An easy way to make tough decisions: 5 questions for Suzy Welch

Several weeks ago, I saw Suzy Welch on the Today show talking about her new book, 10-10-10. The book offers a simple tool for making decisions in all corners of life.

Here's how it works: When working through a decision, you let yourself go down various paths and you explore the way the decision could unfold on those various paths over the next 10 minutes, over the next 10 months, and over the next 10 years. Those time frames aren't meant to be exact; they are stand-ins meant to help you look at how the making of an important decision might affect the short-term, the medium-term, and long-term periods of your life.

From the moment I saw that interview, I was 10-10-10-ing every decision, from whether to take a new assignment that threatened to ruin a pre-planned vacation, to how to confront a close friend who had offended me. My old standby of writing down pros and cons was quickly supplanted by this new method, and I've now tested it in scores of situations. In short, I'm a believer. Which is why I wanted to share Welch's ideas on this blog. I interviewed her by phone about how to use 10-10-10 to make better decisions around career issues. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

The core of your process is about exploring short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, all while staying true to one's values. It seems to assume that most people can identify their authentic values and these different goals. In your experience, where do people have the most trouble?

All too often, we make decisions based on their immediate impact or a lofty long-term vision. The purpose of 10-10-10 is to force you to consider all three time frames. As for the values aspect, people value different things at different stages in their lives. When I became a mother, I placed a higher value on sleep, for example. The hardest part for people is articulating those values for themselves. When I met my husband, he knew his values cold. But there is a large group of people who know their values, but don't live by them, and an even larger group that don't know their values and make haphazard decisions based on gut and guilt. 10-10-10 hopes to be an antidote to all of these situations. If you know your values, you can make decisions by them. If you know them and are not living by them, 10-10-10 reconciles that gap. Lastly, doing a 10-10-10 is a way to discover your values, and the book takes you through a series of questions -- a values excavation -- meant to help you get to them.

Can you give an examples of how 10-10-10 yields well-reasoned results in a career context?

Right now, a lot of MBAs are coming out of quite good business schools unable to find the kind of work they thought they'd like to get. I worked recently with a woman who graduated from a fine school who was grappling with whether to take a job that was less than worthy of her or trying to start an entrepreneurial venture. We went right to 10-10-10. The first thing she had to do was get a sense of her values around risk and her values about financial security. There are people who can live with nothing and be filled with joy and others who are uncomfortable if they can't save a lot of money. She also had to come to terms with how much prestige mattered to her. Once we went through this values excavation, we were able to better compare this lower level job in retail to the idea of her starting her own company. In 10 minutes, it would be harder, messier, and more awkward to explain the choice to go out on her own to her parents, who had different values than she did. But the choice was effortless once she thought past this immediate block and into the future she wanted to build. She is now out of "decision paralysis" and moving forward with her business idea.

You admit in the book that you failed to use 10-10-10 during a critical moment in your professional and romantic life -- your decision to start a relationship with Jack Welch, whom you had interviewed for the Harvard Business review. When the stakes were so high, why is it that you failed to use this tool?

To be honest, I was completely overwhelmed by events and it was an extraordinary circumstance where my life was imploding on several fronts. And there were so many questions at once. The first was what to do about the scandal that had erupted. What we should have done was hold a press conference. Instead we decided to hunker down. It felt right at the time. I failed the tool because I felt I was doing the best I could in a minefield. After the storm passed, my life was restored and re-centered and I went back to 10-10-10. But just recently, I interviewed to a woman for the book who also didn't use the tool when she was at her most emotional. I now see that I could have used it even in that difficult period.

You intensely studied the psychology of decision-making as research for this book. Based on your knowledge of how people make decisions, do you think that applying 10-10-10 can actually overcome some of the hard-wiring that is built into the human brain?

The human brain is a wondrous thing and far be it from me to be critical of it. That said, our minds are wired in a certain way where we have impulses that can lead to, well, irrational decisions. We have, for instance, a well-documented tendency towards selective information deafness, which means that we tend to favor information that we've heard the most times or from people we like over information coming from sources we don't like. But often those people are telling us things that are important. There's also a decision-making bias called "escalating commitment," which I see every day in our jobs and in our relationships. That is, our tendency to enlarge or deepen our commitments to failing enterprises. It's why couples in the middle of divorce buy vacation homes or we stay in jobs much longer than we should. Why do we do it? It could be that evolution favored the early humans who stuck with difficult projects.

As we mature and have experiences. though, we acquire techniques to overcome some of our not-so-useful automatic reactions. I met a neuroscientist the other day who had one of the great lines of all time, "Good decision-makers are made not born." The nice thing is that you can use 10-10-10 as a way to avoid some of the bumps and bruises that result from being on autopilot all the time.

When it comes to that final piece, the 10 years, isn't it hard to know or imagine how the future will play out?

You can't always predict the future, but you can always imagine the life you want. What you will know after a 10-10-10 is how you want to live and then every decision can bring you closer to that vision. So think about the third 10 as the life down the road that you want to create for yourself.