CHAPTER 10
The Pros and Cons of Pros-and-Cons Lists
by Chris Charyk
Pondering an important decision? Chances are that you will consider jotting down the pros and cons of your options. The pros-and-cons list enjoys a long and storied history, going back at least as far as 1772, when Benjamin Franklin advised his friend and fellow scientist Joseph Priestley to “divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con.” But how useful is a pros-and-cons list, really? It’s only fitting to consider the pros and cons of this popular decision-making tool.
The Pros
Rigor
Making the effort to think through all possible pros and cons of a given course of action and then capturing them in writing minimizes the likelihood that you have missed critical factors. (The sidebar “Variables to Consider” provides a list of some of these criteria.) Assigning weights to each of the pros and cons is an additional exercise that promotes deeper thinking and presumably leads to better-quality decision making.
VARIABLES TO CONSIDER
Once you and your team have identified a set of alternatives, you must assess if each one is a viable option to solve your problem. There are a number of variables to keep in mind:
- Costs. How much will the alternative cost? Will it result in savings now or over the long term? Are there any hidden costs? Are there likely to be additional expenses down the road? Does this alternative fall within the budget?
- Benefits. What profits or other benefits will we realize if we implement a given alternative? Will it increase the quality of our product? Will customer satisfaction increase? Will it make our people more effective?
- Financial impact. How will the monetary costs and benefits of this option translate into bottom-line results as measured by net present value? What will be the timing of that result? Will implementation require us to borrow money?
- Intangibles. Will our reputation improve if we implement a given alternative? Will our customers or employees be more satisfied and loyal?
- Time. How long will it take to implement this idea? What is the probability of delays and the impact of such delays on the schedule?
- Feasibility. Can this alternative be executed realistically? Are there any obstacles that must be overcome? What resistance might be encountered inside or outside the organization?
- Resources. How many people are needed to implement each alternative? Are they available, or will we need to hire and train them? What other projects will suffer if individuals focus on this option?
- Risk. What risks are associated with this idea? Could it result in loss of profits or competitive advantage? How might competitors respond? What information would reduce these uncertainties? Would it be difficult and costly to obtain risk-reducing information?
- Ethics. Is this alternative legal? Is it in the best interests of customers, employees, and the community where we operate? Would we feel comfortable if other people knew that we were considering this option?
There is little doubt that your decisions must take into account these considerations. Obviously, some will be more important to your company than others.
Adapted from Harvard Business Essentials: Decision Making (product #7618), Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
Emotional distance
Important decisions are likely to evoke powerful emotions. Going through the steps of creating a pros-and-cons list can create what researchers Ozlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross refer to as a “self-distanced perspective,” in which the decision is viewed as an “external” problem to be addressed, easing the impact of the emotions surrounding the decision. Deferring the decision pending the pro-con analysis also provides a gap in time in which powerful emotions can dissipate, reducing the risk of an “amygdala hijack,” the cognitive phenomenon popularized by Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, in which perceived emotional threats can lead to extreme actions, often with undesirable outcomes.
Familiarity and simplicity
Perhaps most compelling of all, the pros-and-cons list is generally well understood, requires no special computational or analytical expertise, and is elegantly simple to administer.
The Cons
Vulnerable to cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are common patterns of thinking that have been demonstrated to lead to errors in judgment and poor decision making. Unfortunately, the same simplicity that makes a pros-and-cons list so appealing creates many opportunities for a host of cognitive biases to emerge, including:
- The framing effect. Pros-and-cons lists generally are about evaluating two alternatives: a “thumbs up or thumbs down” scenario and an example of “narrow framing,” a bias created by overly constraining the set of possible outcomes.
- The overconfidence effect. A well-established cognitive bias is the tendency of individuals to overestimate the reliability of their judgments. When creating a pros-and-cons list, it is likely that many people assume a level of accuracy in their assessment of pros and cons that simply isn’t there.
- The illusion of control. When faced with the task of envisioning possible outcomes, a common bias is to believe that one can control outcomes that in reality are not controllable.
Reliance on analytical thinking
Using an analytical tool such as a pros-and-cons list emphasizes the objective, “just the facts” side of decision making. Intuition, or what Goleman terms “direct knowing,” has captured the attention of many brain science researchers. In one study, the “absence of attentive deliberation,” AKA “go with your gut,” was demonstrated to result in decisions with better outcomes than those derived from the use of analytical tools.1
The Verdict
My experience as an executive coach suggests that for the vast majority of decisions that my clients deem to be critical, a pros-and-cons list is useful only as a very high-level preliminary thinking aid. I believe this is because the decisions leaders most often bring to coaching are ones for which they perceive the stakes as being high—the client has strong positive or negative (or both) emotions associated with possible outcomes. And when the stakes are high, the potential interference of cognitive biases, wishful thinking, self-limiting beliefs, and similar barriers to objectivity rise. High-stakes decisions therefore require approaches that address these complications. Self-awareness, reflection, and actively applying a range of mindsets are examples of alternatives to the pros-and-cons list that shed light on these hidden, unconscious cognitive biases, ultimately leading to better insights and better decision outcomes.
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Chris Charyk is an executive coach with The Boda Group, a leadership and team development firm.
NOTE
1. A. Dijksterhuis, M. W. Bos, L. F. Nordren, and R. B. van Baaren, “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect,” Science 311, no. 5763 (2006): 1005–1007.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, January 6, 2017 (product #H03E7T).