let me say two things, first, thanks for sending us on an unforgettable mission. second, we must succeed in our quest for peace. >> you can watch this another's online at booktv.org. check the authors name in book at the top of the page in the search bar. >> i want to welcome you this evening to politics and prose. if you haven't done so please silence your cell phones. we don't need flash flooding warning sirens going off. well i get to the question-and-answer portion please step up to the microphone. we have c-span with us here tonight. we want to make sure questions are her unable to be picked up on the recording. when the event is over if you would like to purchase the book

they are available at the registered. if you help out the advent staff by placing them on the bookshelf or column that's a lot of help. we're here tonight to have steve johnson for the book, farsighted, how we make the decisions that matters the most. some decisions have long-term consequences and demand careful and sustain consideration. writing with a mix of storytelling and analysis that have characterized works he draws on cognitive science, military strategy environmental planning and literature to demonstrate deliberative decision-making. johnson shows how important it is for individuals, companies and nations to look beyond the immediate concerns and

developing factors. [applause] >> thank you for coming out, it was really scary out there for a while. i was wondering if anybody was going to make it, including me. it's great to be here. thank you for having me. i think i've done my 11th book here. i'm sure i've done an event here for all of them. so i thank you all for supporting bookstores like politics and prose. it's my favorite bookstore in the country. and how amazing is that that independent bookstores are thriving right now. it's one of the great unlikely story of our age when things are not going as well.

they keep coming out to places like this. it's an important part of the fabric of our culture. so, i have a new book, farsighted. it's the first books to prevent that i have done. i've done some talks but they've all been interviews. i have no idea what i'm going to say. i thought i would talk about how this came about. appropriately enough, for a book about long-term thinking, this one has had the longest incubation time of my books. i started taking notes eight years ago and i think i sold the proposal for it seven years ago. so for seven years my publisher has been saying when are you going to turn in the book about decision-making.

it actually it seems to be surprising to some people, it was the hardest book of all to write. the other one that elizabeth mentioned, where good ideas come from was the second hardest. the reason is, books like this that do not follow the pre-existing chronology like my book the ghost map where there is a historical story, a book like farsighted jumps around from different fields and disciplines, historically to give you examples of case studies and people making decisions. there is no built-in innate structure that you can follow. the way that you can follow a

historical novel. the amount of time you need to spend thinking about what the architecture of the book should be is challenging. i've spent a great amount of time trying to think about how this book should be organized. it was initially sparked by three things, one personal into historical. the personal side, and is time about ten years ago i hurt my version of the midlife crisis when i turned 41 having lived in new york city for my adult life, i began to think maybe i wanted to live somewhere else for some time. i mainly i thought i wanted to live in northern california. i began the process of trying to convince my wife it was a good

idea. she knew no one in california and did not have the california bug so, we had this challenging decision point in our marriage and family of where do we want to live, it's a complex and challenging thing to work through. when you think about the variables that go into a decision i call these full-spectrum decisions. in a sense they involve a wide range of factors and elements of values. from a range of human experiences you think about your kids in the schools committee think about your friend networks and what you will leave behind. the year thinking about the economics of the move and what will it mean financially for

your family or job prospects. you thinking about political or social values. are you in urban pedestrian person or a suburban person, the weather, the climate, everything that goes into a decision, we don't have many decisions in our lives. lots of low-key decisions but we don't think about it a lot. but every once in a while we wonder if we should change jobs or move to california, we went through it and it was difficult. we ended up moving and then move back and now we live in both places. it has worked out. for a while it didn't look good. my wife wasn't happy for a while. looking back i realized we

didn't have a process. it was just this endless conversation that kept happening. we didn't have a system or technique. i began to think, are there better ways to do this. i think we could have done it better. i need to time travel back to this book that was the beginning of the idea. i had just written or was in the middle of finishing up where good ideas come from which is a book about the process and history of innovation and creativity. i thought that was a comparable book to make and then i got distracted and then this book lingered in the background and then evolved and developed. the other two decisions that shaped the beginning were

decisions i know from reading and writing about the life of charles darwin. darwin has these interesting decisions in his life. one of which is comical and i will read from the book to give you a sense. in darwin notebooks, his famous notebooks that are maybe at cambridge now and you can see them all online. in the late 1830s, as darwin is coming up with the theory of natural selection, he has pages about the finches and he has returned from -- on one of the pages he deliberates on the page over a different kind of exercise, not about scientific discovery but about a personal matter which is, should he get

married. he creates what is recognized as a pros and cons list of getting married. it's a funny list. because is somewhat dated. you might not think quite as well as darwin. one side is not mirroring the other side is mary. under not married these are the things that are advantageous. freedom to go where one liked. choice of society. my favorite one, conversation of clever men at clubs. not forced to visit relatives and bend. and then on the other side he has children, if it pleased god.

constant companion and friend in old age will feel interested in one. object to be beloved and played with, who better than a dog anyhow i'm not defending it, i'm just little weird. at the bottom he says no mary, and six months later he gets married and has a wonderful marriage and they have ten children. so, i think that may have restricted the time with the clever conversation with men and clubs. the later decision which i talk about is a more tragic one which is that darwin about 12 years later his daughter, annie dies at the age of 12, not sure what she dies of, she had been the

apple of his eye, it is a terrible tragedy as is anytime a parent loses a child. darwin had lost his religious faith and head become a can secular humanists. his wife had retained hers and her solace in this was that annie was in heaven and would see her in the future and darwin was sitting on this idea which he knew would deal a terrible blow to religion. would be seen as someone who is challenging the view of the world if he released this idea of natural selection which he had not yet published. so he was at this crossroads where he had an important idea in the history of science that he had been sitting on and had it release from the world. he had a personal trauma he had

gone through anew by releasing the idea he would challenge the one solace his wife had. that was a choice that made our decision to move to california not pretty simple or less dramatic by comparison. but those kinds of choices, when we hit those points there extraordinary. to think about the ways in which we go about making those decisions in the process and tools we use they seem to be not only worthy of a book in exploration, that's what led to this, what's so striking particularly about the pros and cons list that darwin wrote up, it's probably the one technique were familiar with.

i remember my dad teaching me the pros and cons list on a legal pad when i was ten. it's the one thing you learn. write down the pros and cons. the pros and cons list turns out to date back about 50 years before darwin mary, do not marry list which comes out of a letter benjamin franklin writes to joseph priestley who is the hero of my book, the invention of air he writes franklin a letter and says i have this complicated decision and says i can't tell you what to do, but i can tell you a method, divided sheet of paper into two sides. given this is the one thing most of us learn in terms of making decisions the science of complex

decision-making has been stagnant for 250 years. in fact, behind the scenes there has been development and knowledge that's come into its own. in a rich multidisciplinary range of fields that have looked at this unruffled with how we can make them better. most of us don't know about, were stuck with the pros and cons model. this is a survey of the research and illustrated with different stories including darwin. also contemporary once come along look at the decision process that led to the radon osama bins moderns pakistani layer. it was an interesting process in terms of the decision that they used in identifying that there was bin laden and then deciding

what to do about it. hopefully it's a book you will read, be entertained, learn about the science and walk away with some strategies. i'll tell you a few of them here. the first principle is to think of the decision process is a process with distinct stages. two divided in different stages. it's not one endless conversation. it has phases. in the book i divided into three phases, the mapping, predicting and deciding. in the mapping phase we are trying to come up with this much is possible not narrow your choice down.

it's an experimental or divergent state as opposed to a convergent stage. you're trying to dream up new alternatives and options, thinking about all the variables that could impact. there is an interesting study by the sky who is a professor not. he is kind of the darwin a business decision. he did an extensive analysis people have me looked at the process used and then looked at the outcomes of the outcomes a year two years later. he launch the new product and opened a new store, he wrote an interesting finding witches that

folks who did not have a stage in the decision-making process where they actively sought additional alternatives, other paths but simply contemplated one path and what he called the weather not decision, folks who just looked at one option and never bothered to widen the pool, those folks were more likely not to be satisfied with the choice later on. you had a significant bonus and effectiveness long-term if you took time at the beginning to come up with other alternatives. in his language, changing it from a weather not to a witch one decision. that strikes me as a useful exercise to do at the beginning of the decision process.

one example i talk about his analogies drawn from urban planning. one is the story of the highline park in new york. it hasn't been around very long. it was an abandoned elevated royal railroad line. as industry left and shipyards disappear for the duck stop being used there wasn't a need for an industrial rail line. 1980 the last train cars went up carrying three pathetic boxes of turkeys. for 20 years there is a decision the city confronted which is a classic weather not decision witches should we tear this

useless realigned down or not. the only other debate was who should pay for it. it was just an eyesore, covered with graffiti, it darken the street as it went over different parts of the street, it had no obvious utility. it was a question of whether you tear it down or leave it, but then about 15 or 20 years ago a new option was proposed that was actually to turn it into a park, people had gone up then there's all these wildflowers i started growing and it was strangely beautiful. you had a unique vantage point over the city walking in going along the streets of west manhattan. crucially, the idea did not come from the officials in charge of

it. the urban planners and people who were debating all the authorities it had not occurred to them. it came from an artist, writer and photographer who lived around the space and saw people walking and sneaking up there and they thought maybe there's an alternate path here. that eventually led to the creation of the highline park which most of us would agree is the most celebrated new urban parks in the world over the last 20 years. there is a reasonable chance that park will be there for 100 years or more. those parks will probably be around for 500 years. when you make a decision like in a successful way the time span of a choices extraordinary. a century long positive chain of

effects from a choice you make correctly because you listened to these other options and voices. that's a key principle. and it's a principal shared and runs through many of my work one of the key assets that you want to have on your side when you're trying to come up with options and go through the mapping phase is to diversify the people advising newer part of the decision. to get different perspectives to get gender diversity, professed professional and intellectual diversity. there is a rich body of research that shows groups that are diverse are smarter and more

original and problem-solving their ability to make complex decisions. this is sometimes called diversity trumps ability. their studies i talk about that analyze it. a lot of studies with mock juries. you work with different juries and tested in the lab and see which actually come up with the more sophisticated analysis of the case. when you bring people with different perspectives and different ways of approaching a problem they make the overall group smarter. we used to think the reason why diversity causes an increase in intelligence had to do with the fact that the outsiders you

bring into the group, they bring in new information. that wasn't shared with the like-minded group at the outside. that is true and part of what happens. there is another element more surprising witches, it makes the original insider group more original in its thinking as well. just the presence of people different from you makes you challenge your assumptions and discover things you did not know, because you're in a group where there's different perspectives. when you think about our own lives it's important when you think about the value of diversity in society, government and elected officials had to talk about diversity in terms of equality of opportunity, which

are all equal representation. we should also stress that will we see people at the tops of political organizations where there are two homogeneous, that's a sign they're going to be not as intelligence in the decisions they try to make. they're not going to be as inventive and creative. so we want diversity for a number of reasons. that's the mapping phase, but, every decision by definition it is on some level a set of predictions about the future. when you're deciding whether to move to california you are thinking about a story of the future. you're thinking this is how it

will turn out and this is where it will take us. the you could be better at making those decisions. it's difficult to predict the future when you're dealing with these complex problems. there is a number of fascinating studies so people are probably familiar with some works. he's a great guy who went through and had the audacity to interview these experts and pundits in various fields and people who go on talk shows or write up, like me and talk about their field of expertise. whether it's international

markets and so on. and implicitly their making predictions. they think this is what's gonna happen. he interviewed them and asked them to make forecasts of what was going to happen. what he did that was so daring, as he went back five years later and said how did it turn out and it turned out that the so-called experts were worse than chance at their predictions. they were worse than the dart throwing chin. he found a correlation between how famous they were and the accuracy of their forecasts. but, he did find this subgroup of folks who he dubbed the super forecasters. they were better than chance.

they were able to see long-term trends and see what was coming in the future. he tried to figure out what was it about them that made them different than the experts. what he found was parallel, they were eclectic in their interests. folks who are wrong about the future had a single be about the world and a theory of how things worked. they tried to make things fit. whereas the super forecasters didn't have an overarching theory, they had small theories and they were really interested in different things. they had hobbies and minor fields, and psychological profile language, they scored highly on a quality called openness to experience which is

another word for curiosity. so in a sense of their own mind they had diversity. they didn't have one big idea, that willingness to be open to new possibilities and follow new trails or signals that are suggesting a clue about what could come in the future, that's an important property to cultivate in yourself. in that predictive stage you are effectively telling stories. the problem most of us have as we tell one story. that was my problem with california. i constructed this beautiful postcard mission of our life. everything else that could be a problem like my wife had no friends, little things were

written out of my master narrative. there were a number of exercises people developed. it forces you to tell a story but also tell multiple stories. there is a technique used in the business environment, it was developed in the 70s. it scenario planning. you're facing a big decision, and to make sense of the market like you releasing a new product into the overall economic landscape, you want to tell stories about how it could turn out. one of the exercises they do is your asked to tell three stories, one which things get better, one in which things get worse and one in which they get weird. i really like the third one. who knows what weird really means. we rarely tell their weird story. sometimes we tell the positive

and negative but we almost never tell the weird story. so forcing yourself to imagine circumstances where things get weird even if it doesn't come to pass, enables you to see the landscape and opportunities with new clarity that you would not have had before. another version, and exercise that you are supposed to apply at that moment when you have fully decided this is the way to go. we are going to choose plan a over plan b, diversified the options and consulted a diverse group. there's one last xmas was created by a psychologist, gary klein. it's a premortem postmortem as the patient is dead, we have to

figure out what cause the patient to die, premortem is the patient is going to die and we have to predict what the cause of death will be. this decision were about to make in two years will turn out to be a catastrophic failure. our exercise is to tell the story of how that happened. this turns out tom locke perception that people don't intuitively have if you asked them this is the decision were going to make, do you see any flaws in it? when people get into that where there excited about her choice and you and they say it's beautiful we should move there tomorrow, when you force them to run those cycles and build that architecture in their head and imagine a story where was a catastrophic event in the future, they end up coming up with perceiving the flaws that

are there so again, it's a storytelling exercise. there are many more in the book along these lines. many interesting tricks. i think that every toolkit will be different and hopefully they will be useful and interesting to you if you get a chance to read it. since we are in this bookstore, there's another theme that runs through the book from the beginning to the end about another storytelling which is the importance of literature. thinking about the great transformative decisions of our lives. i think this is one of the things that the novel in particular, although historical nonfiction can do this if it's done but the novel does this well, to give us an inner access

to the deciding mind at work, watching someone wrestling with a difficult choice. movies can do this as well. because of the interior monologue you getting great literature you're able to see someone wrestling with her choice the novel that there are a number of decisions in that book. dorothea brooke deciding to renounce her inherited fortune for her late husband to run off with her political radical lover and not give up on all of these

you try to do that full-spectrum map of all the different factors in the nuance that they give to it. it's the only book that has extensive lines about the bin laden raid in middlemarch. in fact, there is a lot of middlemarch right out front and we got that first draft i was like, whoa. we need to dial back the 19th century literature. a little bit more balance. one way we technologically have gotten better of making

predictions medical predictions we have this ability to run simulation we run in a million times in the storm forms 80% of the time and we get the sent minutes greatly improved our accuracy of making forecasts. that's what narrative fiction does in her own lying. should we move to california or not, maybe someday it will be a version of the sims where you can fully simulate your life and run it out in parallel 30 times to figure out if you're happy or not. but that's not coming anytime soon. we don't have the ability.

what the novel gives us his practice. rehearsals, watching people making comparable decisions for the ones we might make. it helps us develop the sensitivity, awareness and other mindedness that are so important in making choices. in doing that, it's a great deal of wisdom that narrative fiction in could be a book about scientific studies but also about literature and the impact. but the art and science of decision-making. i would love to hear from your. one thing i realized from doing radio interviews is that a lot of people are calling in insane, but husband and i are trying to

figure out if were going to have a second kid. i'm not sure i have good answers to that. as i have spent these eight years going through the material and think about the issues, more more i became convinced that we should teach complex decision-making. it should be a required course on high schools. think about what you learn, i learned from them, and all, i never was offered a class, was even an offering.

i think it should be part of the core. whatever you do, whatever path your life takes the ability to be better at making decisions on the ability to make these techniques or understand the variables, that is the skill you will need in your life will be improved because you have that skill. this is beyond the pros and cons list. it should be shared in part of the curriculum. by the way, some people say it shouldn't just be about learning useful things it's stumbling across the in developing a new passion because you're forced to take that chemistry class. . .

would know, we talk about brain science in that one decision-making course, there will be lots of opportunities to make unanticipated discoveries and find new interests and for that curiosity that's so important to be sparked, but it

would all be under the macro kind of umbrella of teaching you a skill that makes you a better, wiser human being. in a way this book is an attempt to, the values in this book are the values of deliberation and diversity, and long-term thinking. i think we can probably all agree those are values we could use more of. so to me, it seems like this is the kind of thing -- these should be the core courses you would take in tenth or eleveth grade, and some of the other things that are required should be electives but that's a broader discussion anyway, thank you once again for coming out, thank you for having me, it's an honor to be here. happy to answer any questions. but please come up to the

microphone. (applause) >> got a question right there? >> hi. >> you have to jump up and down (laughter) >> that's good. my name is kathy riley and i live here in the district. i'm curious about the tension between an individual decision, like what's in your best interest, like i work a lot with education with high schools in the city. the tension between each parent making an individual choice about what's best for their child, and for us as a city, and for having the conversation, i worked for a group of principals, parents, community members and teachers and we sometimes have a difficult time influencing the government, but our task is to think a little bit larger than what's in my best interest, and try to think

about what's in all of our best interests. and also as a grandmother, try to think what's in my grandchildren's best interest now. i'm curious how the tension between what's in an individual's best interest is not always what's in the group's best interest. >> it's a really profound question that would be a whole month of a syllabus of the high school. so many different ways to think about the answer to that. first off, this is one of the places where the environmental planning world i think is -- and it shows up throughout far-sighted has done some really advanced work i think in coming up with techniques for thinking about something like for instance building a park. in a community there are a lot of wonderful and sustainable planning world has done this too. think about environmental impact, where you have a whole set of stakeholders

that are involved in a choice. whose values are in conflict, but you want to come up with a solution and decision that respects as many of those values as possible. so there are a number of processes they have developed, things like designs and things like that where you bring a bunch of stakeholders, or interview them separately, and get their input, and the end of the last section of this decision-making at the end of these three processes, there's something i would like to talk about in a little more detail. it's called a linear value model, you can do it individually but it also scales up to groups. it's the updated version of the pros and cons list. once you've decided these are the five options that we are considering, you ask everyone involved to write down the

values that are important to them. crucially to wait weight the values, this value is important to me but not as important a as this one. having children is important, clever conversation of men in clubs is important but not as important. and you give that a numerical weight, and you score each of the options for how it performs for that particular value and you multiply the score by the weight and add it up for each of the options. that's the kind of thing you can do yourself. you can do it with a group also. you can nel create a big spreadsheet, but it is a way numerically of doing this. the other thing that came to mind, and then i'll move on because people have questions. thinking about values outside yourself. the premortem technique, imagine how this could turn out to be a catastrophe. this is one of the things that i feel like every so-called disruptive company, like technology company that's

creating some new product that is going to be released from the world because it's going to disrupt the way we share values or ideas, they should be running more global premortms on those products. this is what's facebook and twitter did not do they said this will be nice, everyone can share photos and what could go wrong, right? they didn't do the exercise of seriously, what could go wrong? (laughter) and that involved not just how could this go wrong for our company, but because we are social players in a connected world, how could this -- what could the adverse effects be in a wider sense. running that exercise, there is a interest in occasion this among the folks that i know in silicon valley and the tech world, they are trying to do this more. they realization this is something -- a skill they need to learn. it would have been easier if it had

been taught to them in high school. great questions. thank you. >> trying to improve decision-making that's one thing. i want to touch on three different aspects of what you've laid out. one is that the whole idea of improving decision-making is really not new because we went through it with irving, and he is the baseline for much of the subsequent research. and crucial decisions, the last book, which was in 89, he went and tried to discern what are the traits and learning dispositions that would make for wiser decision-making, and he went throughout analysis of what is the basic style of

decision-making? it's minimallest, consensus building, and he lays out the criteria for vigilance and decision-making. so it's not something that's really new, i think one of the things that we need to explore is what has not -- what is constraining this situation? this is something that i've been working on myself. secondly, you discussed the curricula in high school. this is another area i've been looking at and i think -- i've been doing it by looking at the biographies of all the thinkers that have made any kind of original. they have had unusually -- unique lives by virtue of the environment, intellectual environment, and

the mentors and so forth. for the specifically high school curricula in this country, that is a big challenge. you have a model you sit in the classroom, it would take you know, many people coming in to a classroom -- people of intellectual starcher, and even ordinary people. ordinary people make fantastic decisions too. so what i'm getting at is that we know what is missing. or what's wrong, but we fall short of being able to do something about it, and we're constrained heavily, so the bottom line is i think that better thinkers have more obstacles in front of them, and people do everything they can to under mine them. so i was wondering what you thought of

that, and if you agreed what you would consider? >> that's great, so many things to say there. i'll just say, the thing that strikes me is you're absolutely right that this is the field of whatever you want to call it, decision-science, decision-theory is not new, it's really blossomed in the last 30-40 years. in the book i talk about herbert simon thinking about it. what you're saying is the understanding has been there, and the conversation has been there, but if you think about the popular books that have been gut decisions, and thinks slow so i get part of that because it is fascinating what the computationles of the brain and making these things we

don't realize we're doing, but strangely it's harder to do the other stuff, and the other questions i will get to. one reason that maybe the case is that -- i wrestled with this a lot. it is the nature of every complex life choice that someone encounters to be unique and singular. there's part of me as a writer, how can i advise someone who's having this unique experience, that will never be repeated again in their life. i don't even know them. how can i give them advice? so it's easier to talk about these are the things that we know that all human brains do, and this is the way our system 1 brain works. and it's easier to test those things in the lab.

what i ultimately came out to is all the exercises and stratagems in this book are about tricking your brain into seeing that complexity, and singularity with new clarity, i don't know the decision you're confronting, but i do know how you can get around your biases or see the problem with no nuance, or understand potential variables along the way with imagining or running a premortem, or whatever the strategy is. i think people have run away from that. the challenge of teaching something that is so singular. great thoughts, thank you. >> let's move that back up. i did a five-day training seminar

which was fantastic. changed my life, and you could totally take that and apply that to a high school crickialal and it would be b world-changing. it should be done, 10%. this is more of i asked, you have a writer as an organizer of information you have a b bunch of different approaches. you're trying -- when you are approaching that are you trying to say i've gone through all that and this is my take. i'm not going to get paralyzed all the minutia here and here, or you try to form it into some kind of coherent hold, how do you address that as a writer, or is that an unanswerable question? >> it is one of the big questions and i think it's

answerable. >> i just ignore the kids. >> that's not true. >> first off, there's the thrall answer to that question, i've written about it incredible word processor, i've called scribner i've wrote a piece called why writing books is not processing words. every word processor was not structured. it was optimized for writing an interoffice memo. and scribner was the first one designed from the ground up that starts with fragmented ideas that slowly emerging into a linear structure. there's a technological way that the software helps me with that, and the break through over the three years. it's much easier this

way. but, what has to happen is you have to have this period of time. it's about liniarity. you have a long period of time where ideas in the book are good ideas where they don't have order or sequence. they're just little dots of nodes, basically they're a loose network. you have a ceiling of there's an interesting thing here about darwin, and there's an interesting thing about group think, and the nodes start to get bigger. something else taches to it that seems related, and at a certain point you want to look at that map and see there's a big cluster here, and a big cluster here, maybe that -- maybe those are chapterrers. maybe those are sections in one chapter. and only after you get to that point do you then start thinking about

sequence. then you're saying okay, but yes, that's interesting, and that's meaningful material. but what should go first? and you have to start organizing in that way. >> but how do you deal with the burden of being authoritative, understanding that there's this other school of thought. how do i not get paralyzed by that? >> just ridiculous overconfidence of -- [laughter] probably 50% of my books i have proposed to my dad, my dad has said this book is dedicated to my dad. my dad said you know nothing about that. [laughter] and he's right. >> thank you. >> hi, thank you, i have two questions. you've touched on them, but one is given that he

had a best-seller and we've been reminded that we all live in crazy town, how do we inject as citizens, as participants in the decision-making process how do we inject rational at into what has been demonstrated again and again as a gut decision, a shelfish decision. my second question is i've recently become acquainted with gib's law 51, gib's rule 51, sometimes you're wrong. once you've invested all this, and been paid so well, how do you build in an ability to recognize that you're wrong and maybe adapt? >> profound questions too. great question everyone. two thoughts. the first is, in one of the mock jury trial

experiments that i eluded to that was looking at the role of diversity and decision-making with the mock juries, one of the interesting findings is the more diverse group ended up making better decisions, and at the same time they were less certain that they were right than the homogeneous group that was more likely to be wrong. there's this paradox of the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be right, the less certain you are that you're right. learning that, it's a really profound thing. the ability to enter tain the idea that you're wrong is -- there are confirmation bias, and groups that keep us from doing that, and in the bin laden story, they spend all this time leading up to the raid,

challenging their assumptions. rating their certainty levels at all the different points. really trying to figure out, investigating the things they haven't thought about. trying to think about if they're missing something, and forcing the team to come up with alternative explanations. i think one way we can encourage that in society, the other part of your question, is by semi-brating examples of that kind of deliberation when it's done well. so, trying to do that -- there's a lot of focus with the bin laden story, with the raid itself, but to me what's more important is the raid is incredible, and daring, drama, and the military operation. but that nine-month deliberation process that was run in this way to make sure

that story is out there. my friend jane is here today, a wonderful tv eshow that talked about it as well. making sure those are part of our popular narrative. when we see people making deliberative decisions well, we should be championing those people, and through that maybe we get outside of the people. we like people who go with their gut and are decisive in the most important important choises that's not right. i say in the book, have you ever seen a political debate where one of the candidates is asked how do you make complicated decisions? shouldn't that be a big question we ask? that's what we want them to do. that's in the essence of governance, to make complex decisions when it matters. >> as a longtime high school english teacher, ap english, i

would say let's just teach more novels, and let me decide the curriculum. i also assigned, and students really liked "ghost map." my question has to dewith the most tragic decision of the last 20 years nationally of the decision to invade iraq. how awful that turned out. on one side you're talking about the decision to go after bin laden. i wonder if you could say something or in the book do you say anything about that terrible process that resulted in such a tragedy for the country of iraq and for our own country? >> i elude to it in that the process with bin laden was self-consciously modeled on not

falling into the same traps that they had made in the decision going to iraq. in the weapons of mass destruction that decision process. the book eludes to that, and also famous studies of bay of pigs that's in the janis group think book as well, and in fact, even in bay of pigs, there was a deliberate course correction that kennedy made between the bay of pigs and the cuban missile process. they changed their process, in just literally like the dynamics of how they had the discussions because they released the way they were making the decisions was not working so they thought about the structure. i haven't looked at it directly in the book eludes to it, but in a sense what you didn't have were you had to we'll be treated as liberatorses narrative, and there wasn't enough time spent

on surfacing other alternative scenarios and looking those scenarios to have a seat at the table in the deliberation over the decision. other books have been written about that process but studying the wrong decisions, there is a long section about the mistakes that washington made in the battle of brooklyn. a military analysis of a bad choice so it ended up all right in the long run. one more question and i want to make sure we have time for signing too. >> my question is more on personal decisions. the process of getting better decisions requires you to look back at past decisions and critically, and especially failures, and so if the point of getting good personal decisions is to maximize your happening happiness how do you do some

self-help with trying to get bert at them and make a decision? >> this came up last night. i was doing a talk at this tech start up hub called beta works and the esos is like fail, fail faster, and embrace failure, you can't get funded unless you failed three times because you're not trying hard enough. you make a lot of bad decisions so you can be good enough to make good decisions. one of the at rehabilitates that does come up in making that final choice if you have three options ahead of you that is related to this in a sense of we think of it in terms of lean start-up development is choose the option, that may not look optimal that offers the most flexibility downstream if it ends up not working out. so this one looks great but you're

locked in on that path. this one, if it ends up failing or ends up going south on you a little bit, there's a room to tinker with it. you're not completely locked into a path, these open the possibility for destructive learning failure without it being catastrophic failure is the way to think about it. all right, thank you all, so much. i'll sign the books, thank you so much for coming out. >> books are available against the registers, thanks for coming in everybody. >> what does it mean to be american? that's this year's student question and wee asking middle and high school students to answer it by producing a short documentary about a national right, historic event and

explain how it defines the american experience. we're awarding $100,000 in toting cash prices including a grand prize of $5,000, this deadline is january 2019. for more information go to our website student camp.org. >> the most important thing is born out of frustration and i talk about this in the book, my entrance and my academic background are in economics but if you think about the global economy today there are a whole host of deeply structural long-term problems. i imagine we'll get back to them in a moment, thinks about the shift, what about the job to job under class concerns around predictive and debt that over hang and income and equality. something

that was never discussed in my phd, and these are all long-term structural problems and yet the people who are charged with overseeing the regulatory and the policy environment, essentially politicians are very short-term. i thought this gives them a mis-match between the long-term economic problems and the short-term political frame is something that had not been fully explored, and certainly i don't feel the potential solutions to this mis-match have been explored adequately. given the ground-swell of emotion both in terms of people's apathy to the voting process, but also because it's in the rise of poppialism for whatever the moachgzs may be arguably in the united states, this was something i wanted to explore. >> and you do talk quite positively, as do people around

the world about many successes in places that have very different models like china. >> yes. >> what's wrong with that model? >> so i think in many respects this book is deliberately not wanting or wishing to write about china. we have talked a lot about china what does and doesn't work there, and they have a fundamentally different system. in the west we prioritize the individual, so the individual is -- by utility function drives market capital. but in the political frame my right to choose as an individual, my rights are paramount. that's a very different model in the chinese system, where for them the most important thing is the social and the community. so their frame and policy leaders that they can use are very different from the frame and policy initiatives that we can adopt in the west. so i feel like a lot has been written about china. i

myself have written a book about china, and i feel it has become a red herring. they have done a lot of things wright, but they're in the early stage of their grement. they've moved a lot of people our poverty but many rankings they rank in terms of per capita income. they have their issues we know about the debt problems, etc. but i think that what's really an .

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