Decision Traps: The Ten Barriers to Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them [Paperback]

Edward Russo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1990

Two experts in business management show how to avoid the ten common pitfalls that ensanre decision makers. The very latest research in the fields of business and psychology has been distilled into practical training methods that will save readers from ever making a bad decision again.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Fireside; First Fireside Edition edition (October 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671726099
• ISBN-13: 978-0671726096
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life > Health & Stress

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical and Insightful, In a newer version December 27, 2004

By dgray

Format:Paperback

I read this book as part of a class in graduate school, and I found it to be quite practical, not only providing insights into ways that decisions can go wrong, but also steps that can be taken to reduce biases in your decisions due to errors in the process, although some of the strategies can only be effectively implemented at the organizational level.

I consulted this book because it was in two different bibliographies, one from my professor's notes, the other from Plous' book, "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making." What I didn't realize until after I had read this book was that it has been updated and reissued under a different name, "Winning Decisions : Getting It Right the First Time." If I were buying it again, I would order the newer version.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best management psych books August 25, 1999

By Douglas C. Bates

Format:Paperback

I had the pleasure of taking Jay Russo's course at Cornell that he used to prototype this book. The course was great, and the book shows it. It's a readable, understandable guide to the primary psychological traps that make people make bad decisions. You'll be left with the feeling, "why didn't *I* notice that?"

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Useful January 19, 2000

By Shree

Format:Paperback

I came across a reference to this book in my Economics Textbook in my MBA. The name attracted and hence I bought this book.

This is an excellent book that explains how managers, however experienced, can become complacent and forget major steps in decision making. It really helped me to understand decision making as a process in a better manner than what I had already learnt.

I think that everyone who makes any major decisions, in whatever capacity, should read this book.

It helped me to think better.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on decision making November 5, 2005

By Russell Conte

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book discusses ten common errors that people make in decision making, and how to avoid them. When I first saw this title, I was not that interested, because I wanted a book on how to make decisions, not on the errors that people make. After reading it, I find the information to be very useful and practical. This is one of my all time favorite books, I go back to it every so often, and even after reading it a few times I find myself making some of the errors that are discussed in the text. Hopefully I don't make as many as I used to! I know the ideas in this book have been a very substantial help in improving my decision making process, and I am getting better as time goes by. Very highly recommended!!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Too much belief in personal judgment June 26, 2004

By Mary E. Sibley VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Most decisionmakers make the same kinds of error. There needs to be a frame for each problem. There should be avoidance of plunging in and relying too heavily on supposed good judgment. Drawing boundaries are part of framing the questions. Managers are apt to draw narrow boundaries.

Sometimes there is a failure to draw a boundary line. There is the sunken cost fallacy, basing current and future changes in operation on past expenditures for equipment. One is influenced by reference points in the the problem frame. Some decisions make sense through several different frames. In such a case there can be certainty that the decision is a good one.

Good communicators align their communications with the listeners' frames. Virtually all people put too much trust in their own opinions. Most people favor data supporting current belief. Wrongly we associate confidence with competence. One should be a realist when making a decision and an optimist when implementing it. Rules of thumb and other decisionmaking shortcuts are called heuristics. The disadvantages of intuitive decisionmaking are more profound than people realize.

Members of groups may agree prematurely on wrong decisions. Groups may suffer from too much cohesiveness, harmony, pressure, insulation, and strong leadership. In group think people practice self-censorship, pressure others, give in to an illusion of invulnerability and erroneous stereotyping. Groups composed of people of mixed types of personality are useful--receptive versus focused and thinking versus feeling types.

The book is written in veritable outline form, presumably to get the attention of busy managers.... It has a extensive notes supplementing the text giving a student of business and other fields an opportunity to pursue related lines of inquiry. Read more ›

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this simple book about the process behind good decisions October 23, 2005

By Bill F.

Format:Paperback

I write about scientific careers, and one of my favorite books is Decision Traps. I recommend this book to anyone who is facing a major career decision, and who would like to separate the emotion from the facts in the decision process. Too often we cloud our decisions with personal feelings and ill-conceived "rules of thumb." This book will help you eliminate decision shortcuts which traditionally DON'T lead to the best answer. It worked for me in my personal life as well. Really helps you understand how your mind works.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent guide for intelligent decision-making December 4, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Extremely readable,insightful and PRACTICAL. I found it difficult to put down! As a practitioner in the field of "human decisioning", I especially appreciated the decision-making tools provided in the book. I highly recommend Decision Traps to anyone who facilitates decision-making of individuals or groups.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars To blink or not to blink ... February 6, 2009

By Zinta Aistars

Format:Paperback

Despite this book having been published nearly two decades ago, an executive-level colleague at my office urged our team to read this book. Good advice stands the test of time. On reading the book, I agree--this has much good, common sense and sound insight to offer, although I had to wonder at much more recent studies I've read that advise something quite the opposite from what Russo and Schoemaker encourage. That is, take the time to consider the parameters of making good decisions.

Taking the time, however, is not what I've been reading in much more recently published books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," which basically states that we need to tap into our inner wisdom, that storehouse of all the experience and observation we've accumulated over a lifetime (the longer the lifetime, presumably, the more wisdom stored), trust it, and make the "snap judgments" that actually hold up to often be our best decisions. Fascinating. Looking back on my own span of a lifetime, my best and worst decisions, I have to lean toward "Blink." That inner voice of wisdom does know. It is when I have ignored its red flags waving that I have made my worst decisions. And paid heavily for it.

That said, I tend to be cynical about any idea that leans too heavily one way or the other. Fads are based on swinging pendulums. The truth tends to be a balance of varied ideas and common ground, and in this, "Decision Traps" appeals to me. Russo and Schoemaker do not disparage the value of making the occasional off-the-cuff decision. There are those times that over thinking something, over analyzing, too much brain over heart (i.e.... inner voice of wisdom), can be a slippery path to rationalization, and rationalization almost always translates into bad decisions made on false premises.

"Decision Traps" is an exploration of how decisions are made, and then, the ten traps, or barriers, to making good decisions. These all require time and careful consideration to overcome. No blinking here. And although this book is geared toward making business decisions, I see no reason why one cannot consider these same traps in making personal decisions.

Barriers and means of overcoming them include what Russo and Schoemaker call "framing" a decision (dramatically different solutions arise from what perspective we take on a problem, from what direction we approach it), the gathering of relevant information and intelligence (knowing what you don't know in some instances is even more important than knowing what you do know), the pitfalls of making group decisions ("groupthink" and expert teams vs. teams of experts), why people can't seem to learn from their mistakes (hindsight is always biased and almost never useful), improving feedback (consider not only the results of your decision but calculate also the potential results of the choices you did not make), being overconfident (a major cause of blind spots in decision-making and a good argument against the more contemporary fad of "positive thinking"), and other valuable points to consider.

One of the more fascinating areas in this book, to me, is the discussion on groupthink. This is the process, or effect, of how people subtly change their thinking, and so their decision-making, according to group dynamics. Indeed, it appears to be nearly impossible to resist peer pressure, let alone the pressure to be agreeable with our superiors, and the result from this is narrow thinking at best, and a suppression of creativity and innovation (i.e. potential problem solving), leading to disastrously false thinking, at worst. President Kennedy's team of experts making the disastrous decision resulting in the Bay of Pigs is a common example used to illustrate how highly intelligent and confident people make terrible decisions when they work in groups. In fact, the more mutual respect and personal bonding there is in such groups, the more powerful the effect of groupthink. We often do not realize how we slip into being agreeable with those we like (or wish to like, or be liked by), and our thinking becomes heavily biased. Many studies have shown that people will suppress all evidence to the contrary when they have a subconscious desire to fit in with others. No one (see the Bay of Pigs) is immune to this effect. Best group thinking, then, happens when a group consists of team members who are very different in their experience, perspective, even personality type. It is crucial to encourage an atmosphere of, well, disagreeability so that all possible viewpoints might be considered.

Another fascinating point to me is the ineffectiveness of hindsight. That is, why do we not learn from experience? Why has humankind learned so little from history, repeating the same mistakes again and again and again? Russo and Schoemaker basically state that hindsight is without value. The day-after discussions of sports come to mind. "In general, the clarity of hindsight is an illusion. And it often hampers learning from experience." (pg. 183) It is impossible, the authors state, to think after the fact in the same way as we thought before the fact. Indulging in hindsight only increases the possibility of making future faulty decisions. Why then do we so waste time in this indulgence? Human nature craves control, the authors write, and so we pretend to understand what we cannot, and that something could have been averted or changed when it could not. Rather than learning from things gone wrong, we do all that we can to avoid learning, thumping our chests with empty hindsight "wisdom."

A tangent on this effect is the individual's difficulty to learn from experience, from past mistakes, instead repeating those very same mistakes in future scenarios. Again, the authors remind us, note the need to control what is often beyond our control. We must be ever vigilant of our weakness in trying to rationalize away our own faults and weaknesses. It is, again, human nature to take credit for our successes while blaming our failures on outside factors. Rather than facing up to our mistakes with ruthless honesty, we tend instead to minimize and avert our own honest gaze, and so doom ourselves to remain as we are, not learning from our mistakes, but rather deepening our tendency to repeat them. "Periodically list your failures; if the list is short, be suspicious." (pg. 182) "To avoid the pain of admitting mistakes, we rationalize. We may distort our memory of what we actually did or said; unrealistically blame the failure on others or on supposedly unforeseeable circumstance; say our original prediction was misunderstood or misinterpreted; change our current preferences so the failure seems less important ... But rationalizations benefit us only in the short-run. You can learn from mistakes only if you acknowledge them." (pg. 179)

Despite its two-decade old publication, "Decision Traps" has much to offer. There may be merit to making quick decisions, especially if one does have broad and expansive life experience, but our internal biases are very real, and to be aware of them, and other factors in our decision-making, can be very valuable indeed, in our work as well as our personal lives. Read more ›