p.22, 24, 25 Making wise trade-offs is one of the most important and difficult challenges in decision making.
The more alternatives you're considering and the more objectives you're pursuing, the more trade-offs you'll need to make...
Before you can begin making trade-offs, you need to have a clear picture of all your alternatives and their consequences for
each of your objectives... Once you've defined and mapped the consequences of each alternative, you should always look for
opportunities to eliminate one or more of the alternatives. The fewer the alternatives, the fewer trade-offs you'll ultimately
need to make.
p.54 Focused trial and error is probably the most widely used procedure for adapting to partial
knowledge. It has two parts: knowing where to start the search for an effective intervention, and checking outcomes
at intervals to adjust and modify the intervention... Focused trial and error assumes that there is important
information that the executive does not have and must proceed without... [it is] feeling one's way
to an effective course of action despite the lack of essential chunks of data. It is an adaptive, not a rationalistic, strategy.
p.144-145 Researchers have been studying the way our minds function in making decisions for half a century.
This research, in the laboratory and in the field, has revealed that we use unconscious routines to cope with the
complexity inherent in most decisions. These routines, known as heuristics, serve us well in most situations.
