I’ve been reading the latest book by Dan Heath and Chip Heath, Decisive. (They have written two other great books: Made to Stick and Switch.) Many great insights are offered in this book that pertain to decision making and also applicable to how we resolve disputes. I’ll focus on the importance of choosing a good process. Excerpts from Decisive are in quotations.

Decisive identifies “four villains of decision making” – narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence, and provides strategies for overcoming them. These “four villains” also often obstruct parties in a legal dispute from reaching the best result. Short-term emotion and overconfidence often result in people making the wrong choice of which process they use to resolve their dispute.

For example, the short-term emotions of “wanting to get our vengeance” or “making the other side pay for what they did” or “wanting to make them suffer” often lead people to either suing the other side or vigorously defending the other side’s lawsuit. Most of the time, other approaches provide better ways to achieving the party’s goals and satisfying the party’s long-term interests. But because clients only see their side of a dispute at the beginning, their view is usually tainted by overconfidence and leads them to think they have a “slam-dunk” case. That overconfidence often leads them to choose a process and a lawyer that will stoke that overconfidence rather than tempering it with a reality check.

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