The Decisions That Changed the World

Afterwards, every decision looks obvious. The people who agreed say they always knew, the people who did not agree stop mentioning it, and a story forms in which the right answer was visible all along. That story teaches you nothing, because when you are the one in the room the answer is not visible at all. This book goes back to sixteen moments before anybody knew how they would end. A Soviet officer deciding whether an alarm showing five incoming missiles is real. A submarine officer refusing, in a boat that has run out of air, to agree to a nuclear torpedo. Eighteen Chinese farmers signing a secret agreement with a clause about who will raise their children if they are executed. An Indian minister betting the country's food supply on a genetic hypothesis. Engineers on a conference call the night before a launch, being asked to prove that a shuttle will fail. And the quieter ones. A laboratory giving away the web. A trucking man deciding the box should never be opened. A Chinese court ending the voyages for reasons that were entirely sensible at the time. Kodak, which saw digital photography clearly and still could not act. Norway, deciding that oil money would not count as income. A factory where anybody can stop the line. Each chapter tells what actually happened, as carefully as the record allows, and then asks the only question that transfers: what did this person do that you could do? With an honest note on where the evidence is thin, because a book about the danger of certainty should not be told with more certainty than it has earned.

• The asymmetry test: when you cannot tell which world you are in, take the mistake you can recover from
• How to notice when the burden of proof has been quietly inverted
• Why the same advisers produced a disaster and then a rescue, and what changed between the two rooms
• Normalisation of deviance: how careful organisations end up doing something reckless without anybody deciding to
• Why the decisions you make by not making them are usually the strategy
• How to build a structure that does not depend on somebody being brave on a bad night

• Anyone who has to decide with less information than they want
• People who run meetings, and suspect the meetings are not working
• Readers of narrative history who want the mechanism, not just the story
• Anyone who has been right in a room and lost anyway
• People building something they want to survive their own attention

1. 01Introduction: The moment before
2. 02Part One: Deciding when you cannot know
3. 03Part Two: Deciding against the room
4. 04Part Three: Choosing what not to keep
5. 05Part Four: How careful people decide badly
6. 06Closing: What to take with you
7. 07Sources, and how confident we can be

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