Conclusion: Change Your Decision Making Immediately

The author intends to close the book with some concrete and actionable advice, but first, he wants to stress that you don't need to think twice before every decision. Most decisions we make are clear-cut, straightforward, and routine that have very little impact. The best course is often obvious enough. But when the stakes are sufficiently high and you find yourself in doubt, then it becomes important to be more deliberate.

(EN: What follows strikes me as Polonius's farewell - a jumble of random things cobbled together. I'll annotate, all the same.)

• Avoiding potential mistakes is a three-step process: prepare, recognize, and apply.
• Merely being aware of the causes of mistakes makes a person better able to see the warning signs as decisions are being made
• Observe others who are making decisions. The spectator's view can provide insights that will guide your own performance.
• Consider the problem in the context of a situation. Assumptions about circumstances lead us astray.
• Consider the full breadth of consequences of an action to avoid unnecessary side-effects. Unintended consequences are the result of negligent decision-making.
• Consider the motivations of others. Any decision impacting or involving other people may be in harmony or in conflict with decisions others are making at the same time. A skilled negotiator figures out what his opponent wants, a poor one focuses only on himself.
• Recognize that there are limits to what you know, and the unknown factors can have a major impact. Try to consider as broadly as possible. Many unlucky people are merely unobservant.
• Recognize there are limits to your ability to control. When factors are beyond your control, consider the range of possible outcomes, not just the most probable outcome.
• Be attentive to feedback. If you're serious about changing the way you think, be open to suggestions and observations of others.
• Use documentation. Not only does writing things down help to focus a decision, it provides a record you can review later to audit your performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Leverage checklists. People underutilize checklists, in spite of their effectiveness in enabling them to make sure that they do everything that needs to be done.
• Perform a Postmortem. An after-action analysis is a valuable learning tool to evaluate what was done right/wrong and learn lessons for the future.
• Recognize complexity, and resist the urge to oversimplify. This is also a great challenge, in that simplification creates blind spots.

A parting note is that we can all recognize bad decisions in arrears - we sift through the damage to identify what the decision-maker could have anticipated, researched, and considered and it's often something that seems like a foolish oversight. To be more deliberate in decision-making, to "think twice" before taking action, enables us to recognize these same things before a disastrous decision is made.