To routinely use value-focused decision-making to nudge yourself to make better decisions, you need to develop skills to address its four critical concepts. These skills are the following: identifying values, creating alternatives, generating decision opportunities, and designing alternatives that satisfy others. For each of the four skills, several basic decisions similar to those you have previously faced are presented to practice using each concept. You can personalize these basic decisions to represent a decision that you do or will likely face. The exercises will help you understand the information that you create by applying the concepts. This should help you develop the initial skill to productively apply relevant value-focused decision-making concepts to any of your decisions. Mastering these skills requires using them on your decisions. This both helps you make better decisions and provides more practice at using the techniques to apply the concepts. With more practice, you will naturally become more proficient at the desired skills.

An alternative is a possible course of action that you have the authority to choose for a decision. Creating alternatives is one of the most important things you can do to make better decisions. The reasons are that you can never select an alternative that you have not identified, and your chosen alternative can be no better than the best of those that are identified. Numerous studies indicate that decision-makers have many shortcomings in creating alternatives, mainly because they do not spend any, or enough, time creating alternatives and they are relatively ineffective spending the time that is allocated. Thinking outside the box is useful advice, but it gives no guidance on how to create desirable alternatives. You want to think inside a much larger, right-sized alternatives box. Your values for a decision are the key to creating better alternatives, as alternatives are subsequently evaluated in terms of these values. A systematic process is provided for using values to create innovative and better alternatives. Practical experiments that show the effectiveness of this process are presented. The concept of value-focused brainstorming to create innovative alternatives in groups is presented and its usefulness is demonstrated in a major application.