Focus on the quality of your thought process, not just the outcome. A solid process leads to better results over time, even if individual outcomes are sometimes negative due to luck.
Classify decisions by their impact and how easily they can be undone. Deliberate carefully on high-impact, low-reversibility decisions, but prioritize speed and flexibility for reversible or low-impact ones.
Acquire all relevant context and information before making a decision, rather than making a decision and then seeking data to justify it.
Regularly ask ‘Why am I sure?’ and evaluate the reliability of your data and the source of your confidence, especially when making pronouncements or acting on intuition.
Actively incorporate dissenting voices and alternative perspectives. Use techniques like ‘red teaming’ or ‘premortems’ (imagining future failure and identifying causes) to uncover potential flaws and broaden your perspective.
Deliberately make fewer decisions yourself by pushing decision-making authority to the appropriate domain experts within your organization, as your need to decide often signals an underlying organizational issue.
Identify emotions, determine if their root cause is incidental or integral to the decision, and if incidental, consciously dismiss them to prevent irrelevant feelings from skewing judgment.
Explain your reasoning to others (or imagine doing so) to identify flaws in your logic and receive personalized, direct feedback from mentors or peers, which accelerates improvement.
When disagreements arise, dig into the underlying mental models and optimization goals rather than just debating the decision itself. Have teams explicitly document their mission and key metrics to ensure foundational agreement.
Imagine putting a monetary value on your opinion to force deeper reflection and challenge assumptions about your certainty before making pronouncements.
For major decisions, create a log entry detailing the decision, key information considered, and the rationale. Revisit this log periodically to assess your process with hindsight and mitigate bias.
Continuously invest in your personal growth to stay ahead of the demands of your role, preventing yourself from becoming a bottleneck to your organization’s potential.
When facing critical strategic decisions with uncertainty, design and run small, parallel experiments to gather data and test assumptions before committing to a larger course of action.
As a leader, ensure alignment on the decision process and strategy before execution. Hold individuals accountable for the quality of their process, not just the outcome, and commit to future review.
Employ systems thinking by drawing diagrams that map out system boundaries, identify forces, and illustrate feedback loops. This exposes assumptions and fosters shared understanding of complex problems.
Scrutinize other organizations and reverse-engineer what works for them and why, especially in evolving fields, to gain insights for your own practices.
Don’t fear assigning probabilities to potential scenarios. This practice fosters information hunger and open-mindedness, driving you to seek diverse information and perspectives to refine your estimates.
Understand that people operate from conceptual, ethical (good vs. evil), or affiliational (tribal) frameworks. This awareness helps in understanding disagreements and adapting your communication.
Recognize that the ‘best’ decision-making approach is context-dependent. What works in one cultural or environmental setting for survival and success may not work in another.
Leverage environments that offer a high volume of iterations or experiences (e.g., online simulations) to quickly accumulate experience and see various situations unfold.
Even when working alone, imagine explaining your thoughts and decisions to others. This internal dialogue simulates external challenge and helps refine your ideas.
Within decision-making groups, establish an agreement that withholding dissenting perspectives or relevant information is a violation of trust, promoting open and honest challenge.