Smart Choices

CHAPTER 5

Consequences

YOU’VE DEFINED YOUR PROBLEM, you’ve structured your objectives, and you’ve established the set of alternatives you have to choose from. Now, to make a smart choice, you need to compare the merits of the competing alternatives, assessing how well each satisfies your fundamental objectives. To make the comparisons, you’ll first need to describe how well you’ll fare with each alternative. In other words, you’ll need to lay out the consequences each alternative would have for each of your objectives. If you describe the consequences well, your decision will often be obvious— without requiring much further reflection.

This chapter presents a simple message: be sure you really understand the consequences of your alternatives ...