Bytes that get stuck in your teeth.
Csaba Okrona:
“There is no right decision. There’s just the decision you make and how well you execute it.”
I’ve had very similar experiences and see others struggle with this.
I agree with the suggestion to “Treat decisions as experiments, not solutions”.
Roberto Vitillo:
Putting the options in a single place and seeing them contrasted with each other will help you develop new options and ultimately make a decision.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss:
The heart of this process – the move that I think makes it work so well – is that in includes an explicit step to first decide how to decide.
How to Decide digs into the characteristics of decision making and provides tools for making better decisions.
I took away loads of things to try and recommend the book.
Below are some of the salient points that stood out to me.
Two things determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You can only control the second.
Any decision is essentially a prediction about the future.
When making a decision your objective is to choose the option that gains you the most ground in achieving your goals, taking into account how much you’re willing to risk.
You need to develop a decision process that improves your decision quality and helps you sort your decisions to identify which are larger and which are smaller.
A good decision tool seeks to reduce the impact of cognitive biases.
Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.
Using the quality of the outcome to judge the quality of the decision causes you to learn the wrong lessons and is called resulting.
Imperfect information is a kind of uncertainty that interferes before a decision.
Luck is a kind of uncertainty that can interfere after the decision is made but before the outcome.
Chasing certainty causes analysis paralysis.
Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe an event, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.
Memory creep is when what you know after the fact creeps into your memory of what you knew before the fact.
Tilt is when a bad outcome causes you to be in an emotionally hot state that compromises the quality of your decision making.
Quitting is a powerful tool for defraying opportunity cost and gathering intel, intel that will allow you to make higher-quality decisions about the things you decide to stick to.
There are quite a few in the book. Here are some that resonated with me.
Use a Knowledge tracker to avoid hindsight bias.
Use Decision trees for evaluating past decisions and improving the quality of new ones.
Repeating options are when the same type of decision comes up over and over again you get repeated chances to choose options, including options you may have rejected in the past.
When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy. When you’re weighing two options that are close it can feel like the decision is difficult. The decision is actually easy, because whichever one you choose you can’t be that wrong since the difference between the two is so small.
The lower the cost to quit, the faster you can go, because it’s easier to unwind the decision and choose a different option, including options you may have rejected in the past.
It’s not particularly useful debating the value of anything in isolation.
Considering programming languages, tools, processes, or product decisions on their own is a mostly philosophical exercise.
Things start to have meaning when we assess them against other available options.
That’s where the rubber hits the road, and things get spicy, friends.
Roger Martin:
The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.
If you had that as your conceptualization, you would naturally do things such as organize around decisions; measure output in terms of decisions; measure and work on enhancing the productivity of producing decisions; and so on. But companies don’t do any of the above because their conceptualization is of a coordination and control structure, not a decision factory.
Richard Mironov:
Prioritization is more than an analytical/intellectual exercise. It’s an organizational challenge with natural disagreements among stakeholders. Product leaders need to think about motivating the right kinds of participation and addressing the emotional issues that arise. Spreadsheets and models are necessary, but not sufficient.
Richard Marmorstein:
There’s nothing wrong with a fondness for data. The trouble begins when you begin to favor bad arguments that involve data over good arguments that don’t, or insist that metrics be introduced in realms where data can’t realistically be the foundation of a good argument.
Chris Stjernlöf:
When reading Robert’s Rules of Order, I learned two things that struck me as deeply important, which I had misunderstood in the past:
- The purpose of debate is not winning, it’s about information sharing.
- Votes should not need to be counted, the result should be clear anyway.
Jessica Kerr:
This is participatory sense-making. When we want to work on a thing together, and we need a shared understanding to do it right, then everyone gets to participate in constructing that understanding.
…
Shared understanding doesn’t come from “I share my understanding, and you adopt it.” it comes from “I share my knowledge, you share yours, and we construct a new understanding together.”
Bezos considers 70% certainty to be the cut-off point where it is appropriate to make a decision. That means acting once we have 70% of the required information, instead of waiting longer. Making a decision at 70% certainty and then course-correcting is a lot more effective than waiting for 90% certainty.
…
Reversible decisions can be made fast and without obsessing over finding complete information. We can be prepared to extract wisdom from the experience with little cost if the decision doesn’t work out. Frequently, it’s not worth the time and energy required to gather more information and look for flawless answers. Although your research might make your decision 5% better, you might miss an opportunity.
Barack Obama:
But the point is, in just a few short weeks on the job, I had already realized that because every tough decision came down to a probability, then certainty was an impossibility — which could leave me encumbered by the sense that I could never get it quite right. So rather than let myself get paralyzed in the quest for a perfect solution, or succumb to the temptation to just go with my gut every time, I created a sound Decision Making process — one where I really listened to the experts, followed the facts, considered my goals and weighed all of that against my principles. Then, no matter how things turned out, I would at least know I had done my level best with the information in front of me.
From MIT 15.S50 Poker Theory and Analysis.