When we make poor decisions, it’s rarely because we’re irrational. More often, we’re human: we narrow our focus. We fall in love with our own ideas. We let short-term emotions hijack our thinking. Or, we’re overconfident in predictions we shouldn’t trust.
In the book, Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath offer a mental method designed to defeat those biases. It’s a process called WRAP – a four-part framework to improve the way we make decisions at work, in life, and under pressure. The WRAP process breaks down into the following:
- Widen your options
- Reality-test your assumptions
- Attain distance before deciding
- Prepare to be wrong
Widen Your Options
(Overcome the villain: Narrow Framing)
Most people frame decisions as “this or 
that.” But better decisions come from “and” thinking, not “or.” The Heath brothers call this narrow framing – our tendency to overlook all available options. Their research shows that binary choices, or “whether-or-not” decisions, fail nearly twice as often as those with two or more alternatives. As they write, “why do “whether or not” decisions fail more often? When a manager pursues a single options, she spends most of her time asking: “How can I make this work? How can I get my colleagues behind me?” Meanwhile, other vital questions get neglected: “Is there a better way? What else could we do?”
Key Techniques:
- Opportunity Costs: Ask, “What am I giving up by choosing this?” Every decision forfeits something else – make that tradeoff visible. They write:
“Opportunity cost” is a term from economics that refers to what we have to give up when we make a decision. For instance, if you and your spouse spend $40 on dinner one Friday night and then go to the movies ($20), your cost might be a $60 sushi dinner… What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?“
- Vanishing Options Test: Pretend your current choices will soon disappear. What else could you do? This widens your mental spotlight. Heaths:
“You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do?.. When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere – really move it – often for the first time in a long while. Ask them: What would you do if you’re current alternatives disappeared?”
- Multi-track: Develop multiple options at once. This allows comparison and enables smarter combinations from different perspectives. The Heath’s highlight the following:
“[Ad agency example]: “All of the designers ultimately created the same number of ads (six) and received the same quantity of feedback (five ad critiques). The only difference was the process: Simultaneous versus one at a time. As it turns out, process mattered a great deal: the simultaneous designers’ ads were judged superior by the magazine’s editors and by independent ad execs, and they earned higher click-through rates on a real-world test of the banners on the Website. Why? The simultaneous designers, by multitracking, were learning something useful about the shape of the problem. They were able to triangulate among the features – combining the good elements and omitting the bad.”
- Find Someone Who’s Solved It:Don’t just brainstorm – Borrow! Ask: Who else has solved this problem? What can I learn from them? Look outside your company. Study best practices. Sam Walton improved Walmart’s checkout by observing competitors. Kaiser Permanente scaled a breakthrough sepsis protocol from a procedure utilized at one hospital. Ad agencies use decision playlists to spark fresh thinking.
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
(Overcome the villain: Confirmation Bias)
Once we like an idea, we unconsciously seek evidence to support it. We ask biased questions, listen selectively, and avoid contrary facts. The Heaths call this “confirmation bias,” and defeating it requires deliberate methods:
- Consider the Opposite: Ask, “What would have to be true for this to be a bad idea?” Invite disagreement early. In fact, this concept has been utilized by the Catholic Church for over 400 years. Known as promotor fidei, or “devil’s advocate,” this method was utilized when making canonization decisions. The church specifically used promotor fidei to stir contrary arguments against canonization, specifically where skepticism wouldn’t naturally surface. Reviewing both sides of an argument allowed the Vatican to make the wisest of decisions. Like the devil’s advocate, the Heath Bros also point out the importance of asking disconfirming questions:
“Asking tough, disconfirming questions [c]an dramatically improve the quality of information collected. In [one] study, participants acted as the seller in a role-played negotiation over an iPod. As sellers, they knew everything about the iPod: it was relatively new, had a spiffy cover, and was filled with [songs]. On the other hand, it had frozen up twice in the past. The researchers wondered what it would take for the sellers to disclose the freezing problem. The buyers in the negotiation, who were cronies of the researchers, tried three different strategies. When the buyers asked about the iPod, “What can you tell me about it?,” only 8% of the sellers disclosed the problem. The question, “It doesn’t have any problems, does it?” boosted the disclosure to 61%. The best question to ask, in hopes of discovering the truth, was this one: “What problems does it have?” That prompted 89% of sellers to come clean.”
- Zoom Out, Zoom In: Start with base rates (what usually happens), then look at specifics. As the Heath’s write, “What we’ve seen so far is a very simple rule for analyzing your options: take the outside view. You should distrust the inside (your) view – those glossy pictures in your head – and instead get out of your head and consult the base rates (base rate ex: what percentage of IP cases get settled before trial)”.
- OOCH (Small Experiments): Don’t predict – test. Run small experiments. Try a little before going all in; letting the market give you feedback. As the book demonstrates, rather than choose “all” or “nothing,” consider choosing a “little something.” This is another way for us to reality-test our assumptions in our decision making. The Heath’s write:
“To OOCH is to ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know? Those questions bring us to the end of this section, in which we’ve been studying strategies for fighting the confirmation bias. The basic problem we face, in analyzing our options, is this: We will usually have an inkling of the one that we want to be the winner, and even the faintest inkling will propel us to gather supportive information – and sometimes nothing but supportive information. We cook the books to support our gut instinct.
To avoid that trap, we’ve got to Reality-Test Our Assumptions. First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. Finally, reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit.”
Attain Distance Before Deciding
(Overcome the villain: Short-Term Emotion)
Emotions distort our judgment – especially in the moment. What feels urgent now may look trivial later. Step back. Regain clarity. The Heaths suggest stepping back to gain clarity. The following are the key techniques necessary to attain distance prior to making a decision:
- 10/10/10 Test: Ask yourself prior to any decision: How will I feel about this choice in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years? As the Heath Bros write:
“Our worst enemy [is] short-term emotion. When people share the worst decisions they’ve made in life, they are often recalling choices made in the grip of visceral emotion: anger, lust, anxiety, greed… Visceral emotion fades. That’s why the folk wisdom advises that when we’ve got an important decision to make, we should sleep on it… For many decisions, though, sleep isn’t enough. We need a strategy.
[The strategy] It’s called 10/10/10… To use 10/10/10, we think about our decisions on three different time frames: How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? how about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now? The three frames provide an elegant way of forcing us to get some distance on our decisions.”
- Advise a Friend Test: What would I tell my best friend to do? We often give better advice to others than we do ourselves. When helping a friend, we focus on what truly matters – like long-term happiness. But for our own decisions, complexity creeps in. We think about approval, image, or who we might disappoint. We simplify for others but overthink for ourselves. With friends, we see the forest. For ourselves, we get stuck in the trees. The Heath’s highlight the following:
The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions. That’s why, in helping us to break a decision log-jam, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?
- Clarify Core Priorities: Draft a “stop doing” list. Set boundaries. Establish strict priorities. Anchor decisions in long-term values. As the Heaths point out, it’s critical to define your core priorities. This exercise, although intuitive, is actually quite rare. First, people seldom define their priorities until it’s necessary; and second, establishing priorities often doesn’t result in binding yourself to those priorities.
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, recommends the stop-doing list – not just a to-do list. Each year, he uses the list to review what needs eliminating. The idea is simple: time is finite. You can’t make space for new priorities without letting something go. One hour spent on one task is an hour not spent on something else. Look at last week’s calendar. Ask yourself, “What, exactly, would I give up to free five more hours this week?”
Prepare to Be Wrong
(Overcome the villain: Overconfidence)
We’re notoriously bad at predicting the future. We overestimate success, underestimate risk, and rarely plan for failure. The final step in W.R.A.P. helps reduce that fragility. The key techniques include:
- Bookend the Future: Estimate the best-and-worst case outcomes. Then plan for both. [worst end | <- – – middle – – ->| best end). Book-ending involves estimating the outcome of the range of each scenario. The first is the bad scenario where things turn out badly and the other is a positive scenario, where the outcomes are generally good. As the Heaths write:
“Researchers found that when people did not consider the bookends, they produced ranges that were only 45% as wide as they should have been. When they were asked to consider the bookends, their guesses improved to 70% of optimal, and when they also added their best guess in the middle, their ranges improved to 96% of the optimal size, only 4% away from perfection… When we bookend the future, we anticipate and plan fo rthe best outcomes as well as the worst.”
- Prospective Hindsight: Picture yourself in the future, looking back. The concept of working backwards from a certain future allows you to establish protocols for certain outcomes. One example the Heath’s use is: “Imagine that it’s six months from now and the employee has just quit. Why did he quit?”
- Premortem: Imagine your decision has failed. Why? What went wrong? Reverse-engineer your failure so that you can prevent it. The Heath’s ask: “Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail?”
- Preparade: Imagine overwhelming success. Could your systems handle it? Plan to scale. Again, the Heath brothers: “Let’s say it’s a year from now and our decision has been a wild success. It’s so great that there’s going to be a parade in your honor. Given that future, how do we ensure that we’re ready for it?”
- Set Tripwires: Define early warning signs. When they trigger, pause or pivot. For example:
- A manager sets a revenue target: If sales drop below $X for three weeks, we need to revisit the strategy.
- A product team sets a launch target: If adoption doesn’t hit 1,000 users in 60 days, we pivot.
- An investor defines a rule: If a stock dips 10% more than twice, we’ll sell.