- 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 donât 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 vs. Two-way Door decisions
Decision Making Frameworks
Reducing Dimensionality3 Mediating Assessments protocol3 WRAP Framework
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 âgoodâ and âbadâ1. 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.
What to do when you canât 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 â70% Ruleâ5:
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, youâre probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If youâre 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: âworst day everâ
- Signs of appealing to the crowd: âeveryone agrees with meâ
- Lack of self compassion: âI have the worst judgmentâ
- âWrongâ â wrong is a conclusion not a rationale
- Informing the listener of the outcome to shade their perspective
1. Duke, A. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Donât Have All the Facts. (Portfolio, New York, 2019).
2. Everingham, J. 1/ âLeadership is a repeatable skill, not an art.â Over 25 years ago, I attended a leadership session at Netscape, run by Jim Barksdale. It was a single hour that profoundly impacted my career. https://twitter.com/jevering/status/1611793067945922560 (2023).
3. Doshi, R. 3 Frameworks For Making Complex Decisions. https://medium.com/swlh/3-frameworks-for-making-complex-decisions-6a77099c9683 (2020).
4. Michael Lopp. Ok. So, You Canât Decide. https://randsinrepose.com/archives/ok-so-you-cant-decide/ (2021).
6. Pearson, T. How to Stop Procrastinating Using the 70% Rule (Updated 2023!). https://taylorpearson.me/how-to-stop-procrastinating/ (2018).