From Shane Parrish’s Decision Making Course.
Perpetually Improve as a Decision Maker.
The world’s top athletes, surgeons, and speakers know that the fastest way to progress is to know where you’re starting from, record your performance, and review it constantly.
The same is true for decision making.
By reflecting on your own decisions you become your own coach, identifying the areas that need the most work and moving yourself forward. You can’t just wait for someone to walk up to you and tell you what you need to do or where you’re not giving it 100%. You have to do it for yourself.
Let’s explore the two false indicators of good decision making.
Most people rate their decisions based on two false indicators: Outcomes and feelings.
When we evaluate the outcome, we ask questions like: What happened? Was it what we wanted to happen? Of course, that also assumes that we even knew what we wanted when we made the choice, which — most of the time — many of us don’t.
We also evaluate based on how we “feel” about the decision in hindsight. This is subject to a lot of biases, as we protect our ego. If we got the outcome we desired — even for the wrong reasons — we’ll convince ourselves that we were right and not lucky. If, on the other hand, we got an unfortunate outcome, the tendency is to convince ourselves that we did all we could and couldn’t have seen it coming.
We all want good outcomes. And while we tend to equate good leaders to good outcomes and bad leaders to bad outcomes, we know it’s messier than that. As we’ve seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes. Just as bad decisions can have good ones. The real world is complicated. Things don’t always work out the way we want them to. Evaluating our — or others — decisions based on the immediate outcome or how we feel about the immediate outcome, doesn’t go deep enough. And doesn’t help us get better.
We think, “If I had only talked to that person (who I didn’t know at the time).” Or, “If I had only known that piece of information that didn’t exist, I would have made the right choice.” But the masters of decision making don’t look at one individual outcome. They zoom out, determine what was within their control, and add what they’ve learned to their decision making process for next time. They know that if they invest in it, that process will lead to good outcomes more often than not.
So, what makes a good decision? A good process used intentionally.
First, and foremost, did you have a process and use it? Did you have something in place proactively, so that when a problem or decision arose you knew what to do? Did you know what type of decision you were making?
Secondly, did you look upstream to make sure you were solving the root problem? Did you separate defining the problem from trying to find a solution? Remember this means you didn’t let others define the problem for you and you separated defining the problem from finding a solution.
Next — before looking at solutions, did you define your objectives? Did you know the most important thing to you? Now many of the rest of these may not have come in a particular order — but they’re skills sandwiched between solving the right problem and knowing your objectives, and learning regardless of the outcome.
Did you know in advance how long you would take to decide? In this course we’ve learned ASAP or ALAP decisions — but maybe you had another way of determining an amount of time to give a decision in advance. Or did you find yourself in the messy middle — making a decision just to stop thinking about it?
Did you do the work to get a credible third option? Did you let others frame the options for you?
And did you see how each option would play out over time? Did you look for second-, and third-order consequences? Did you anticipate the amount of work the good outcome would take and anticipate the barriers you’d need to overcome to arrive there?
When you were gathering information, was it from your own direct experience and reflection or the direct experience and reflection of someone else? Or was it tertiary information that could have been filtered?
And did you have automatic correct behaviors in place to leverage your best thinking before you needed it? Did you have a plan for how to react based on different outcomes?
Did you create a margin of safety so that you were prepared for the widest range of outcomes? Did you position yourself for multiple possible futures? Did you sleep on it first?
And when it came to executing, were you away from environmental traps — like deciding as a group, when you were rushed, when you were physically or mentally under-resourced, or when you were distracted?
When setting the wheels in motion — whether that was sending an email, saying the words aloud that eliminated options and started your team executing, or taking action in any other way — did you use positive self talk?
And finally, before this very moment, did you look back and evaluate your decision, reflect upon what went well and what still needs work, and whether or not you’re headed towards your objectives? Did you reflect on your experience, and digest it into learning? And did you incorporate that feedback and add it to your process somehow?
When you’ve done all these things, you can sleep soundly knowing you’ve put yourself on the path to
success.
If you haven’t done these things, even if the outcomes have been good, you may have just gotten lucky. And we want to be strategic, not just lucky. Pause now to take out the checklists. Think through the two decisions you listed earlier as being hard decisions, and re-evaluate them using the new criteria that you’ve learned throughout the course.
You’ve just done what the masters do: perform, record, and evaluate. We want to encourage you to keep doing it. That’s why we’ve included the decision checklist in your resources.
Using a decision journal over time is how self-evaluation goes from being interesting to being powerful. You’ll be able to look at two, or five, or ten decisions and notice patterns. What’s the same about how you handled each When you look across the span of months or years, you’ll see patterns. You’ll see where you consistently implement skills and do it well, and you’ll learn where you need more work.
Did you:
- Identify the type of decision you were making
- Define the root problem for yourself
- Decide at the right time
- Identify the most important thing
- Own the framing of the options
- Think of the consequences
- Get the best information
- Follow your automatic behaviours
- Prepare for multiple possible futures
- Avoid stupidity
- Earn the confidence to act
- Learn, regardless of the outcome
My friend Peter Kaufman once told me about the four levels of learning.
On the first level are the people that don’t learn.
The second level has the people that learn from their own mistakes.
The third level contains the people that learn from other people’s mistakes.
And on the fourth, and final level, are the people that learn from their own and other people’s successes. You can’t get better if you’re not learning.
You can apply this decision making process to every consequential decision you make in any area of your life.