“When you have a blank page you have an infinite number of possibilities. Anything can happen, and as soon as you define the first paragraph you’ve narrowed it down drastically and everything you do from that point on narrows it further, step by step by step, until really there is only one place to go,” says thriller writer Lee Child, whose name still sits atop the global best-selling Jack Reacher books.
It perfectly illustrates the process of decision-making in the real world too. Up until the moment you decide on a particular course of action there are endless possibilities open to you, and each decision after that limits your options. A new podcast series explores the complexity of this process and provides useful insights to help you make better decisions, at home, at work and for the country.
The internet will tell you that you make up to 35,000 decisions every day. Most are inconsequential over longer periods, a few might have an effect on how your week turns out, and only a handful will have a significant bearing on your life. Depending on your pay grade and sphere of influence, the calls you make could have wider ramifications.
For Child, who sells a book somewhere in the world every three seconds, every word and every plot line is critical to the story. But the pivotal decision came in 2019 when he realised he no longer wanted to keep spending the dark northern hemisphere winters tied to his desk, conjuring up new adventures for his creation.
He contemplated killing his hero, letting “him bleed to death on a filthy motel room floor”, but decided against it as he felt it would be cruel to the reader. He opted instead to extend Reachers’ life, and handed the legacy to his younger brother Andrew, who this week delivered his first solo effort, and the 29th in the series, In Too Deep.
It would have been easy enough to simply stop writing the books, after all Reacher leads an itinerant life and his disappearance between small towns would be unnoticed in the world Child created. It would have been more poetic than the messy end the author contemplated. He even considered letting Reacher settle down, rent a house behind a white picket fence and adopt a rescue dog. Fans might have revolted at that.
Decision-making is integral to all of our lives and Child’s approach to writing brings one perspective on the impact of a process most of us treat as little more than a reaction to circumstances and events we face regularly.
Changed lives
After my decision to stop presenting The Money Show after more than 20 years of daily programmes at the end of June, I reflected on the one thing I had enjoyed above all others: getting inside the minds of people who either made a big decision that changed the course of their lives, or were in a position where the decisions they made had a significant effect on the lives of others.
Hence the launch this week of The Art of Deciding with Bruce Whitfield that will do exactly that. It delves deep into the decision-making processes of busy and globally influential people and features a cast of extraordinary guests.
In addition to Child, who kicked off the series this week, you will be introduced to Sharmadean Read, a British entrepreneur with Jamaican roots who is using tech to revolutionise the global beauty industry. Unlike many in the world of start-up, her willingness to openly share ideas is disarming.
Karan Bilimoria is a big believer in making your own luck. The Indian-born cross-party peer who created Cobra beer as he couldn’t find a suitable brew to match his favourite curries, married a South African who went to school in Bloemfontein. He is philosophical about seizing opportunities: “Serendipity,” he says, “is seeing what everyone one else sees, but thinking what no-one else has thought.”
You will also hear from Cape Town-born Brad Fried, whose rise through consulting at McKinsey to CEO of Investec in London and becoming chair of the Bank of England started with a cold call to Jim Wolfensohn, whom he had seen on the cover of Fortune magazine. Wolfensohn, who later headed the World Bank for two five-year terms, was bemused as to how a recently qualified SA chartered accountant had managed to get through to his personal number.
For Fried the choice was simple. Phone or don’t phone: “What is the counterfactual? What is the worst that can happen?” Wolfensohn could have ranted, raved and slammed down the phone (as you could in the ’90s), but instead he chuckled at the sheer audacity of the approach and offered him life-changing advice to study an MBA at Wharton. He also invited him to pop by should he ever be in New York. Which he did.
The sheer volume of decisions we make daily is hard to compute. Researchers suggest it’s one every three seconds. Hard to believe? It all depends on how many words you speak, emails you send, who you cc’d (and who you didn’t) plus the number of times you roll your eyes at a colleague’s most recent “big” idea. It’s not just the decisions we make at home and at work — we are also subjected to the decisions made on our behalf by elected officials who face a five-year work cycle and are in a constant race against time to the next ballot.
In politics, as in the real world, decision-making is about trade-offs. The moment you take a particular course, as Child suggests, it sets in motion a series of events and options that must be weighed up, challenged and considered. Some people are better at it than others. Why?
For Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian police officer who supervised the interrogation of mass killer Anders Breijvik to establish whether he operated alone or as part of a connected network of right-wing vigilantes across Europe, it was about ensuring that those tasked with unpicking his story considered one key factor: What if the opposite is true?
He has revolutionised police interview techniques in an effort to move away from the use of torture, coercion and psychological manipulation, which has been shown to lead to false confessions, wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. Much of the scientific base of investigative interviewing stems from social and cognitive psychology, including studies of human memory, interpersonal communication and decision-making theory.
Decision-making is an art, not science, and is subject to all of our beliefs and biases about and perspectives on how the world works. This new series will help you brush up your skills and help you make better choices more often.
• The Art of Deciding podcast with Bruce Whitfield is available for download on BusinessLIVE weekly.
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