In their best-selling book Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath identified ‘four villains of decision-making’, these are the common pitfalls that we fall into when making a choice. Their resulting decision-making process aims to avoid these villains and empower better decisions. 

The WRAP Decision Process includes: Widening your options to avoid narrow framing; Reality testing your assumptions to avoid the Confirmation Heuristic; Attaining distance to avoid short-term emotions; and Preparing to be wrong to avoid overconfidence. 

WHY WRAP? 

We were immediately drawn to this model because it effectively applies the Inversion approach, one of our favourite models, to decision-making. In other words, rather than obsessing about making great decisions, WRAP empowers you to avoid making bad ones. 

In arguing for their model, the Heath brothers note that people tend to overestimate the impact of analysis over the power of an effective decision-making process. They explain: “When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.

"Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.” 

APPLYING WRAP.

We know you’re busy, so we’ve distilled the WRAP Decision Process into this quick reference table for you: 

SETTING TRIPWIRES. 

The Heath Brothers implicitly advocate Fast and Slow Thinking and acknowledge that we will generally make irrational, fast decisions left to our own devices. They, therefore, suggest setting ‘tripwires’ which are a form of Nudges to encourage us to focus on decisions more consciously at key moments. They cite the example of Zappos which offers their employees $400 to quit during their induction process, this temptation is a tripwire to force an early decision point for less motivated employees. 

IN YOUR LATTICEWORK. 

The WRAP Decision Process has connections to many other models and frameworks as you can see from the many links above. WRAP is a form of Inversion in that it avoids the worst of decision-making. In addition, when applying WRAP you can use:

• Framestorming and Opportunity Costs to help widen your focus; 

• Rolestorming and Prototyping to challenge your Confirmation Heuristics; 

• Advice Giving Effect and Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimisation Framework to challenge short-term emotions; 

• And  Probabilistic Thinking, Inversion (premortems) and Redundancy or a Margin of Error to challenge overconfidence. 

Beyond those models consider applying the WRAP Process in combination with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework to identify the level or nature of complexity you are facing, or as an overlay to Decision Trees.