Decisions and How to Make Them

This intriguing book takes the complex academic analysis of an everyday act -- making a decision -- and offers a variety of models for how that process might work. The clarity of its title, The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking, accurately reflects the straightforward nature of its contents: simple, but not simplistic.

Authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler usefully group the models into categories for which they are considered most appropriate: How to Improve Myself, How to Understand Myself Better, How to Improve Others, and How to Understand Others Better. 

I can see this book being used as a very accessible introduction to a business course or an industrial psychology course, because how decisions are made (and the flaws and limitations inherent in any process) can be tremendously important to an organization.

This book could also be used by anyone to "try on" different methods, perhaps leading to different results and greater insight into the problem at hand. It's a little dry -- this is science, mostly -- but it's so doggone interesting that I really enjoyed it.

A couple of my favorite examples:

The Stop Rule: Sometimes a simple rule works best, because (properly formulated) it eliminates research, processing, agonizing, etc. Formulating the rule may take some time but the decision itself can be made very quickly and easily at the necessary moment. Examples would be rules like "if an investment loses 10 percent of its value, sell it" or "if we don't reach the summit by 2 p.m., we turn around." 

I have actually used this rule because it's so easy. I never launch my kayak when it's already raining. I never drink more than half my water during the first half of the hike. I start looking for a filling station when I have a quarter tank of gas left in my car. You get the idea.

The Project Management Triangle: This triangle expresses innate and contradictory truths: "Good and fast is expensive. Fast and cheap is bad. Good and cheap is slow." So . . . where do you want to go from here? If you need your result quickly, you will need lots of resources. If you don't have any funding, the quality will suffer, and so will the speed . . . unless you have lots of time to go with your lack of money. 

This reminds me of one of my favorite movie lines: "Don't rush me, sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles." (Bonus points if you know this movie!)

I feel compelled to mention that the book, while full of graphs and figures, also includes methods to get you to turn off your thinking and make decisions more intuitively. I really liked that. The authors assert that the unconscious brain excels at synthesizing data, and you should give it a rest and do something else for a while. Then the answer will probably come to you.

The idea of having many tools at my disposal for decision-making is very comforting. I'm glad I gave in to impulse and picked up this little book.

Excerpt:

When we encounter chaos, we seek ways to structure it, to see through it, or at least to gain an overview of it. Models help us to reduce the complexity of a situation by enabling us to dismiss most of it and concentrate on what is important. Critics like to point out that models do not reflect reality. That is true, but it is wrong to claim that they compel us to think in a prescribed way. Models do not define what or how we should think; they are the result of an active thought process.

Note: This book counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.