The WRAP Model for Decision Making

6. The WRAP Process

We believe Joseph Priestley, the scientist, made a good decision to work with Lord Shelburne, though it’s impossible to say for certain. After all, it’s possible that spending time with Shelburne distracted him just enough to stop him from making yet another world-historical contribution (cinnamon rolls? the Electric Slide?). But what we do know is that there’s a lot to admire about the process he used to make the decision, because he demonstrates that it’s possible to overcome the four villains of decision making.

Of course, he’s not the only one to triumph: Steve Cole at HopeLab beat narrow framing by thinking “AND not OR.” Andy Grove overcame short-term emotions by asking, “What would my successor do?”

We can’t deactivate our biases, but these people show us that we can counteract them with the right discipline. The nature of each villain suggests a strategy for defeating it:

1. You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. So …

→ Widen Your Options. How can you expand your set of choices? Look beyond the choice first presented to you, including combinations of options and alternatives that solve the same underlying problem.

2. You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving info. So …

→ Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information that you can trust? Seek evidence that could challenge your preferred option, and ask what would change your mind.

3. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So …

→ Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make the best choice? Consider the choice from a less immediate perspective, such as what you would advise a friend to do.

4. Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. So …

→ Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed? Consider how the decision could turn out differently from your forecast and what would prompt you to change course.

The mnemonic WRAP captures the four verbs. We like the notion of a process that “wraps” around your usual way of making decisions, helping to protect you from some of the biases we’ve identified.

The four steps in the WRAP model are sequential; in general, you can follow them in order—but not rigidly so. Sometimes you’ll double back based on something you’ve learned. For example, in the course of gathering information to Reality-Test Your Assumptions, you might discover a new option you hadn’t considered before. Other times, you won’t need all of the steps. A long-awaited promotion probably won’t require much distance before you accept and pop the champagne.

At its core, the WRAP model urges you to switch from “auto spotlight” to manual spotlight. Rather than make choices based on what naturally comes to your attention—visceral emotions, self-serving information, overconfident predictions, and so on—you deliberately illuminate more strategic spots. You sweep your light over a broader landscape and point it into hidden corners.

It would be tempting to promise that following these four steps religiously will make your life a picture of human contentment. You will lack for nothing, and your peers will herald your wisdom. Alas. If our own experience is any guide, then you are still going to make a healthy share of bad decisions.

Here is our goal: We want to make you a bit better at making good decisions, and we want to help you make your good decisions a bit more decisively (with appropriate confidence, as opposed to overconfidence). We also want to make you a better adviser to your colleagues and loved ones who are making decisions, because it’s usually easier to see other people’s biases than your own.

The process is intended for decisions that take longer than five minutes to make: Whether to buy a new car, take a new job, or break up with your boyfriend. How to handle a difficult colleague. How to allocate budgetary resources between departments. Whether to start your own business.

If a decision takes only seconds—if, for instance, you are an NFL quarterback choosing which open receiver to hit with a pass—then this deliberative process is not designed for that moment. Much has been written in recent years about intuitive decisions, which can be surprisingly quick and accurate. But—and this is a critical “but”—intuition is only accurate in domains where it has been carefully trained. To train intuition requires a predictable environment where you get lots of repetition and quick feedback on your choices.

If you’re a chess grand master, you should trust your gut. (You’ve had thousands of hours of study and practice with prompt feedback on your moves.) If you’re a manager making a hiring decision, you shouldn’t. (You’ve probably hired only a small number of people over the years, and the feedback from those hires is delayed and often confounded by other factors.)

Our hope is that you’ll embrace the process we outline in Decisive and practice it until it becomes second nature. As an analogy, think of the humble grocery list. If you’re forgetful (as we are), it’s hard to imagine shopping without a list. Over time, the routine sharpens; you get better at recording, right away, the random items that occur to you, and when you shop, you begin to trust that everything you need to buy will be on the list. The grocery list is a correction for the deficiency of forgetfulness. And it’s a much better solution than focusing really hard on not being forgetful.

Occasionally some aspect of the WRAP process will lead to a home-run insight, as in the cases of Steve Cole’s “horse race” and Andy Grove’s question “What would our successors do?” More commonly, it will yield small but consistent improvements in the way you make decisions—and that’s critical too. Think of a baseball player’s batting average: If a player gets a hit in one out of every four at-bats (a .250 average) over the course of a season, he is mediocre. If he hits in one out of three (.333), he’s an All-Star. And if he hits .333 over his career, he could be a Hall-of-Famer. Yet the gap in performance is small: only one extra hit in every twelve at-bats.

To get that kind of consistent improvement requires technique and practice. It requires a process. The value of the WRAP process is that it reliably focuses our attention on things we otherwise might have missed: options we might have overlooked, information we might have resisted, and preparations we might have neglected.

A more subtle way the WRAP process can help us is by ensuring that we’re aware of the need to make a decision. And that leads us to David Lee Roth.

ROTH WAS THE LEAD singer for Van Halen from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, an era when the band cranked out one smash hit after another: “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Dance the Night Away,” “Jump,” “Hot for Teacher,” and more. Van Halen toured tirelessly, with over a hundred concerts in 1984 alone, and behind the band’s head-banging appeal was some serious operational expertise. It was one of the first rock bands to bring major stage productions to smaller markets. As Roth recalled in his autobiography, “We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max.”

The band’s production design was astonishingly complex. The contract specifying the setup was, according to Roth, “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages” because it was so technical and complex it was like reading a foreign language. A typical article in the contract might say, “There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes…”

While Van Halen had its own road crew, much of the prep work had to be done in advance, before the eighteen-wheelers arrived. Van Halen and its crew lived in fear that the venues’ stagehands would screw up something and leave the band exposed to injury. (This was the same era when Michael Jackson’s head was set on fire by some misfiring stage pyrotechnics as he filmed a Pepsi commercial.) But, given the band’s frantic touring schedule, there wasn’t time to do a top-to-bottom quality check at each venue. How could the band know when they were at risk?

During this same period of touring, rumors circulated wildly about Van Halen’s backstage antics. The band members were notorious partiers, and while there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about a rock band that likes to party, Van Halen seemed committed to a level of decadence that was almost artistic. Roth wrote in his autobiography, “Well, we’ve heard about throwing a television out a window. How about getting enough extension cords … so that the television can remain plugged in all the way down to the ground floor?”

Sometimes, though, the band’s actions seemed less like playful mayhem and more like egomania. The most egregious rumor about the band was that its contract rider demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage—with all the brown ones removed. There were tales of Roth walking backstage, spotting a single brown M&M, and freaking out, trashing the dressing room.

This rumor was true. The brown-free bowl of M&Ms became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star diva behavior. Here was a band making absurd demands simply because it could.

The band’s “M&M clause” was written into its contract to serve a very specific purpose. It was called Article 126, and it read as follows: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” The article was buried in the middle of countless technical specifications.

When Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d immediately walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he said. “They didn’t read the contract… Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

The demand served an operational purpose, however theatrical Roth’s response. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention—whether they’d read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. He needed a way, in other words, to snap out of “mental autopilot” and realize that a decision had to be made. In Van Halen’s world, a brown M&M was a tripwire.

COULDN’T WE ALL USE a few tripwires in our lives? We’d have a “trigger weight” that signaled the need to exercise more, or a trigger date on the calendar that reminded us to ask whether we’re investing enough in our relationships. Sometimes the hardest part of making a good decision is knowing there’s one to be made.

In life, we spend most of our days on autopilot, going through our usual routines. We may make only a handful of conscious, considered choices every day. But while these decisions don’t occupy much of our time, they have a disproportionate influence on our lives. The psychologist Roy Baumeister draws an analogy to driving—in our cars, we may spend 95% of our time going straight, but it’s the turns that determine where we end up.