499: The Way to Make Better Decisions, with Annie Duke

Annie Duke: How to Decide

Annie Duke is an author, corporate speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space. As a former professional poker player, Annie won more than $4 million in tournament poker before retiring from the game in 2012.

Prior to becoming a professional player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education.

Annie is the author of Thinking in Bets* and her newest book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices*.

Key Points

• Better decision-making aims to reduce resulting and hindsight bias.
• Avoid using a pro/cons list in decision-making, as it tends to reinforce biases you already have.
• Use a decision tree to document potential decisions, possible outcomes, and the likelihood those outcomes will occur.
• More people being involved in a decision is helpful, assuming you are actually leveraging each person’s independent thinking.
• Negative thinking will help you foresee potential problems along the path of your decision so you can do a better job of mitigating issues before they occur.

Resources Mentioned

• How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices* by Annie Duke
• Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right* by Atul Gawande
• The Alliance for Decision Education

Book Notes

Download my highlights from How to Decide in PDF format (free membership required).

Related Episodes

• How Women Make Stronger, Smarter Choices, with Therese Huston (episode 255)
• How to Approach Corporate Budgeting, with Jody Wodrich (episode 355)
• How to Ask Better Questions, with David Marquet (episode 454)

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