Think like an artist to improve your decision-making

How does perspective shape the choices we make? In Decisionscape, Elspeth Kirkman explores how applying artistic principles – distance, viewpoint, composition and framing – to decision-making can help us make better choices. While the book’s framework is striking and valuable, its emphasis on individual decision-making and omission of the curiosity that drives problem-solving leave some questions unanswered, writes Robyn Gausman-Burnett.

Decisionscape: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve Our Decision-Making. Elspeth Kirkman. The MIT Press. 2024.

How do we make decisions? In what way does our proximity to a problem influence our choices in relation to it? What information do we consider, and what do we ignore? These are some of the questions Elspeth Kirkman attempts to answer in Decisionscapes: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve our Decision-Making.

The “decisionscape” [is] a clever portmanteau bringing together the mental image of a painted landscape and the practice of decision-making

Following a familiar template established by books like Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and the works of Malcolm Gladwell, Kirkman draws heavily on existing research in psychology and sociology to support her thesis. The book is structured around fundamental elements of artistic composition ⁠– distance and diminution, viewpoint, composition, and frame ⁠– which she argues are central to decision-making. Through this analysis, she develops the concept of the “decisionscape”, a clever portmanteau bringing together the mental image of a painted landscape and the practice of decision-making. With this, she presents the reader with a new language for capturing how individuals can think like artists when pressed to make consequential choices.

The introduction presents perspective as the main artistic innovation, utilising historical examples including the cave pig-art of Indonesia and Brunelleschi’s articulation of linear perspective in Europe. By examining how these innovations come together Kirkman develops a multi-criteria framework for decision-making founded in classical artistic instruction. While the introduction frames the sections to come as “thinking like an artist,” it is the only section of the book that is directly connected to the artistic imagination. In the first part, The Decisionscape, the author provides examples illustrating how artists build and deconstruct shapes to convey information, create temporal, spatial, social, and even hypothetical distance, and import meaning by comparing depth and perception in Western and Eastern artwork.

Across the four major parts of the book, Kirkman provides examples of how individuals can streamline decision-making. In Distance and Diminution, her own research into Child Protection Service workers in the US and UK takes centre stage. She highlights how close physical and psychological proximity can obscure the goal of finding a suitable temporary home for a child in need as quickly as possible. By diminishing the decisionscape, a social worker can prioritize a placement that is good enough today rather than waiting months for an ideal but impractical option.

Moving on to Viewpoint, Kirkman examines how temporal and spatial constraints shape perspective. This section explores how place-linked philosophical and societal values influence individual choice by comparing how Korean and American subjects respond to reward payment structures, particularly in relation to delays and discounting behaviours. By returning to the contrast between Western and Eastern viewpoints, Kirkman reinforces how cultural context shapes decision-making.

Composition, the third part, outlines how categorical thinking, patternmaking, and gestalt philosophical principles restrict and extend what is brought into the decisionscape. Inattentional blindness-our inability to perceive the unexpected-can lead us to miss important details which are necessary considerations for our decisionscape.

Finally, in Frame, the reader’s attention is turned to how the language we choose to use or avoid ⁠– including whether something is communicated through active or passive voice ⁠– shapes the limits individuals place around their own decisionscapes.

The thinking patterns outlined in the book are supported by ample research. Kirkman succeeds in providing a structured and accessible framework for individual decision-making, drawing on compelling real-world examples. The use of artistic concepts as an analogy for cognitive processes offers a fresh way to consider how we perceive and navigate choices. As structured, this book presents compelling evidence for how adopting an artistic perspective across a range of scenarios could yield tangible individual benefits.

After reading the book, one might think the main artistic practice is to consider perspective, but this misses a crucial motivating force. Before taking pen to paper, an artist’s ideation phase is driven by curiosity

Throughout the book, Kirkman reinforces differences between Eastern and Western artistic expression. In the Western artistic tradition, following Brunelleschi, artists adopted linear-point perspective. In contrast, even as Western techniques spread across the world, the atmospheric and parallel projection of the East remained a primary artistic motif. This juxtaposition of Eastern and Western perspectives in artistic distance, viewpoint, composition, and frame presents a missed opportunity to explore how cultural mores and social values both reinforce and restrict artistic thinking.

This gap becomes particularly evident in the conclusion. In the final chapter, Kirkman attempts to extend the decisionscape to problems of collective action, including climate change and future wellbeing. Yet, because the book frames the task of re-examining one’s perspective as a largely solo endeavour; it remains unclear how it this approach can be meaningfully applied to collective decision-making. While Kirkman acknowledges that philosophical perspectives are shaped by cultural origins ⁠– collectivism in the East versus individualism in the West ⁠– she stops short of providing a usable framework for fostering collective action across geographic and ideological divisions, despite considering global climate change the most pressing challenge of our age.

After reading the book, one might think the main artistic practice is to consider perspective, but this misses a crucial motivating force. Before taking pen to paper, an artist’s ideation phase is driven by curiosity. For the past 15 years, the Stanford d.school has worked to encourage a culture of curiosity as a means to solve big problems through their design thinking bootcamps. While perspective is an essential component of their methods, curiosity is seen as the foundation for effective design and problem-solving.

A valuable resource for those who must balance conflicting criteria and multiple objectives to achieve individual or organisational goals

The shadow of curiosity looms over every example presented in the book; it is at the heart of the decisionscape, yet never directly acknowledged. This is particularly important because solving big problems requires more than stepping outside one’s own perspective – it requires active engagement across perceptual divisions. If, as Kirkman states in her conclusion, the goal of this book is to expand the decisionscape to support problem-solving and collective action for our biggest challenges, we must also think about the whys that shape the decisionscapes of people from different places and who hold different perspectives.

In the end, Decisionscape successfully applies the metaphor of artistic perspectives to provide a framework for individuals navigating complex, time-consuming, and high-stakes decision-making. It is a valuable resource for those who must balance conflicting criteria and multiple objectives to achieve individual or organisational goals. Despite the critiques outlined above, Decisionscapes fulfills this role and may help individuals make more confident, less regrettable decisions.