Many people ask me for professional advice on making a decision, to which question there is seldom a short answer. To prepare for such questions, I recommend reading widely about the science behind our decision-making processes. Some books I’ve found useful include:

“Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahnemann – Kahnemann won a Nobel prize for his work with Amos Tversky on the psychology of human decisions. This book is a highly readable and lively overview with some very revealing examples, a few of which you may find are close to home.

“The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver – Bayesian reasoning is Silver’s topic, and he discusses the art and science of making predictions from available data in a variety of relevant fields. His suggested thought process to use available data to estimate the probabilities of various outcomes is a good start to incorporating uncertainty into our decision processes.

“The Science of Successful Organizational Change” by Paul Gibbons – Gibbons can be a bit controversial, but his rules of thumb for evaluating the quality of our decisions have been very productive for me.

Contact me if you would like to discuss your particular decision-making problem in detail.

Text Copyright © 2018 Katrina Rogers