The WRAP process described below is from Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, the bestselling book by Chip and Dan Heath.
Make better decisions.
Each step in decision-making has a “villain” from our flawed brains, which we can counteract using specific techniques. The result is a four-step process to better decisions.
Villain: But narrow framing makes you miss options.
Solution: Widen your options.
Adding just a few more options, especially to “whether or not” decisions, vastly improves the result. There are specific tricks you can use to see options you are blind to. No one is immune to this, from teenagers to multi-national corporations.
Villain: But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.
Solution: Reality-test your assumptions.
Confirmation bias is the act of hunting for information that confirms our assumptions. We are very good at making patterns and stories that fit our beliefs. There are techniques you can use to gather more reliable information.
Villain: But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.
Solution: Attain distance before deciding.
Our most important decisions often contain a great deal of emotion. Emotion is important, but short-term emotion can cloud our judgement, hence the expression “sleep on it”. When facing a truly agonizing decision, there are tricks you can use to gain perspective.
Villain: But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.
Solution: Prepare to be wrong.
Despite this process, the future is always uncertain so we need to prepare. This involves imagining a range of outcomes, from terrible to great, and preparing for all of them. Also setting tripwires to prevent autopilot and allow us to reevaluate.
If you are trying to decide “whether or not” to do something, stop.
There are always more options, and adding even a single new option makes a big difference.
When deciding between options, be explicit about what you’re giving up in each choice. If you’re deciding between a $1000 dollar computer and a $700 dollar computer, you’ll sway back and forth.
But simply asking “Would you want a $1000 computer, or a $700 computer and $300 worth of games?” the choice somehow seems different.
Come up with more options by asking:
What would you do if you couldn’t do any of the options you are currently considering?
If you answer honestly, this trick works very well.
When you have a set of options, make sure they are actually options, and not just fillers.
Even presidents have fallen for this. Their advisers present 3 “options”, but two of them are obviously poor choices. That means there’s only one real choice.
A good way to know if you are considering true options, is if there’s at least some part of yourself, or of your team, arguing for each of the options.
Sometimes the best answer to “should I do this OR that” is to say:
“Why not both?”.
Don’t underestimate the power of asking this simple question.
Think “AND” not “OR”.
When you’re stuck for options, look to others who’ve solved the same problem. You can either look outward to find solutions, or you can look at your “bright spots”; the times where you did successfully solve this (or similar) problems.
It’s often the case that when torn in a decision, we forget that it’s very likely this problem (or something similar) has been solved before by someone, somewhere. Talk to those people.
If you expect to make a certain kind of decision more than once, it helps to create a ‘playlist’.
A checklist is made to protect against error, but a playlist is a list of questions and actions that you can ask to expose new options.
You can have checklists for any decision you face more than once:
Once you have options, our tendency is to find confirmation for what we already want to do. It’s critical to use techniques that allow you to really explore these options.
One way is to spark constructive disagreement. Think of each option being on trial. You wouldn’t consider a trial fair unless there was someone arguing for each option, even the ones you consider bad ones.
One way to prevent these disagreements from becoming position-taking, is to ask
“What would have to be true for this option to be correct?”
That way, two sides can decide on the objective truths that would convince them of a given option.
For example, executives of a mining company considered the closure of a struggling mine, and the mine managers did not want it closed. Instead of arguing who is right, they decided to ask:
This technique creates a list of facts that need to be gathered, and how those facts eliminate or select the best options.
To “ooch” is to dip your toe into something, to try it out. The idea is not to move incrementally forward. The idea is to test the waters on a few options.
Once this testing is complete, though, a decision has to be made. The next step after ooching is to leap, not to continue to move forward incrementally.
This works well because we are terrible at predicting the future, so it’s best to try something, even on a small scale and for a short time, than to try to predict.
This does not work well for emotional decisions that require commitments.
We are often too focused on our present emotions with a difficult decision. A simple way to get some perspective is to ask yourself:
“Imagine that right now, you resolve to take this path. How would you feel about your decision 10 minutes from now?”
Repeat this, but for “10 months” and “10 years from now”.
Done right, this trick can give you the feeling of hindsight, without having to wait.
You may discover that you’d feel relieved 10 minutes later, that 10 months later there might be a big upside and no downside, and that 10 years later there is no chance that you’d regret taking this path. But with all the short-term emotions getting in the way, you wouldn’t see this “no-brainer” option.