One final technique to add to your decision-making skills is called value modeling. Think of it as an updated version of the pros and cons list. It makes up for two critical weaknesses of the simple pros and cons approach: it doesn’t work if you’re looking at multiple potential paths, and not all values will be equally important. For example, if you’re choosing between three different towns to live in, one of the cons might be a longer commute for one of the towns, but on the pros side, that town might have much better schools. Presumably, a great education for your kids is more important than an extra ten minutes to your daily commute. But in a pros and cons list, all of those values are equally weighted.

Here’s how value modeling works: When you’re confronting a complicated choice with multiple options on the table, create a list of the values that are important to you. For each of those values, give it a weight that is a numerical indication of how important that value is to you, from 0 to 1. Using the previous example of choosing a town to live in, you might give the good schools value a rating of .9 on a scale of 0 to 1, and commute might get a .4. (See the interactive exercise section for a sample table.)

Then, with the values weighted, turn to the three scenarios (town A, town B, town C), and grade each option (on a scale of 1 to 100) in terms of how well it addresses your values. Once you’ve established those grades, multiply each grade by the weight of each value and add up the numbers for each scenario. The scenario with the highest overall score wins.

Of course, some people are never going to create a spreadsheet to adjudicate a complex decision in their lives—the value model may seem a little too mathematical—and that’s fine. But it’s important to remember that all of these techniques—from value modeling to scenario planning to full-spectrum mapping—enable us to see the full complexity of a decision and its many downstream consequences in a way that we’re never going to see when we first confront it. Our gut, initial impression of a complicated choice is always going to be too narrow.

That doesn’t mean we should underestimate the importance of instinct. Our brains do a lot of intuitive calculating and processing on their own when we go for a walk, daydream, or mull over a complicated choice. What Farsighted proposes is to supplement that intuitive understanding of a problem with exercises that will widen our view. When we use these techniques to confront complicated decisions in our lives, we will end up making smarter choices. In the long run, we will be more farsighted.