“[T]hat, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape behind it.”

The shoe company Zaapos offers all trainees $1000 to leave immediately and not work for them. Why? Consider the following decision-making process.

You’re faced with an important decision. You first look for your options, but narrow framing means you ignore several critical ones. What options you’ve found, you analyze, but confirmation bias means you fail to adequately look for information that disproves your thesis. Then, you make a choice, but fall victim to short term emotion and temptations. Finally, you live with your choice, but overconfidence means you’ve failed to prepare for error.

That, essentially, is the process Chip and Dan Heath describe in Decisive. Our brains are wired to act foolishly in some situations; how, they ask, can we do better? To help, they outline a series of mental tricks and approaches that allow us to better analyze, understand, and most of all improve our decisions.

What really comes through, however, is how often we don’t do what we obviously should to make a good decision. In a study of businesses, only 29% of teams considered more than one alternative option, while experts forecasting the future do less well than a simple extrapolation of base rates (though better than novices). Simple techniques can therefore be powerful; searching for options until you fall in love at least twice (better for houses than for marriages, perhaps), testing the future instead of predicting it, focusing on process, and asking yourself what you would do if none of your current options were available, can all have large payoffs.

All of which brings us back to Zappos and their $1000 offer. People who accept it, Zappos argues, are people they didn’t want anyway. It forces employees to stop, think, and decide, not just accidentally drift into a job they didn’t want. Those who remain know that they valued this opportunity so much they turned the offer down.

I’m not sure I learnt very much reading Decisive, but it was a quick and easy read, and some of the tricks for improving decision-making will certainly be useful. If you’re looking for a substantive addition to the literature, I can’t recommend it, but if you’re looking for a fun summer read it’s worth picking up.

If you do decide to pick it up, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right instead! (Doing both also permitted…)