How to make a decision you wont regret, according to science

How to make a decision you wont regret, according to scienceHow to make a decision you wont regret, according to scienceOne of the things that I learned in researching and writingFarsightedis that the predictive phase of a decision is always, on some level, a narrative art. The future is unpredictable, particularly when were dealing with complex choices. Because we can never fully predict the outcomes of our choices, we have to tell stories- crucially, multiple stories- to imagine different outcomes.This is best exemplified by a technique that was developed in the 1970s calledscenario planning. The idea is that youre confronting a choice, and youre trying to imagine what the long-term consequences of that choice are going to be. In building a scenario plan, you actually tell multiple stories, so that you dont get locked in on one way of interpreting the future.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neurosci ence, and moraOne of the techniques that one of the early pioneers of scenario planning, Peter Schwartz, talks about is to tell three stories about the choice youre confronting One story where things get better, one story where things get worse, and one story where things get weird. Ive always loved that last option, because it forces your mind to imagine a platzdeckchen of outcomes the are not coming to you initially. You have to explore the possibility of space, the full-spectrum map of the future in order to come up with that weird outcome.One of my favorite modifications of the scenario planning technique was developed by a psychologist named Gary Klein, and his technique is called apremortem. Now a premortem, as you might imagine, is the opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem is when a patient is dead, and its the job of the forensic scientist to figure out what killed the patient. In a premortem, the patient is going to die, and its your job to tell a story about what will ult imately kill the patient.So in decision theory terms, a premortem is the exercise you run right when youre about to pull the trigger on an important choice. Youve decided on the path ahead, so you sit the team down, and you tell a story. The story is, in five years, this decision turns out to be catastrophically bad- its a complete failure. Tell the story of how that failure happened.And what Klein found is that when you force people to get into that storytelling mode, when you force them to build a narrative account of a future failure, theyre much more creative in seeing potential problems and anticipating ways in which the choice could end up being a disaster.On the other hand, you could sit them down and say, Were thinking about making this choice. Do you see any flaws with it? When you ask them that question, they tend to suffer from the usual problems of confirmation bias and overconfidence that people often have. And they say, No, it looks great. This is a great choice- lets press play.But when you run the premortem, they end up seeing flaws that they wouldnt have otherwise perceived, precisely through that narrative exercise of imagining a catastrophic future.So the next time youve reached the point where youre convinced about the choice that you should make, gather your team or family around, and force yourself to run through a premortem. By telling the story of how the decision ends up going wrong, youre much more likely to have it end up going right.This article originally appeared on Heleo.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people