Decisions shape our lives. “Should I change careers?” “Where should I live?” “How should I invest my savings?” Making decisions is a fundamental life skill, and we can all learn to become much better at it. In this post, I present a simple, systematic approach you can use to make smarter choices starting today.
The PrOACT Approach to Decision Making
The PrOACT approach (outlined in the book Smart Choices) is by far the best model for decision making that I have seen. It helps you see both the tangible and intangible aspects of your situation more clearly and to translate all pertinent facts, feelings, opinions, beliefs and advice into the best possible decision.
‘PrOACT’ is a mnemonic that stands for five key elements in the model:
- Problem statement
- Objectives
- Alternatives
- Consequences
- Tradeoffs
The method consists of examining each of these core elements separately, using them to clarify and organize your thoughts as you go. Let’s take a look at each of its components.
1. Problem Statement
Behind every decision you make there’s a problem you’re trying to solve. The way you state your problem frames your decision. It determines the alternatives you consider and how you will evaluate them. Effectively posing the problem is paramount, as it influences all your subsequent thinking in the decision making process.
In spite of its importance, many of us just skip this step altogether: it’s too easy to state problems as they come to our minds. The better-defined your problem is, the easier it will be to solve it — to the point of the solution becoming self-evident.
Want an example? A friend of mine loved to work for his company, but hated his boss. His dilemma was to resign or to stay in the company. Instead of choosing between these two options, he redefined the problem as how to keep his job, but getting rid of this boss. What did he do? He sent his boss’ CV out and got him interviews for higher-paying jobs. His boss ended up moving to another job — and my friend ended up staying in the same company — promoted to his boss’ previous position. Smart problem redefinition trumps hard thinking.
For a primer on problem definition and many techniques you can use to tweak your problem statement, the article Einstein’s Secret to Amazing Problem Solving is a good starting point.
2. Objectives
After you have a better definition of your problem, now it’s time to get crystal-clear about what you’re trying to accomplish with your decision.
This is another step most of us get wrong: we regard our objectives as obvious and skip explicitly defining them — allowing them to fuzzily float in our minds. Objectives are the elements that will guide our decision. Clarifying them improves our understanding of the problem, and sets expectations for the possible solutions. It also helps you better communicate what you want as you explain the problem to others.
So, sit down and make a bullet point list of objectives, as explicit and clear as possible. Why exactly do you want to change jobs? Is it your boss? Maybe you want a shorter commute time? Make these reasons clear in writing.
If you find that your objectives don’t come naturally to you, journaling is a tool that can really help. Asking why repeatedly is also a great way to look at your objectives from different viewpoints.
3. Alternatives
Now that you have a well-defined problem and clear objectives, it’s time to finally assess your alternatives and decide, right? Not so fast! First, we should generate alternatives — expand and explore possibilities. The payoff for looking for new, fresh alternatives can be extremely high, so there’s no excuse to skip this step.
There’s a simple aphorism in decision making that says your final choice can never be better than the best alternative you considered. Yes, it’s obvious, I know, but it serves as a reminder of how important it is to take our time and generate as many alternatives as possible before spending time choosing between unsatisfactory choices.
Indeed, it’s much easier (and fun!) to generate better alternatives than to find yourself stuck choosing between two poor ones. Never take the first alternative that comes to your mind. Don’t settle for two, either — shoot for more, way more.
The way to generate new alternatives is to take each of your objectives and ask “How?” or “In what ways can I fulfill this objective?”. Remember, go for quantity, and don’t evaluate the ideas you gathered just yet. Idea-generation techniques such as lists of 100 or idea quotas are your friends here.
4. Consequences
Now comes the time to finally start assessing the merits of each of the alternatives you considered. And the primary way of doing this is by evaluating the consequences of each choice.
After you discard the clearly inferior alternatives you generated, take each of the remaining ones and describe, in writing if possible, what are the consequences of choosing them. That is, imagine how the future will look like for each of them. If you foresee each alternative’s consequences well enough, your decision will become obvious.
Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. Anticipating consequences in complete and precise terms is hard. Predicting the future is something we humans are notoriously bad at — and that’s particularly true when it comes to predict our own future.
So, don’t take the process of foreseeing consequences sloppily — be as realistic as you can and use every tool in your reach to paint as precise a picture of your future as possible. Talk to experienced people who have already ‘been there, done that’ and get as much information as you can from them.
Also, don’t just imagine you might choose an alternative: imagine yourself in a future where you already chose it. How do you feel about each of the objectives you set? Is it what you first anticipated?
5. Tradeoffs
If you got this far without a solution, it’s probably because your decision is really tricky. It also means that it has conflicting objectives — and that you’ll need to consider some hard tradeoffs between them.
As you might have expected, this is seldom something easy to do. Choosing between unrelated objectives feels like comparing apples with oranges — except that, depending on the number of objectives you have, it may feel more like comparing apples with oranges with elephants with washing powder.
So, before anything else, now is a great time to revisit your objectives, looking for ways to simplify them, based on the extra information you gathered so far.
If that’s still not enough, and the decision is not obvious just by mentally evaluating the tradeoffs, you’ll need a systematic approach to make your tradeoffs.
I’ve seen a couple of these approaches, but the best one I found is the Even Swaps method (which is also described in detail in the same book). I’ve used the method twice already, and I found it fascinating! It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about it, but the basic idea is to take consequences and isolate them in pairs — making a series of small, easy tradeoffs instead of trying to compare each alternative as a big blob of conflicting consequences.
If you think that a complete, detailed explanation about the Even Swaps method would be valuable to you, let me know in the comments. If enough people are interested, I’ll write an article about it.
Final Words
This process may seem like a lot of work to go through. However, after you use it a couple of times, you’ll realize that, if you walk through the steps in order, you’ll seldom need to go through them all.
An interesting characteristic of this method is that each of the five components helps clarify each other. When outlining consequences, you might find out about a new objective. By looking at tradeoffs, you may decide to redefine your problem. That means you should frequently go back and forth between the steps in the model.
The book Smart Choices explores even more elements that are required when analyzing the hardest of decisions, such as uncertainty and linked choices. So, I end this article recommending it: Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Life Decisions is an easy read full of practical examples, and definitely worth reading by everybody interested in taking their life decisions to the next level.
Update: For a downloadable, ready-to-use PrOACT mind map template (which also includes the information from this article), check out the this post on the Mindjet Blog. Thanks Michael Deutch for creating and sharing it!
love the approach. this is so, so useful. i’m going to print this out and use it any time i need to make a decision. thank you!
Been using this approach for some time, it’s the basic framework for all decision making. I teach it as well.
Only change I added was a “requirements” section — or what does the solution look like (ie what are the requirements of a successful solution) — All alternatives are measured against this.
Tony Wanless
http://www.knowpreneur.net
Hi Tony, thanks for sharing!
Your comment intrigued me… How does the ‘requirements’ section differ from the ‘objectives’ session outlined above?
Hi Luciano,
Just imagine how much different everyone’s life would be if we had always applied the ProAct approach. Well, it’s never too late to start making better decisions and this article certainly offers some valuable guidance.
We’ve all been in a position, at one time or another, when we just can’t seem to make a decision. Your post demonstrates the skills needed to become clear about what we want, why we want it, and what the outcomes of our decision will be.
Life feels good when we take charge of deciding what we want, and then go through the steps of taking action to effect change in our lives. We make decisions not to torture ourselves, not to chase or push at goals. But imagining what we want, feeling excited about moving in that direction, and then expending energy to make our decision real.
The truth I have learned, is that there is never a wrong choice. However, follow the heart and the path will be rich and fulfilling.
Although this post focused more on the ‘analytical’ side of decisions, I agree wholeheartedly with you, Annette. We should never feel forced to decide or tread decisions as undesirable.
In fact, the PrOACT mnemonic is there to remind us exactly of that — that we should step up and make decisions before we’re forced by circumstances.
Luciano, go ahead and write that article…
I think that this decision method is useful but incomplete. As Gilbert said in Stumbling on Happiness we are uttely poor predictors of our own future. Maybe you can talk a bit about Gilbert’s book and its relationship with this technique.
You’re absolutely right: our poor abilities to predict the future deserves an article on its own right. I will write one article about that and make sure to establish the relationship between the two.
Many thanks for the article suggestion, Fier!
Your blog is really valuable, and so would be an article about the Even Swaps method !
I’m very interested.
Fier and Boreale are interested in an article about the Even Swaps method for performing decision tradeoffs. (thanks both for letting me know!)
Would anyone else be interested, too? Or should I focus on some other topic? (suggestions welcome!)
Another great and very timely article (when I need it the most)!
I’m having a dilemma for all the week and can’t make up my mind, which path should I choose (it must be my Libran nature).
This article showed me few tricks which made things more clearer but I didn’t made the decision because choices I have are EVEN. So I would be also very interested in Even Swaps Method!
Great tips. They almost look like the scientific method.
really cool way of putting it.
of breaking it down.
i’d done something similar for a while – some techniques picked up online and other things that just made intuitive sense but cool to have a solid breakdown because i struggle to explain my decision making process and this is a great place to start.
respect
alex
That’s what I like about structured approaches, too. Most of this is indeed just common sense. However, it is common sense organized in a way that makes it easy to actually use it.
As always a wonderfully detailed and thorough description of a method. Thanks. And the Even Swaps method sounds fascinating. Would love a description of it.
This is a great read. I love any post that encourages people to make conscious choices instead of living with the autopilot engaged. I especially like the consider the consequences part. Too often we make choices looking back at reasons instead of looking forward to the results and then we complain that we didn’t get what we wanted, or that life isn’t fair.
I agree, Alex. Although it’s important to know our reasons, it’s also way too easy to become trapped by them. Although seldom easy to do, anticipating consequences is indeed a valuable input to decision making — one that can change our initial objectives in wildly unexpected ways.
Reframing, or thinking out of the box, can take some effort if you’re not used to doing it. Sometimes I think we get into a cognitive rut with problem solving. Luv your example of sending the boss’ CV out
Nice article. The ability to make good, quick, and reliable decisions is a skill that will help us pursue our goals. If we are too slow to make decisions or we completelly avoid decisions opportunities will pass us by. This is called procrastination and it is at the root of a great many failures.
I am so glad I stumbled on this site. I too would like an article about the Even Swaps method. I appreciate the work you are putting into this site. It truly is a service!
Very well written and to the point! Thanks for the tips and the book link. Feel like I’ve spent much of my life learning this the hard way and look forward to refining my approach to choices.
Luciano,
I just updated the Mindjet Blog with a map template and content based on your post! Great comment too from a reader who applied mind mapping to his own decision making process which had a profound impact on his life!
Here’s a link to the post & PrOACT MindManager template: http://blog.mindjet.com/2009/0.....-decisions
Thanks again for the great post.
Wow, Michael — that’s a very useful mind map you created! Thank you so much for sharing it with us!
I’ve updated the article with a link to your blog post so readers can download and use the mind map for their important decisions.
Thanks!
Do you know the work of Professor Thomas L. Saaty? I stumbled upon it about thirty years ago and used it extensively. His theory can be found in the book The Analytic Hierarchy Process, published in 1980. He uses a hierachy of pairwise comparisons.
I love this example you give:
“Want an example? A friend of mine loved to work for his company, but hated his boss. His dilemma was to resign or to stay in the company. Instead of choosing between these two options, he redefined the problem as how to keep his job, but getting rid of this boss. What did he do? He sent his boss’ CV out and got him interviews for higher-paying jobs. His boss ended up moving to another job — and my friend ended up staying in the same company — promoted to his boss’ previous position.”
I find myself re-telling it to colleagues and friends (and pointing them eagerly to your excellent blog) all the time. And now I just have to know: Did a friend of yours truly do that? When I’ve told the story to people, they have a hard time believing an actual person would have the audacity. So, Luciano, humor me: is it for real?
Hi Lars,
Yep, the story is true.
However, the story — as it’s told in the article — omits some details (for brevity’s sake and to keep its point)…
The boss had already mentioned he was dissatisfied with his current position at some point. My friend, knowing about some new job opportunities, mentioned them to the boss and, with his consent, handed the CV on his behalf to the recruiter (my friend knew the recruiter personally).
So, while the story is indeed true, my friend didn’t sent the CV in secrecy — as it’s implied in the story.
Now I can only hope this doesn’t spoil the fun in retelling it to friends…
Luciano,
Fantastic. And if you ask me, the details don’t subtract anything from the story. They just add context. The important thing for me is that it actually happened, so thank you so much for clearing that up for me.
As I said before: Keep up the good work. It’s great stuff.
Hey Loved Your Post…Great meaning to it….:)