How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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.

Third book I read by Anna Duke! Enjoyed the book and the strategies she laid out for better decision making. However, she provided too many checklists and exercises, which sometimes seems to interfere with the flow of reading. I still recommend it though.

I dont do a lot of reviews. This book is awesome. Im reading it again as I got it on the weekend and really love it. Will highly recommend and also get her other book.

Our lives are produced by the decisions we make: what we eat, read, watch, our exercising or not, our choosing to move or attend one college over another, one field of study over another, whom to befriend or marry or stay away from; all of this, the fabric of our lives is woven with the thread of our decisions. Whatever you want to do, whoever or however you want to be, you will get there by way of daily decisions. Terrified by the consequences of my decisions, I spent years deciding from-the-hip, regretting decisions which led to bad outcomes, and spending longer and longer trying not make the wrong choices. Under the weight of particularly oppressive analysis paralysis, I decided to pick up this book. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it drastically changed my relationship to decision-making, and made explainable the former mad god of consequences, providing the tools to face uncertainty with confidence. The outcome of your life relies in part on your decisions, and this book, if taken seriously, will improve the quality of your decisions.

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

Annie Duke knows her stuff. She writes clearly, provides important ideas, recommendations, along with the tools to implement all of it. My favorite is the use of a journal. Unless you make a contemporary record of your reasons & thoughts leading up to and at the time of a decision, you cannot (at least I cannot) rely on memory well after the fact. Another useful tool she illustrates is the use of bounding, using the process of getting to a rough estimate of the weight of a bison in a photo. This author is extremely talented - and entertaining. I even enjoyed the acknowledgments - seemed to have more life than most. The footnotes and bibliography are also very useful & informative. So there are 3 things I'd like Ms Duke to consider: 1. Flash Cards for the definitions in the book. 2. A laminated outline similar to BarCharts Quick Study series 3. Finally - I want to know the alternative titles suggested by Prof Kahneman!

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.

This is a great book for someone in a mentorship role or if you’re the go-to person in your friend/family circle when others need advice. It offers an easily understandable framework for making better choices (and, in effect, helping others make better choices). While most of the concepts are approachable, those you share this book with will find many of them novel - and potentially life-altering. You can still get a lot out of How to Decide without doing the exercises. I only did a handful of them (the trivia one was fun!), but got good value from the ones that I did. Forcing oneself to assign probabilities to a list of outcomes in a pro/con scenario is a powerful tool for people of all ages. This book will help you and the people around you become more comfortable with ambiguity, which is an important skill to develop in a time of such great uncertainty. Only time will tell which jobs/industries will be turned upside down by automation or changes in public policy. Sound decision making skills provide shelter from the storm. Thanks for your contribution to the craft of better decision making, Annie. Your work is much appreciated.