Framing decisions as a yes or no question - should I fire this person yes or no, should I buy a car yes or no - instead of looking at other options like what is the best way I could spend some money to make my family better off? example instead of hiring 1 firm, shrunk project down to first step and hired 5 firms to design - he would have the best options and could combine, and would be able to weed out vendors who were unresponsive or ineffecctive

Researchers have found this result again and again. When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.
Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong.

we've got a difficult decision our feelings churn, we replay the same arguments in our head, we agonize about our circumstances

people think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold -
a study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves "completely certain" about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time.
When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

teenagers frame the majority of their decisions - whether or not to do something i.e. should I go to the party or not - rather than - should I go to the party all night or go to the movies with a few friends or attend the basketball game and then drop by the party -

organizations are a lot like teengagers

A 1993 study which analyzed 168 decisions by businesses and non profits -- of the teams he studied only 29% of the businesses considered more than one alternative -- McDonalds considered a new design for its stores, a 250-bed rural hospital decided whether to add a detox unit -

30% of the teens considered more than one alternative

organizations like teenagers are blind to their choices -

whether or not decisions fialed 52% of the time over the long term, versus only 32% of the decisions with two or more altneratives - when a manager pursues a single option, 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?

consider the opposite, zoom out, zoom in, ooch, running small experiments to test our theories,

overcome short-term emotions, honor your core priorities, magic question - what would you tell your best friend? what would you tell your successor?

bookend the future
set a tripwire
brown m and ms
cap risks and quiet your mind until the trigger is hit

kind environments versus wicked --page 277