We've all been there: faced with a major decision, yet overwhelmed by the very data that is supposed to help us. It’s an all-too-common struggle in the digital age, when Google searches produce a million results in a split second and software programs provide analysis faster than we could ever hope to read it.
Adapting the geopolitical and historical lessons gleaned from over two decades in government intelligence, Philip Mudd—an ex–National Security Council staff member and former senior executive at the FBI and the CIA—finally gives us the definitive guidebook for how to approach complex decisions today. Filled with logical yet counterintuitive answers to ordinary and extraordinary problems—whether it be buying a new home or pivoting a failing business model—Mudd’s "HEAD" (High Efficiency Analytic Decision-making) methodology provides readers with a battle-tested set of guiding principles that promise to bring order to even the most chaotic problems, all in five practical steps:
• What's the question? Analysts often believe that questions are self-evident, but focusing on better questions up front always yields better answers later.
• What are your "drivers?" The human mind has a hard time juggling information, so analysts need a system to break down complex questions into different characteristics or “drivers.”
• How will you measure performance? Once the question has been solidified and the "drivers" determined, an analyst must decide what metrics they will use to understand how a problem—and their solution to it—is evolving over time.
• What about the data? Rather than looking at each bit of information on its own and up front, an analyst can only overcome data overload by plugging data into their "driver" categories and excising anything that doesn't fit.
• What are we missing? Complex analysis isn't easy, so it is imperative to assume that the process is flawed, while also knowing how to check for possible gaps and errors, such as availability bias, halo effects, and intuitive versus analytic methodologies.
Drawing deeply from his own harrowing experiences—and mistakes—in the line of duty, Mudd has spent years refining and teaching his methodology to Fortune 500 companies and government organizations. Now, in the best-selling tradition of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit and Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything, Philip Mudd's The HEAD Game can change the way you both live and work.
Philip Mudd has decades of experience as an analyst and executive at the CIA, FBI, and the White House National Security Council, and has taught courses around the world on methodologies for understanding difficult analytic problems. He has also commented about terrorism in open and closed congressional testimony, and is regularly featured on CNN, NBC, Fox News, and NPR. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post, and he is the author of Takedown, a detailed account of intelligence gathering in the hunt for al-Qa’ida.
HIGHLIGHTS: 1. The art of thinking backward: information should give us some kind of decision advantage, helping us to think smarter about how to lead our own life. The analyst helps a decision maker narrow uncertainty by applying knowledge and experience after the analyst understands the decision-makers question. - Using the information to help make better decisions. Question what we need to know. - Keep the purpose of the briefing in the back of your mind. The audience is a non-expert listener. - The analyst is responsible for helping the customer.
2. Slow thinking: a lot of downtime at the beginning of the process to shape key questions. - Don’t even touch the data until you know the question, the destination. - Spend the time ensuring that you understand what you’re asking. - People are underinvesting and thinking about exactly what it is we want to know. The tendency is to jump to conclusions and the data.
3. Help provide decision advantage to the person at the head of the table, the decision-maker. Focus on what the customer needs to know rather than on your own knowledge is one of the hardest lessons for any expert to master and the transition to becoming an analyst.
4. Call mom exercise: one sentence limits, will force you to be clearer and more concise and you’re comfortable with. Speak it out loud. Thought processes are distilled. Inclusivity. Look at all the data you’ll need to include in your analysis and ensure that your one sentence gives you the latitude to cover the subject.
5. The thinking game: you have to offer a rational, clear answer to every question you ask yourself about the position you’re defending. You can’t inject emotion and you can’t use loaded judgment words that mean different things to different people.
6. Be conscious about whether you’re allowing the people who are analyzing the problem to also slip into the role of decision-maker. It opens the door to bias. People prefer to answer quickly particularly in their area of expertise. Wait 30 seconds and try to step through a clear articulation of what you know and what you don’t.
7. Driver: There’s no way you can build a valid analytical conversation if we manipulate the drivers from the outside to favor one side or the other. - Drivers are the speed bumps that prevent analysts from making a mistake of moving directly from the question to the data. - We need a step between crafting the question and weighing the data: we need a mind crunch.
8. Metrics: This metrics based process should allow non-expert analysts to have more meaningful conversations with a close circle of experts on whether an analysis is flawed or needs more rigorous thinking. Metrics might help add rigor to an assessment. - Starting with the data is a dangerous approach. Instead, we want to start by building a rigorous analytical framework. Be aware of knowledge gaps. Your default should be to toss the excess data. - Metrics will help us measure incremental change to avoid the expertise trap. Add measurements to analytical problems and judgments that lack clarity, measurements that will allow us to test ourselves as we attempt to limit bias.
Color coding: - Green – great quality of information high-quality sources can assess the driver with confidence. - Yellow – accumulating enough information to make a start at assessing the driver a pipe, a pile of information has at least one key gap. Too thin to support a high degree of certainty. Red – bits and pieces of data, Don’t have enough quality data this area is an “unknown” or “I don’t know”. - Read- yellow-green will help you avoid a few critical analytical errors in the situations. This will give you a fighting chance to acknowledge the importance of the unknown and your analysis. Assessing things we can count and things that are inherently unknowable.
9. There is value in leavening expertise with fresh perspectives. One of the critical weaknesses of the analyst is the inability to see change. - Remember bias every time you break down a problem. Then hand your solution to somebody else, opening the door from the outside to the chance that you unconsciously failed to recognize some flaws in your thinking. - The better analyst is defined not by what they know but instead by how they think. - Signposts, exact metrics help guide us to the tough decision of whether and when we need to consider course corrections in our analysis. - Success lies in reducing uncertainty – subtracting elements that are extraneous and focusing on those areas that are most important, including areas that represent gaps in your knowledge. Training your mind through this and a little path will help you analyze palms more clearly. - The analyst's role in helping to narrow uncertainty for decision-makers is much more subtle: can’t honestly provide a clear yes/no answer, can provide a sort of decision advantage.
10. Test yourself: thinking isn’t knowing. You will be prone to missing key points or overestimating your level of confidence unless you find a way to test yourself.
I don't know if it was the testosterone pumping or the subject matter of this book, but I found it very interesting. The author discusses his method of using efficient analytics. As a lean leader and Six Sigma Black Belt this is definitely a topic that was of interest, but what may have been even greater interest, was that the author was a member of CIA who reported directly to several presidents.
The case studies he provides, for the most part, are declassified intelligence and analytics that were used to uncover threats such as Egypt and Iraq. He discusses how his method was used both successfully and unsuccessfully to uncover threats. He does sprinkle in different suggestions on how to use his method in less crucial circumstances.
The stories throughout the first several chapters of the book are interesting and in some cases exciting but some of the points points the author is trying to relay are a little bit hard to internalize. The author does a great job of adding two appendices to the end of the book that bring a lot of value. The first is a cliff notes summary of the entire book. The second is a full checklist of how to approach his analytic method.
The appendices alone are worth the price of the book.
Isinya beberapa panduan meningkatkan kualitas diskusi/brainstorming & menghindari pitfall yang sering dilakukan pakar. Sayangnya karena konteksnya analisis intelijen, agak kurang relevan dengan kehidupan sehari-hari. Studi kasusnya pengalaman-pengalaman CIA pas melakukan analisis yang salah (tuduhan WMD di Irak, kejatuhan Shah di Iran, tes nuklir di India).
Sebagian dari buku ini membahas tentang kognitif bias, jadi kalo sudah pernah baca buku tentang kognitif bias (rekomendasiku: Thinking fast and slow & You are Not So Smart) mungkin akan lebih mudah mengikuti.
Membaca buku ini ga bikin sejago di judulnya, tapi tetap direkomendasikan buat koleksi bacaan critical thinking & decision making. 👌👌👌
Philip Mudd has made some decisions. As a former executive for the FBI, CIA and a National Security Council staff member Philip Mudd has made his living sorting through the complexities that come with major decisions. The H.E.A.D (highly efficient analytic decision-making) Game is his approach to dealing with the problems that seem to be too overwhelming and might just make our head spin.
“We tend to reduce complex problems to improbable simplicity”
What HEAD Game is, is a book that guides you through dealing with a combination of information overload, blind spots, biases and thinking traps that we face when we are trying to make those decisions that keep our palms wet and our stomach in knots. What it is not is a book that makes you want to jump up and tackle those big and hairy life decisions with zeal.
The reason for this is simple, The HEAD Game demonstrates that complex decision making requires hard work, practice, focus, patience and resilience. This is more or less the truth but it is not a bag full of fun.
The HEAD Game takes the reader through the 5 pivotal points for decision focus. Firstly, asking the right question. All too often when we face a problem, choice or decision we fail to spend enough time searching for the question we are actually trying to answer.
Secondly, we need to focus on the “Drivers”. These are the categorical characteristics teased from the information available. This is a valuable step in the process that is often overlooked as we presume to know what is influencing the problem at hand.
Thirdly, once you have boiled down the question and collected the drivers, you have to decide the standard by which you will measure performance.
Next Mudd suggests you go through the process of sorting the data collected into the drivers and deal with incongruent information. This is all about valuing and sorting information, it’s relevance and reliability.
“The process helps you squeeze out a bit of the uncertainty… the choice is still betting on a future outcome that we can’t really predict”
Lastly, you have to attempt to figure out what you might have missed. Are you having any fun yet?
Here is the thing, this book, despite its sometimes laborious analysis of tales from the field and explanations of the processes of analytical decision making, is filled with gold. Mudd is deeply in tune with the way we fail ourselves when trying to decide. He provides thorough explanations and examples of how, through a diligent process, we can overcome them and learn from our mistakes along the way. This book is not a page-turner, there is no romance here. But what is here is a lot of hard work that will pay dividends in your decision making future. My mother says, “sometimes you gotta suffer a little to reap the rewards”. Suffer now with The HEAD Game. Reap the rewards later.
"Focus on the process, not the prize, take care of the effort that precedes the score”
Overall Score: 4.0 / 5
In a sentence: A worthwhile lesson in analytical decision making, comes with a free headache.
Mudd provides a good overview of some basic tools for analytic thinking. With simple examples from daily life and international politics, this book is best suited for people new to the intelligence community, taking an undergraduate or basic graduate-level class on national security decision making or analysis, and people generally interested in how to make better decisions. A lack of other-then cursory references to the deep academic literature on the psychology of decision making and a lack of examples of different techniques for analytic thinking keep this book from reaching the potential that an author with Mudd's experience should be able to provide. While "The Head Game" does not have much depth in terms of an academic underpinning or complex examples that would really challenge the reader to think about the challenges of applying analytic thinking, it is nonetheless a worthwhile read.
It was an enjoyable read that provided good pointers to think about (e.g. working backwards, red team thinking, decision drivers, capability vs intent) with good practical tips. I also enjoyed the real life examples from the CIA.
May be a little too abstract for those who don’t work with data on a day to day basis to have been required to think about these questions often
Interesting insights into how an analyst's motivations can miss major motivators that are front of mind for the people on the other side of a negotiation
Analytic decision making sounds like a daunting subject but it doesn't have to be- especially after reading Philip Mudd's book The Head Game. What's really great about this book is that the author uses examples from his professional work with the CIA and FBI and then applies the same principles to everyday decision making.
I personally have had experiences where trying to answer questions quickly and succinctly was difficult. Sometimes, as Mudd emphasizes in this book, it's asking or answering the wrong questions and sometimes its not looking at the available information in the right context.
I found the information in this book can also be extremely useful in relationships as well. Whether friends or partners, getting the correct information across is always paramount. Of course, listening skills, which in today's world seem like a lost art, are valuable necessities in solving problems and thinking ahead.
Mudd walks the reader through the steps to effective analysis and also explores the pitfalls we sometimes fall into when solving complex and even what should be simple problems.
I recieved a free copy of this great book through Goodreads giveaway program.
1. To make better decisions and analyses, work within a methodical process. 2. To analyze a problem soundly, think backward. Start with the goal and audience in mind. 3. Ask the right questions. Questions determine how you think about a problem and what information you consider. 4. Identify six to ten categories or “drivers” you can use to sort data and provide criteria. 5. Metrics tell you how you’re doing. 6. Experts in one field tend to use their expertise to explain everything. People with varied knowledge make more nuanced and useful predictions. 7. Evaluate your level of confidence in your data: Sort it into what you know, what you think is the case and what you don’t know. 8. Practice analytical humility; keep watch for what you’re missing. 9. An alternative “red team” analysis can help you develop alternative perspectives. 10. Any analyst can fall victim to conceptual traps. Methodically seeking these fallacies strengthens your thinking.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Brilliant book written by a long time CIA analyst who was on the floor analyzing many of the seminal events in the past decade (India's nuclear bomb test, WMDs in Iraq, 9/11). He presents a simple yet powerful analytical tool to systematically think through difficult problems. Key idea is that before diving into the data, you invest time into developing a good question that gives the decision maker a decision advantage. He eschews yes/so questions, reviews cognitive biases, and regales us with stories of many of the CIAs missteps. I paid attention primarily because the CIA is tasked with analyzing complex problems, with very limited data from people that usually don't think like you do, and where you *have* to act, and actions (or inactions) have major financial and human consequences. In other words, the decisions & analysis matters.
This is a book I will be returning to many many times.
I won a free copy of this book from Goodreads FirstReads.
Mr. Mudd sets out a clear path for better decision making. Given his personal history as a CIA analyst, the examples are very terrorism heavy. I did not expect this and did not enjoy it. Real life examples are great, but I just don't enjoy reading about terrorism. The decision making plan though is useful if not revolutionary. My educational background in modeling may make me outside the norm on this thinking though. Starting with an endpoint you want to get to rather than data is always a good plan. Being aware of biases is basic research principle not a revolution. Writing is not dry either. Interesting reading, but for me not earth shattering advice, just good research principles set out in a clear fashion with, to me overwrung, real world examples.
One of the better books I've read on analytical techniques to aid in decision making and managing uncertainty associated with complex policy issues. The content is closely aligned to many of the technical systems analysis books I've read in the past and in graduate school; many analysts/authors try to contribute to the analytical dialogue by offering increasingly detailed techniques to execute basic/fundamental steps of analysis, but Mudd conveyed his experience and recommendations to these concepts using a very simple and straightforward approach.
This book contains some incredibly useful information, if the part I made it through is any indication. But the writing style is so verbose and dense with ideas that I found my mind wandering, and ultimately decided that there are better uses of my time than to struggle on through the other two-thirds of the book. If that kind of writing is what you are used to, I'd say it might be a very good read for you.
I'm a professional analyst. I solve problems using data and modeling every day. The insights in the book are very true. For example, sometimes the most difficult part is to solve the "right" question and present the analysis in the context.
I would have given the book five stars if it was shorter.
**Proof sent to me for free via Goodreads "First Reads" program.
Interesting method of making decisions on complex, multi-faceted issues. The author draws heavily on examples from his years at the CIA, which is interesting but perhaps makes the book less valuable to a broad audience than it would be if the examples were drawn from business.
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads . I enjoyed reading this book .I will be looking for more books from the author in the future , Great book !!
Straight from the source, a concrete and easy to understand guide for how to break down complex analytical problems and analyze them methodically. Refreshingly oriented toward the practical