In their highly readable book, Smart Choices, decision experts Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa provide a practical and workable roadmap for intelligent decision making. Although addressed to the general reader, executives will find it both approachable and relevant to practically all of the decisions they confront, big and small alike. In their formulation, effective decision-making is founded on eight elements: Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences, Tradeoffs, Uncertainty, Risk Tolerance, and Linked Decisions. The first five of these, referred to by the apt acronym “PrOACT”, are the essential ones involved in all good decisions.

Their five-to-seven steps differ from the six sequential steps according to Drucker, or the seven steps in our own recent paper, “Decision Decision”, but also have much in common. All these sources agree on the importance of carefully defining the problem, and coming to a clear understanding of the consequences of alternative choices. For each of the steps, the authors lucidly and concisely explain the reasons for it, provide an illustration, and extract lessons from the application.

The material is so well organized that potentially difficult ideas become easy to digest. For example, in discussing alternatives, the book separates out four types: Process alternatives, win-win alternatives, information gathering, and time-buying alternatives. Conceptual clarity is followed by practical helpfulness, in this case taking the form of six suggestions for generating useful alternatives: use your objectives by asking “How?”; challenge constraints; set high expectations; do your own thinking; learn from experience; and ask others for suggestions.

In addition to skillfully explaining each of the steps in their decision framework, Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa include a chapter on psychological traps, in which they reveal the eight most common and most serious errors in decision making. They conclude with a chapter on “The Wise Decision Maker”, in which they move from the process to the person, looking at ten core practices of successful decision makers. Even executives with formal training in decision making, if it was some years ago, will find this in this book an efficient reminder of the crucial elements of effective decision making.