Book Review: “Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions” 4/5
“What do you really want? What do you really need? What are your hopes? Your goals? Answering these questions honestly, clearly, and fully puts you on track to making the smart choice.”
Decision making is a skill. We are not born as great decision makers, we learn through our experiences. It’s hard to believe that such an essential skill that creates our lives is not taught as a separate subject at school. Decisions shape everything we do, from trivial ones like where we shop for groceries to buying a house or deciding on a job.
The book has three authors: John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. They based it on 50 years of research, combined with their experiences and common sense. Through this book they want to help us make important decisions. The ones that shape our lives the most are the ones that require more deliberate consideration.
It is a comprehensive guide on the process of making decisions, with use of a framework called ‘PrOACT’ - which stands for Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences and Tradeoffs. Each step is described by a separate chapter and we have to go through all the steps to make sure that we are not missing anything important. In addition to the PrOACT approach with the framework we explore topics of uncertainty, risk tolerance, how to deal with more complicated decisions, and our biases and psychological traps.
The framework was not just theoretical as throughout the book we explore real world applications of it. Among others we go through examples of buying a house, selling a company, or changing a job. What stayed with me as well as the PrOACT approach was the strong distinction between decisions and their outcomes - a bad outcome does not necessarily mean that the initial decision was bad. However, we tend to assume that bad outcomes result from bad decisions which is not always the case.
What I did not particularly like was its tendency to repeat itself. It could have been distilled to a shorter version. Thanks to its structure where each chapter is a step from the framework, looking at just the table of contents serves as a valuable reminder of how to approach decision making. Due to the fact that three different authors wrote it together, its style is an average of three voices, which makes it quite dry and lacking a personal touch.
I read this book thanks to a recommendation from The Rational Reminder Podcast, where Ralph Keeney was the guest in one of their episodes.