to your public library. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thank the charming neal bascomb. [applause] be. ..

>> good evening, everybody. my name is liz artlip, and i'd like to welcome you all the politics and prose. a couple quick notes. if you've not done so please take a moment to silence your cell phones. we don't need another wave of flash flooding warning sirens going off in the middle of the event. along the same light from the get to portion, if you please step up to the mic come with c-span booktv with us tonight and so we want to make sure all questions are heard by everyone in the audience and also able to be picked up on the recording. after the event is over if you decide you like to purchase a copy of the book, they are available at the register. head on back to the front of the store. if you'd help out by poling temperatures and placing them up against the bookshelf, it's a lot of help for us. we are here tonight to have steven johnson back for his

newest book, "farsighted: how we make the decisions that matter the most." and in age more and more defined by instant responses, quick results in short attention span some decisions to long-term consequences and even careful and sustained consideration. writing with engaging mix of storytelling and announces that is characterized early works such as wonderland and were good ideas come from, johnson draw some cognitive science, military strategy, department of planning, social psychology and literature to demonstrate the value of deliberative decision-making. a wide friday of times a spaces, johnson shows how important it is for individuals, companies and nations to look beyond the immediate concerns and develop skills for considering all relevant factors. please help me welcome him to politics and prose. [applause] >> all right. thank you all for coming out. it was really scary out there for a while. i was wondering whether anyone

was going to make it, including me. it's great to be here and thank you politics and prose have me. i think event any that here, this is my 11th book, which is crazy and i am sure i've done an event here for all of them. so i think the bookstore. i also thank you all for supporting bookstores like politics and prose, what a great place, one of my favorite bookstores in the country. [applause] how amazing is it that independent bookstores are thriving right now? this is one of the great stories, unlikely stories of our day and age when some things are not always going quite as well as we'd hoped we might. keep coming out to places like this. this is an important part of the fabric of our culture. so, i have a new book, "farsighted." also this is the first bookstore event that i've done for the

book. i've done a couple of talks but they've all been interview so this is a first time i've been steady in front people talking about a book. i have no idea what i'm going to say. no, i thought i would talk about how this one came about. appropriately enough for a book about, part about long-term thinking, this one has had the longest incubation time of any of my books. i started taking notes on this book eight years ago and i think i sold the proposal for 87 years ago. for seven years my publisher has been saying when i go to turn in the book about decision-making that we bought during the carter administration? [laughing] it actually, this seems to be surprising to some people, it was the hardest book about my books to write.

the other one that elizabeth minchin, where good ideas come from, was kind of the second hardest. the reason for that is that books like this that do not follow a pre-existing chronology like a book, the ghost map the some of you read, where there's a historical story, a book like "farsighted" jumps around especially an in all these different places, it jumps around from different fields and disciplines, it jumps around historically to give you examples and case studies of people making decisions. so there's no built-in innate structure to it that you can follow the way you can follow a historical narrative. the amount of time yet to spend thinking about what the actual architecture of the book should be is very challenging because that is entirely up for grabs. i spent a great time wrestling but how this book should be

organized before i started writing it. it was initially sparked by three things. one personal and two historical. the personal side of it is at a certain time about ten years ago i hit my version of a midlife crisis when i turned 40, having lived in new york city in manhattan and brooklyn for all of my adult life, i began to think that maybe i wanted to let someone else for at least some stretch of time and made an ostrich think i want live in northern california. and begin the slow process of trying to convince my wife that this was a good idea. we had three young kids. she knew no one in northern california, did not have the california buckets i did at all. we had this really challenging decision point in our marriage, in our family of where we want

to live? which is an enormously complex and challenging thing to work through when you think about just all the variables that go into a decision like that. these full-spectrum decisions in the sense they involve such a wide range of factors and elements and values from a whole range of parts of human experience. when you think about a move like that you are thinking that your kids and the schools they might go to invest in place. you are thinking about your friend networks and what i going to leave behind, , what new friends much making the place, thinking about the economics of the move and what will it actually mean financially for your family or your job prospects in this particular part of the world. you are thinking about your political values order social values. are you an urban sidewalk citric pedestrian person, or are you a suburban car centered person?

the weather, the climate, all these things ago to decision like that. we don't have any of those decisions in our lives. with lots of loki low information decision we make quickly and we don't have to think about a lot but every now and then we have these important crossroads, should i change jobs? showed should i launched a new t in my business? should i moved to california? we went through it and it was a difficult thing, and we ended up moving into we moved back and now we kind of live in both places. it is worked out. for while pitted not look very good. my wife was not happy for a while when we were out there, and looking back on it i realized that we didn't have a process for making this decision. decision. it was just this endless conversation the kept happening. we didn't have any system for thinking about it or any technique. i began to think are there better ways to do this? could we have done a better?

really we probably could have sometimes i think i need to time travel back with this book to stephen in 2000 and given the book to read so we can make that choice better. that was the beginning of the idea. i just written prose in the middle of finishing up where good ideas come from which was a book about the process and the history of innovation and creativity, and so i thought there's kind of a comparable book to write about long-term decisions and how we make them and how we can make them better. i got distracted and windows of the books and did a bunch of things coaching and this book lingered in the background and evolve and develop. the other two decisions that shape the beginning of this book were decisions i happen to know from reading about and writing about the life of charles darwin. darwin has these two very interesting decisions in his life. one of which is somewhat comical and i will just briefly actually

read from the book to get a sense of it. in darwin's notebooks, famous notebooks that are, i think they're at cambridge now, you can see them all online come in the late 1830s as darwin is coming up with a theory of natural selection, he has all these pages about the finches and issues returned from -- on one of the pages he deliberates on the page crawford different kind of exercise, different conversation, not about scientific discovery but about a more personal matter which is should he get married. what he does in the notebook is he creates what is recognizable as basically a pros and cons list of getting married. a very funny list because it's somewhat dated.

i just want to warn you you may not think quite as well as darwin. he has one side of the page that is not to marry any of the site is to marry. under not marry these are the things that are advantageous about not marrying, freedom to go when one likes. choice of society, and little of it. my favorite one, conversation of clever men at clubs. [laughing] not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle. and then on the other side to marry, children, you could please god. constant companion and friend and old age who feel interested in one. object to be beloved and played with. better than a a dog, anyhow ise line. i'm not defending it. i'm just saying, a little --

there are some sweeter things. at the bottom of it he says mary. six months later he marries and goes on to have a wonderful marriage and the of ten children. and i think that might've restricted the time with the clever conversation with men in clubs. the later decision which i talk about in a later point in "farsighted" is a much more tragic one, which is that darwin, about 12 years later, his daughter dies at the age of 12. not totally sure what she dies of, and she had been kind of the apple in his eye and it's a terrible tragedy, as any time a parent was a child. darwin had really lost his religious faith and had become kind of a secular humanist. his wife had retained hers and

her stalls on all this was she was in heaven and she would see her at some point in future, and darwin was sitting on this idea which he knew would deal a terrible blow to religion, and he would be seen as someone who was challenging the whole religious view of the world and the history of life on earth if you release this idea of natural selection in the world which she had not yet published. he was at this extraordinary i think crossroads where he had one of the most important ideas in the history of science that he had been sitting on for 12 or 13 years and had not released it to the world. he had this enormous personal trauma he had gone through and he knew by releasing this idea on the world he was going to challenge the religious value, the one solace his wife had after this terrible family tragedy. that was the kind of choice that

made our decision whether of wo move to california look pretty simple or less dramatic by comparison. those kinds of choices when we hit those points in our lives i think a really extraordinary ones. to think about the ways in which we go to making those decisions, the process we use, the tools we use, the conversation went to make them seem to be enormously worthy of a book and further exploration. that's what led to "farsighted." what i think is so striking particularly about the pros and cons list that darwin wrote is that is probably the one technique we are familiar with. the one thing we learned. like i remember my dad teach me the pros and cons list on a legal pad when i was ten. that's the one thing you learn. you have a tough choice, right down the pros and cons. the pros and cons list turns out

to date back about 50 years before darwin's to marry or do not marry list, which comes up in a letter that benjamin franklin wrote to joseph priestly who was the hero of my book, invention of air. he writes franklin a letter, i have this comforter decision. franklin writes back, hey, i can't tell you what to do but i can tell you this method i have. divide the sheet of paper into two sides. what strikes me about this is given this is the one thing most of us do learn in terms of making decisions, effectively for most of us the signs of complex decision-making has been stagnant for 250 years. and, in fact, behind the scenes there has been all this development, all this knowledge that is coming to it's own over the last 20 or 30 years in a rich multidisciplinary range of fields that it was precisely at

this question of how we make these decisions and wrestle with the question of how we can make them better. that most of us don't really know about. we are still stuck with the pros and cons model. "farsighted" is a survey of that research and its illustrator with a number of different stories, including darwin. there are also some contemporary ones. there's a long look at the decision process that led to the raid on osama bin laden is pakistani layer gun which was a very interesting process in terms of decision architecture that they used in making, involve identifying that was, deciding it was bin laden and to then deciding what to do about it. and hopefully it is book you read, learn something about the sites but also walk away with some kind of strategies. i'll tell you a few of them here and then we can talk about them

in the q&a and hopefully you get a a chance to read it. the first meta-principle meta-o think of the decision process as a process with distinct stages. to divide it up into different stages so it's not just one long continued in this conversation. it's something that has phases that are distinctive in the book i divide it up into these three cases, each one of which is a chapter, the mapping phase, predicting face and then the deciding phase. in the mapping phase you are trying to innocence come up with this as much as possible, you are not trying to narrow your choice to do something. it's a much more experimental, at the virgin stage as to a convergence stage. you try to dream up new alternatives, your options come to think about all the potential variables that might impact the decisions. there is an interesting study, a

number studies by this guy paul not lose a management professor, professor not which sounds like a character in the board game clue. he's kind of the darwin of his decision. he basically did this extensive analysis of decisions people make inside of businesses and look at the process that was used to make the decision to look at the outcomes of those decisions a year later, two years later. get it worked out, he made that choice, he figured that new store, how did it work. he came up with this interesting finding which was 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 in

what he called a whether or not decision, , should we do this or not, folks who just looked at one option and never bothered to widen the pool of options, those folks were much more likely to not be satisfied with the results of the choice down the line. you had significant bonus ineffectiveness long-term if you took time at the beginning of the process to come up with other alternatives. in his language, changing it from a whether or not decision to which one decision. that strikes me as a really useful exercise to do at the beginning of a decision process. and about i talk about, a lot of analogies drawn from urban planning in the book as well, and one of them is the story of the highline park in new york. how many people have been -- a bunch of people. it hasn't been around for long. for those of you don't know

what, it was an abandoned, elevated industrial railroad line that ran up the west side of manhattan, and as industry left, as the shipyards disappeared, there wasn't a need for industrial elevated rail line, and in 1980 the last train cars went up the west side carrying something like three pathetic boxes of turkeys. that was apparently the last train ride. for 20 years there was this decision at the city was confronted with, which was a classic whether or not decision which is should we care this useless rail line down or not? the only other debate was who should pay for it? this was just an eyesore. it was covered with graffiti. it darkened the street as a win over these different parts of chelsea.

at no obvious utility. it was just a question of whether we should care it down or leave it. but then at about 15, 20 years ago a new option was proposed, and the option was actually to turn it into a park. people are going up there and looked around and are all these wildflowers that it just started growing in the summer on the train tracks and was strangely in this kind of industrial, postindustrial weight beautiful. you read this unique vantage point over the city walking, snaking along the streets of west manhattan. crucially, the idea for that did not come from the officials were in charge of it. the urban planners, the people who were debating, the real commission or whatever it was, all the authorities have this idea, it did not occur to them. it came from a writer, an artist and photographer in chelsea and

two at seeing people walking up there, to stink up the drink beer and paint graffiti on whatever they're doing. they started thinking, there's a different alternate path. that eventually led slowly over time integration of the highline park, which is, most of us would agree, is one of the most celebrated new urban parks in the world over the last 20 years. it's one of those decisions where there's regional chance that park will be there for 100 years or more. prospect park, central park, the sparks are publicly to be around for 500 years. when you make a decision like that, when you make it any success away, the kind of time spent of a choice like that is really extraordinary, like a century long can a positive chain of effects which way she made correctly because you listened to these other options and these other voices. that is one of the key principles, and this is actually a principle that is shared, that

runs through a lot of my work and shows up in where good ideas come from and how we got to are now, and is one the key assets that you want to have on your side when you're trying to come up with these new options, trying to go through this mapping phase is to diversify the people who are advising you or who are part of the decision, to get different perspectives, to get gender diversity, ethnic diversity, professional diversity, intellectual diversity. there is a really rich body of research that shows that groups that are diverse on any number of different axes are smarter and more original in the problem-solving, independently to make complex decisions than groups that may be allegedly in terms of pure iq, are smart but are homogeneous in a makeup. this is sometimes called the diversity trump's ability.

there are a lot of different studies i talk about in the book that analyze this and you get groups together, a lot of studies with mock juries for instance, where you work with different jury competitions and detest this in the lab and seek which injuries come up with the most sophisticated analysis of the case and it turns out when you bring people of different perspectives and different ways of approaching a problem, and make the overall group smarter. interestingly, we used to think the reason why diversity causes an increase in group intelligence have to do with the fact that outsiders that you bring into the group, that they bring in new information, that wasn't chaired by the like-minded group at the outset. that is true, part of what happens in these encounters but there's another element that is more surprising to people is they also discovered, which is

it makes the original insider group more original and inventive in its thinking as well. just the presence of people who are different from you makes you challenge your assumptions, discover things you would not realized you knew. because you're in the group we realized there different ideas and different perspective at the table. this is a really important part when you think about our own life, people around us our work environments but it's an important point just in general we think that the value of diversity in society, in government, in our elected officials. we tend to talk about diversity in terms of equality of opportunity or social tolerance which are all equal representation which are important values but we also should stress that people should be aware when we see people at the tops of political organizations -- i was not mention the current administration -- where they are

to homogeneous, that is a sign that they're going to be not as intelligent in the decisions they make him not be as farsighted in the decisions they make, not as infinity and greeted in the problem-solving they do. we want diversity for a number of different reasons. so that's part of the mapping phase. but every decision by definition is also on some level a set of predictions about the future. when you're deciding whether to move to california you are implicitly thinking about a story of the future, thinking this is how it's going to turn a companies will be given scope this is why we will be happier there. this is -- your building those narratives in your head. and if you are telling accurate, making accurate predictions about the future you'll be

better about making those types of decision. it's difficult to predict the future when you're dealing with these complex problems. there's been a number of really fascinating studies of prediction. some people are probably with the work on expert political judgment. this great guy who went through and had the audacity to interview all these allegedly experts and pundits in various fields, people go on talk shows or write op ads. i suppose like me. and talk about the field of expertise whether it's international relations, financial markets and soul. who implicitly what did you are always making productions. i think this is what's going to happen. why do you do once he interviewed them all and ask them to make forecasts about what would happen over a two ao five your timeframe, what's going to happen to russia, which would have did unplug the

market, so one. what he did, so daring, is he then went back to the five years later and said hey, how did it turn out? it turned out that the so-called experts were like worse than chance. [laughing] at their predictions. they were worse than the proverbial dark turn chance present a correlation between an adverse correlation between how famous they were and the accuracy of the forecast. the more well known, the worse they were. he did find a subgroup of folks who resets quite dubbed the super forecasters, and they were actually better than chance. it went a perfect because no one can predict the future but they're able to see these long-term trends and begin to understand something about what was coming in the future better than chance. he tried to figure what was it about them that make them different from the so-called

experts. what he found was parallel to what retirement in terms of diversity, they were very eclectic in their interests. the folks who tended to be wrong about the future had a a single monolithic view of the world and the kind of threw it at how everything works and to to make everything fit in that model. whereas the super forecasters didn't have grand overarching theory. they had a bunch of sponsors about how things worked and they were interested in lots of different things. they had a lot of hobbies, a lot of minor fields they gaveled in. in psychological profile language, they scored very highly on the quality that is called openness to experience which is another word for curiosity. they had a lot of curiosity. in the sense in the own minds they had a lot of diversity, a lot of interest. they didn't have one big idea. that willingness to be open to

new possibilities, to follow new trails or signals that are suggesting some clue about what might come in future, that's a really important property to cultivate in yourself. in that addictive stage, you really are effectively telling stories, and the problem most of us have is we tell one story. that was my problem with california. i was like i constructed this beautiful postcard vision of what our life is going to be like, and all the other things that could potentially be problems, like my wife had no friends there, little things like that, you know, were written out of my master narrative that i constructed. there were a number of exercises that people have developed in making select decisions that force you to telstra but crucially force you to come multiple stories. this one technique that use a lot in the business environment

that was developed in the '70s, scenario planning, the ideas are facing this big decision and to make sense of it, to make sense of the market, if you're releasing a new product in the overall economic landscape you want to kill multiple stories about how this could turn out. one of the exercises that they do in doing scenario planning which alone is asked to tell three stories. one in which things get better roughly, one which things get worse and one of which things get weird which i really like that that one because who knows what we are to really means? we rarely tell the weird story, right? sometimes we tell the positive and negative story but we almost never tell them read story. again forcing yourself to imagine a set of circumstances in the future with things got weird even if it doesn't come to pass. enables you to kind of see the landscape, the opportunities with kind of a new clarity that

he would not have had before. another version of this that i love as well and it's an exercise that you're supposed to apply at that moment when you have fully decided that this is the way to go with going to choose plant a over plan b. with diversified our options, mapped all the variables, and we're going with this plan. there's one last exercise and this is something created by this psychologist named gary klein, a premortem. premortem is as you can imagine postmortem is the patient instead. forgot what cause the patient to die. the patient is going to die como predict what the cause of death will be. in this decision-making context it is this decision without to make in two years will turn out to be a catastrophic failure.

exercise that is to tell the story of how the failure happened. this turns out to unlock a lot of perception that people don't intuitively have if you simply ask them this is the decision were going to make, d.c. any flaws in it? when people get into that moment when darkside about the choice and ask them to see any flaws? no, it's perfect. we should move to california tomorrow. it's fantastic. when you force them to run the cycles and built but narrative architecture in their heads and imagine a story where catastrophic event in the future, they ended coming up with perceiving the flaws that are there that it been all along that it would not have the licensing. again it's a storytelling exercise. there are many, many more in the book along these lines, lots of interesting tricks. i think everyone's particular

toolkit is going to be different and hopefully there are enough in your that they will be useful and interesting to you if you get a chance to read it. i wanted to mention somewhere in this bookstore context that there's another theme that runs the book from the beginning to the end, which is about another storytelling which is the importance of literature in thinking about the great transformant decisions in our lives. i think this is one of the things, the novel in particular, although historical non-fiction can do this as well if it's in with the psychological lens can but the novel does this incredibly well which is to give us this inner access to the deciding mind of work, watching somebody even if it's in a fictional situation wrestling with a difficult choice. movies can do this, but because of the interior monologue you

get getting great literature, you're able to see somebody wrestling with a choice and a great novelist can show you all those different values and factors that are shaping the choice this fictional character is confronting. the novel i've always loved the most and that is run to my whole life is middlemarch, and there's a number of decisions in that book but a very famous decision at the center of it which many of you know i'm sure, deciding whether to renounce her inherited fortune from her late husband to run off with her political radical lover and thus give up on all these wonderful projects she has in trying to improve the lives of the people in our community. it's a decision, and a book i try to do the full-spectrum map of all the different factors that are influencing the

decisions, and extranet nuanced portrait elliott gives. it is the only book i believe it has lines about the bin laden raid and middlemarch. i don't think it's ever been attempted of course in history a fiction or nonfiction. in a first draft of the book there was a lot of middlemarch by the front and my editor at the first cut and was like wait. we need to dial back the 19th century literature. that's a little more balanced i think. someday i'll write -- but one of the ways in which we actually technologically have gotten better at making predictions, like for instance, the weather predictions, medical predictions, is that we have this technical ability to run simulations. we can forecast the weather so much more effectively wc 20 20r 30 years ago because we run --

we run among times with different variables. it's impossible to get it totally wrecked that we tweak the variables each time that we run it a 9/10 of a notice the storm forms 80% of the time and so we get the sense, 80% 80% probability that will be a store. that is great improve our accuracy of making forecasts. i think that's what narrative fiction does innocence for online spirit we can't run on -- ensemble situation and she would run to california are not? may be something in the future we can fully simulate your life and run it out in parallel 30 times africa if you're happy or not. i don't think it's coming anytime soon. we don't have the ability to simulate these decisions that are most important to us. what the novel gives us is in a sense practice, rehearsal to watching people making comparable decisions to the ones we might make. and helps us develop a

sensitivity, that a witness, the other mindedness, the winners of other peoples thoughts that so important in making choices. and in doing that that is a great deal of the wisdom i think narrative fiction, great realist novels endow us with. in many ways it's a book about scientific studies but it's also very much a book about literature as well as impact, about the art and science of decision-making. that leads me to just one last point and then i would love to hear your own question. one of the things i realize from doing the first couple of radio interviews for this book is a lot of people are calling in and saying my husband and i are trying to figure what we should have a second kid. [laughing] can you tell me should i or should i not? i'm like i'm going to become an advice columnist or something like that. i'm not sure if i have good answers to that but the last point i i wanted to leave you h is this, which is as i have

spent all these features going to this material and thinking about these issues, more and more as a cat to the end of the book, i became increasingly convinced that we should teach complex decision-making. they should be a required course in every high school in the country. think about all things you learned in high school. a couple of my old high school teachers are here. i learned an immense amount found in you, doctor, wherever you are. but in all, my whole high school and college and grad school experience was never offered a class which was how to make a complex life decision. it wasn't even an offering. i think it should be part of the core. because whatever you do in your career, whether you have a career or not, whatever path your life takes, the ability to be better at making decisions like this, the ability to have

these techniques work to at least understand the variables are at work, that is the skill you will need and your life will be improved approved because og that skill. whether i have conveyed them in this book were not, there is a lot of wisdom we have now beyond the pros and cons list that should be shared and should be part of the curriculum. by the way, some people say school shouldn't just be about learning useful things. school should be about stumbling across something that you did know you're interested in developing a new passion because you were forced to take a chemistry class even though you son of possible utility for chemistry in your life. that is a really valid point and i spent my whole career gaveling in crazy fields i had no idea of the interest in. serendipitous discovery is one of the great driving forces of creativity. internet will be on the syllabus and a class on how to make

complex decisions. think about what we talked about jews in a short time together here. there's neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, this whole utilitarian philosophy, and we haven't talked about. there's literature, behavioral economics, statistics and probability. that is incredibly diverse, diversity of thought, body of work that could be in one single course. there would be countless opportunities to stumble across something you didn't know, like we talk about brain site and that one section of the decision-making course and economy interested in the internet becoming a neurosurgeon. lots of opportunities to make an anticipated discoveries and find interests and for the curiosity that so important to be sparked by do it all be under the macro umbrella of teaching you a skill that makes you a better, wiser, more farsighted human being. in the way this book is an

attempt, the values in this book are the valleys of deliberation and diversity and long-term thinking, and think we can probably all agree those are values we could use more of right now. to me it seems like this is the kind of thing, these should be the core style course that you would take in tenth grade or 11th grade and some of the other things that are required they should be elected at the broader discussion. we can talk about that later. anyway, thanks you once again for coming out, politics driving, at such an honor to be. happy to answer the question but please come up to the microphone. [applause] >> a question right there. >> yet to jump up and down like

that. that's good. thank you. hi. my name is kathy reilly and a leader in district i'm curious about the tension between an individual decision like what is in your best interest, like i work a lot with education with high schools in the city, and 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 work with a group of principals, parents, community members and teachers and we sometimes have come and students, and have a difficult time influencing the government. but our task is to think a little larger sometimes than what's in my best interest and try to think about what's in all of our best interest. also as a grandmother, trying to think what's in my grand children's best interest in. i'm curious how the tension between what's in an individuals

best interest is not always what's in the groups best interest. >> it's a really profound question. that would be a whole month of the syllabus. so we do voice to think that the answer. first off, this is one of the places where the environmental kind of planning world i think is actually, and it shows up throughout "farsighted," since i'm really advanced work i think and come up with techniques in thinking about something like, for instance, building apart in a community. there are a lot of wonderful, and this sustainable planning world, and i will, in fact, we have a whole set of stakeholders that are involved in a choice whose values are often public but you want to come up with a solution, a decision that at least respects as many of those

valid as possible. there are a number of different processes of their developed, things like design, we bring a a bunch of stakeholders to the table, or interview the stakeholders separately together input. the last section, actual decision-making, actual decisions you make it into these three processes, the something i talk about in more detail and i'm going to get a little nerdy but is called a linear value model and you can do individual but also skills up to groups that's it which is it's really an updated version of the pros and cons list, which is you create a list of what you decide these are the five options that we are considering, you u.s.-21 involved to write down the valleys that are important to them and crucially to wait the valleys. this is important but not as important as this one. having children is really important, having a conversation

with men and in clubs is important and you get that a numerical weight and then you scored each of the options for how it performs for that particular value and you multiply the score by the weight and you added up for each option. that's the thing to do so but you can also get with the group. you can create selected on the table, like a spreadsheet on some level but it is a way numerically of doing this. the other thing that came to mind at that i will move on because i know people have questions, thinking that value outside of yourself. the premortem technique i was talking about. imagine how this could turn out to be a catastrophe. this is one of these things i feel like every so-called disruptive company like technology company that is creating some new product that is going to be released on what because all disrupt the weight we consume news or share values or share our ideas or whatever it is, they should be running more global pre-morton's on

those products. this is what facebook and twitter did not do, right? they just he said that we nasco everyone can connect and share photos. there's lunch with her friends. what could go wrong, right? susa, what could go wrong. that involves not just how could this go wrong for our company like because where social player in a connected world, how could this go look at the adverse effects of this be in a wider sense. and running that kind of exercise. there is a real interest in doing this among the folks i know in silicon valley and the tech world figure trying to do this more. they realize this is something, this is this is a skill they need to learn what it would been easier if it had been taught to them in high school. thank you. great question. [inaudible] >> great. >> trying to improve decision-making. that's one thing.

i want to touch on three different aspects of what you have laid out. one is that the whole idea of improving decision-making is really not needed because, i mean, we went through it with groupthink, 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. he went through the analysis of what is the basic style of decision-making, minimalist, consensus building and he lays out the criteria.

this isn't something that's really new new, and i think one the things we have to explore is what has not, what is constraining the situation? this is something that i've been working on myself. secondly, you discussed the curricula in high school. this is another area i been looking at. and i think, and i've been doing it by looking at the biographies of all the thinkers that it made any kind of original, and they've had an unusually, they have unusual lives, unique lives by virtue of the environment, intellectual environment, and the mentors and so forth. so for specific high school curricula in this country, that is a big challenge because you have a model. you sit in a classroom. i i mean, if we take many, many

people coming in to a classroom, people, intellectual stature, and even ordinary people. ordinary people make fantastic decisions, too, you know. so what i'm getting at is that we know what, we know what is missing, you know, like what's wrong, but we fall short of being able to do something about it and we are constrained heavily. the bottom line is i think better thinkers have more obstacles in front of them, and people do everything they can to undermine them. i was wondering what you thought of that and if you agreed, what you would consider -- >> that's great, , so many thins to say there. i'll just say, the thing that strikes me is you are absolutely

right this is the field of whatever you want to call it, decision signs there is not new in the sense it's the last ten years. lawson goes in the last 34 years. i talk about the first person -- groupthink is an incredible book. part of what you're saying is like the understanding has been at the conversation has been there, but if you think about the popular books that have tackled decision digital have been much more focused on gut decisions and thinking decisions, like and think fast and slow and so on. i get part of that because it is fascinating, we don't realize we are doing things, but strangely it's kind of hard to do the other stuff. i want to get to the other questions but one reason i think that may be the case is, and i

wrestled with this a lot, i almost didn't write like this k because i was wrestling with this so long, that it is the nature of every complex life choice that someone encounters to be unique and singular. there's part of it as a writer, kind of like how can i buy someone who is having this unique experience, unique forces that will never be repeated again in the life, i don't even know them because i'm an author, something i haven't met, how can i give them advice. caesar to talk about these are the things we know that all human brains during this is a way our system one brain works. it's easier to test those things in a lab because you can do this little controlled experiments. what i ultimately came out to us all the exercises and strategies in this book are about tricking your brain into seeing that complexity in that singularity with new clarity.

i really think about the decision you are confronting but i do know something about how you can get around your biases or see the problem with more nuanced nuance or understand potential variables down the way my magic run a premortem or whatever the strategy is. people run away from that in terms of popularizing for teaching these things because of that, the challenger teaching something that is so singular. great thoughts, thank you. >> actually i did -- [inaudible] >> let's move that back up. >> i did a like a five-day training seminar, which was fantastic, change my life. you can totally take that and apply that to high school and would be world changing.

they can be done, 100%. >> this is more like -- this sort of bootstraps onto what the previous question asked. you've got, as a writer, as an organizer of information, you've got a bunch of different approaches, a bunch of different ideas come all the stuff and you trying, when you're you are apg the are you trying to say okay, i can't do all that and this is my take and do not going to get paralyzed dealing with all the minutia here, here and here? or do try to fall into some kind of coherent whole that reverses the sound of it all? how do you address that as a writer? >> it is one of the big questions, and to think it is answerable. >> and have three kids. >> i just ignore the kids. that's not true. first off, there's a

technological question which has to do come up with about this incredible wordprocessor i've used, some folks maybe scribner nurse as well but i wrote a piece called why writing books is not processing works. every wordprocessor was writing an interoffice memo. scribner is the first one that's been designed from the granted to do with the project starts with a bunch of fragmented ideas that solely emergent coalesced into a linear structure. and so there's a technological way which that software helps me and has been a big breakthrough over the last three books, and it's much easier. but what has happened is you have to have this time where it's about linearity which is you this long time where the ideas particularly a a book lie this are good ideas, where it

any order or sequence. they are just little dots of little nodes recently, loose network. you had the feeling of like there's an interesting thing here about darwin, and there's interesting thing i read about groupthink and janice and there's this other interesting -- and the nodes start to get bigger. something else attaches to the seems related and that another thing attaches to this one and at a certain point which what is look at the whole map and say there's a big cluster here and in the cluster here and the cluster here. maybe those are chapters or maybe those are seconds in one chapter. only after you get to that point do you then start thinking, and the way i work, about sequence. then you think okay, but yet that's interesting and that's meaningful matriarch of that's interesting, meaningful material but which should go first?

you have to organize in that way. >> but how do you deal with the burden of being authoritative, understanding versus other school of thought or this other school of thought and how do i not get paralyzed by that? >> just ridiculous overconfidence. [laughing] >> probably% of my books i kind of proposed to my dad can i think that writing this book and my dad has said this book is dedicated to my that actually, but you know nothing about that. [laughing] and he's right. thank you. >> i have two questions and jusu touched on them but one is given that we've been reminded all wel live in crazy town, how do we inject, as citizens, advertisements in decision-making process, how

would we inject a little more rationality into what has been deficit over and over again, usually i get decision, something i can sophist dishes and someone? my second question, i recently have become acquainted with gibbs law 51, rule 51, which is sometimes you are wrong. how do you build in an ability to recognize that you're wrong and maybe adapt? >> profound questions, great questions, everyone. two thoughts. the first is, in one of the mock jury trial experiments that i alluded to that was looking at the role of diversity decision-making with a mock juries, one of the really interesting finding is the more diverse a group ended up making

better decisions and at the same time they were less certain that they were right mandate homogeneous group that was actually more likely to be wrong. there's this paradox of like the more likely are to be right, the list certain you are to be right. learning that, that's a really profound -- d busily to entertain the idea that you are wrong is, there are all these biases we have come confirmation bias we have come and groupthink on some of the keep us from doing that. in the bin laden story, they spin all this time leading up to the raid challenging their assumptions, reading the 70 levels at all these different points. really trying to figure out, investigating the things that

they haven't thought about, trying to figure out if they're missing something enforcing the team to come up with alternate explanations. one way we can encourage that, the other part of your question, is by celebrating examples of that kind of deliberation when it is done well, right? trying to do that with, there's a lot of folks or something like the bin laden story on the raid itself, but to me what's more important in a way the rate is incredible and daring, the great drama in another operation like that, but that nine months deliberation process that was really right in this very artful way to make sure that story is out there, and my friend is here, did a wonderful tv show about it the talk about this as well, making sure those are part

of our popular narratives. .. >> if you've ever seen a political debate where one of the candidates is asked how do you make complicated decisions, what's your process, how do do u do it, shouldn't that be within one of -- be one of questions we ask? >> as a longtime high school english teacher, i would just -- let's just teach more novels. [laughter] and let me decide the curriculum. [laughter] assigned and students really liked ghost map.

my question has to do with, to me, most tragic decision, the decision to invade iraq. and how awful that turned out. on one side you're talking about the decision to two after bin laden, i wonder be you could say something -- 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 allude 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 to go into iraq. particularly in the farther weapons of mass destruction, that decision process. and so the book kind of alludes to that and also same thing,

famous studies of bay of pigs in the group think book as well from janus, and, in fact, even in bay of pigs there's, you know, there was a deliberate course correction that kennedy made merchandise the administration between -- inside the administration between bay of pigs and the cuban missile crisis. they changed their process in the way, in the kind -- just literally, like, the dynamics of how they had those discussions. because they realized the way they were making the decisions was not working, so they thought of the structure. in iraq, i haven't looked at it directly, and the book kind of just alludes to it. in a sense, what you didn't have where you just had we'll be treated as liberators narrative, and there just wasn't enough time spent on surfacing other alternate scenarios and really allowing those scenarios to have a seat at table in the deliberation over the decision. but you could -- other books have been written about that, about that process.

but studying the wrong decisions, there is a long section about the mistake that washington made in the battle of brooklyn that are kind of, that kind of -- once you've read through the military analysis of a bad choice, though it ended up all right. okay. one more question, and then i want to make sure we have time for signing too. >> my question is more about personal decisions. >> yeah. >> so the process of getting better decisions requires you to look back at past decisions critically and especially failures. and so the point of making good personal decisions, how do you balance the process of, you know, dwelling on your failures and -- >> yeah. >> trying to get better at them and actually make the decision? >> yeah. it's really -- well, this came up last night. i was doing a talk at kind of tech start-up hub in new york called dataworks, and, you know,

the whole ethos in the tech world is fail, you know, fail faster. [laughter] embrace failure. you can't get funded in silicon valley unless you've failed three times. you're not trying hard enough. and so there is a lot of bad decisions, so you can then be smart enough to make a really good decision. i think there is, you know, one of the attributes that i think does come up in making that final choice, let's say you got three options ahead of you that is related to this and sometimes we think of it in terms of app development or start-up development, that is choose the option that may not look optimal but that offers the most flexibility downstream if it ends up not working out. so 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 lot more -- there's room to tic ther with it. you're -- toninger with it. --

tinker with it. these open the possibility for effective learning failure without it necessarily being catastrophic, i guess. all right, thank you all so much. i'll sign some books. thank you for coming out, i appreciate it. [applause] >> so books are available behind the register. please fold the up your chairs and set them against the wall. thanks for coming in, everybody. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. for a complete television schedule, visit booktv.org. you can also follow along behind the scenes on social media at booktv on twitter, instagram and facebook. >> john january rely, tell us about your fbi career. >> had a great career in the fbi. start thed off over 20 years ago where i worked bank robberies, terrorism, everythiin