Decision Making

When costs accelerate non-lineraly, do not delay fixes for efficiency
Patterns in Group Decision Making
10-10-10 process¹: What are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?
In this way we can maintain perspective on our how our decisions are likely to fair. Moreover, it allows us to maintain perspective on the importance of current feeling state. E.g. will you remember a flat tire as terrible in ten years as you might in ten minutes or 10 days?
Kill Criteria
Never make a decision you don’t have to make²
No decision is a decision²
Decoy Effect
Temporal discounting
Outcome-blind analysis
The Cost of Free
Assessing the accuracy of our beliefs
Confidence in knowledge

One-way door vs. Two-way door decisions: One-way door decisions like selling your company or quitting your job are almost impossible to reverse, and you should make them slowly. Two-way door decisions like starting a hobby or changing your prices are easy to reverse, and you should make them faster. Most decisions are two-way doors³. ## What to do when you can’t decide

Paralysis in decision making, may be a subconscious way of your brain feeling there is an essential piece of the decision to be uncovered. In this case you might try a deep focus activity to try and uncover this.

At some point, you do need to just make a decision, the costs of indecision will out weigh any benefits from making the exactly correct decision. The weight of the decision can impair performance across other areas⁴.

Jeff Bezos has quote, that has turned into the “70% Rule”⁵:

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

In short, the 70% rule says that you should make a decision when you are about 70% sure rather than delaying until you have more certainty. Delaying for certainity can lead to procrastination⁶.

Warning signs that should elicit a pause

When making decisions there are warning signs in phrasing that should give us pause when making a decision¹:

Signs of certainity or speaking in absolutes
Irrational outcome attribution, for example attributiing an outcome to all luck or all skill depending on the actor. See also Self-serving Bias.
Generalizations of people, especially when it comes to evaluate an idea
Signs that we are blowing a moment out of proportion: “worst day ever”
Signs of appealing to the crowd: “everyone agrees with me”
Lack of self compassion: “I have the worst judgment”
“Wrong” → wrong is a conclusion not a rationale
Informing the listener of the outcome to shade their perspective

Scenario Planning

Consider a broad range of possibilities for potential outcomes and attempt to assign probabilities to their likelihood. At minimum this exercise can help move you from thinking only in binary outcomes of “good” and “bad”¹. However, it also cements in us that the outcome is uncertain, better prepares us for a range of outcomes, and allows us to make Ulysses contracts when we anticipate our own irrationality. Scenario planning can be taken many levels deep, with branching sets of outcomes.