By Don Dew, Director of Marketing

Do you have a big decision coming up? Whether buying a car, looking for a job, or evaluating capture software, one thing is for certain. As a human, your likelihood of making the best decision is, frankly, flawed out of the gate.

The good news is, with a little process rigor, you can increase your chances of making the best choice possible.

At least that is what is put forward by authors Chip and Dan Heath in their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. I had the pleasure of listening to Chip and Dan in a podcast interview by Dan Pink.

The premise, according to the authors, is simple. People bias their decisions by finding supporting information and downplaying non-supporting information. We let our short term emotions cloud the big picture, and we are too optimistic about future outcomes.

How can we make better decisions? The Heath brothers have developed something called the WRAP process. Broken into 4 major stages, it suggests:

• Widen your options
• Reality-test your assumptions
• Attain distance before deciding
• Prepare to be wrong

You can get a one-pager of this process by registering on their website at: http://heathbrothers.com/books/decisive/

If you’re in the middle of a software evaluation, here are a couple of links that you might find interesting in widening your options:

• White Paper: Automated Handwriting Recognition
• Not All ICR Software is Created Equal