I have long been drawn to one question: why do capable people make poor decisions? I work in civil engineering, where a wrong call can show up years later as a failed structure, and that pushed me to study how judgment goes wrong and how to repair it. I have read widely on decision-making, risk, and clear thinking, and I write about it for general readers. I chose these five because each one changed how I question my own thinking. I hope they help you pause, check your assumptions, and decide better before the cost of a mistake lands on someone else.
I wrote...
What Are We Missing?
By
Zafar Alam,
What is my book about?
What Are We Missing? starts with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and works through fifteen real-life, high-profile cases, including Challenger,…
I come back to this book whenever I catch myself feeling certain about something I have not checked.
Kahneman gave me the words for the gap between how a decision feels and whether it is sound. Reading it, I kept thinking of failures within my domain, and Deepwater Horizon, where experienced people looked at an unclear pressure test and settled on the comfortable explanation, or distorted the facts to suit their biases; that is the mistake I now watch for in myself first.
I recommend it because it is the one book I would hand to anyone before a decision that matters. It changed how I question my own confidence.
The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions
'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times
Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast,…
This book made me take my own predictions less seriously, and I mean that as praise.
Tetlock and Gardner show that the best forecasters are not the boldest or the most certain. They put numbers on their doubt, check themselves against what actually happened, and change their minds. I wish more boardrooms worked that way. When I think about how sure the Theranos story sounded before it fell apart, I see the opposite habit.
I recommend it because it turns clear thinking from a talent into something you can practise and measure.
'A manual for thinking clearly in an uncertain world. Read it.' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow _________________________ What if we could improve our ability to predict the future?
Everything we do involves forecasts about how the future will unfold. Whether buying a new house or changing job, designing a new product or getting married, our decisions are governed by implicit predictions of how things are likely to turn out. The problem is, we're not very good at it.
In a landmark, twenty-year study, Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed that the average expert was only…
Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them? Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain…
Smart people make bad decisions, and this is the book that explained why to me.
Stanovich separates intelligence from rational thinking and shows they are different skills. A test can tell you how fast someone solves a puzzle. It cannot tell you whether they will stop and question their first answer, or put down a belief they like.
I found that idea freeing and a little uncomfortable, because it means no degree or job title protects you. I recommend it to anyone who assumes a clever team cannot make a foolish call.
An engaging discussion of the important cognitive characteristics missing from IQ tests
Critics of intelligence tests-writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman-have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.
Stanovich shows that IQ tests (or their proxies, such as the SAT) are radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning. They fail…
I trust this book because Gawande writes from the sharp end of his own work. He is a surgeon, and he shows how highly trained people still miss simple steps when things get busy, and how a short checklist closes the gap.
In engineering, the same pattern shows up again and again: the failure is rarely a lack of knowledge; it is a step skipped under pressure. Challenger and many other accidents read like that to me.
I recommend it because it is humble, practical, and honest about how experts fail.
In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.
The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a…
Helping Mom is a practical, compassionate guide for adult children navigating the everyday realities of supporting an aging parent. It is written for the person who suddenly finds themselves coordinating appointments, worrying about safety, managing paperwork, having difficult conversations, and wondering what needs attention next.
Reading this book changed how I look at a headline number.
Gigerenzer shows that most of us, including many doctors, misread risk because statistics are presented in a confusing way, and that saying ten in a thousand instead of a percentage clears the fog. I now stop and ask what a figure actually means before I react to it.
Risk sits at the centre of every decision I care about, from safety margins to ordinary choices. I recommend it because it gives you tools you can use the same day, with nothing harder than counting.
Gerd Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty illustrates how we can learn to make sense of statistics and turn ignorance into insight.
However much we want certainty in our lives, it feels as if we live in an uncertain and dangerous world. But are we guilty of wildly exaggerating the chances of some unwanted event happening to us? Are we misled by our ignorance of the reality of risk?
Far too many of us, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, are hampered by our own innumeracy, while statistics are often presented to us in highly confusing ways. With real world…
What Are We Missing? starts with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and works through fifteen real-life, high-profile cases, including Challenger, Volkswagen, and Theranos, to ask why capable people and teams still decide badly.
It gives an architectural framework to think more clearly before you decide: what to check, what to question, and how to spot the gap between what you know and what you assume. Release date: 13 February 2027. Kindle pre-order is open now.
Aging solo does not have to mean aging unprepared. Aging Solo Today is a practical, compassionate guide for adults who are approaching later life without a spouse, partner, or nearby children they can automatically rely on. Michael Crawford helps readers think intentionally about the people, plans, documents, finances, home, healthcare,…
UNWRITTEN: The Thought Leader’s Guide to Not Overthinking Your Business Book is a business book about how to write a business book. Written by a business owner (a ghostwriter) for other business owners, it shows you the easiest way to fit writing a book into running your business. And most…
