[1][2] Examples range widely, from the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden to the destruction of Manhattan's Collect Pond, and even include the literary depiction of decision-making under uncertainty in George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Johnson advances the idea that skilled, forward-looking decision-makers use a process comprising separate mapping, predicting (including forecasting and simulating), and deciding steps.

"[3]: 89  Hill's randomized controlled trial concept is offered as an example of a tool that meaningfully increased the accuracy of predicting the future behavior of complex systems.

[3]: 92, 101 Ensemble simulations, war games, scenario planning, red teams, and Gary Klein's "premortem" procedure[3]: 101–119  serve to incorporate and localize uncertainty, helping decision-makers avoid a "range of cognitive habits — from the fallacy of extrapolation to overconfidence to confirmation bias – [that] tends to blind us to the potential pitfalls of a decision once we have committed to it.

The latter, formulated as a probabilistic assessment of risks, confers long-term advantage in forcing the consideration of "not just our objectives and values, but also something we can be too quick to dismiss: the highly unlikely catastrophe.

[5] The Wall Street Journal said the book "lose(s) steam" in a consideration of decision-making at a global scale, illustrated with the issue of climate change, but its final chapter, regarding a momentous personal decision, seems to be "from the heart.