That’s a bad combination: having a lot more confidence in the quality of a decision that isn’t necessarily any better.

the information that lives in people’s heads doesn’t necessarily get shared with the group, particularly as a consensus starts to form.