This year’s festive season books are focussed around decision making and are some of the books that were used as input to our work for the Investment Property Forum on mitigating behavioural influences on decision-making within the property investment process.

Think Twice

Michael Mauboussin is an investment strategist who has taken a good look at the psychological aspects of decision-making and adapted them to investment management. He argues that our natural decision-making processes lead us towards sub-optimal decisions and it is to our benefit to actively think twice about the decisions we make, especially where the stakes are high.

Perfectly Confident

This gem of a book by Don Moore is subtitled “How to calibrate your decisions wisely”. The inside of the dust jacket gives an adequate flavour of what follows…”self-help books and motivational speakers tell us that the more confident we are, the better. But this way of thinking can lead to enormous trouble; we often have an overinflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe”.

You are About to Make a Terrible Mistake

This work by Olivier Sibony is an exploration of the more common biases in decision making. It has a foreword by Daniel Kahnemann which describes it as “A masterful introduction to the state of the art in managerial decision making. Surprisingly, it is also a pleasure to read”.

Groupthink

In the spirit of overconfidence, many people use the term groupthink but perhaps are overconfident about what it is. Why not read Janis’ book and find out what it is, and what it is not? Thereafter, the psychological drive for consensus might not seem so appealing.

How to Decide

Annie Duke, an ex-professional Poker player, is also a co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education - something people are rarely taught. The subtitle of this book is “Simple tools for making better choices” so if you want a shortcut offering solutions to the problems that revolve around decision making, this is the book for you. All you have to do then is find an organisation that is willing to adopt the solutions which she offers, or make your organisation that organisation.