From Shane Parrish’s book “Clear Thinking”
How can I prevent yourself from fooling myself? Make the decision-making process visible.
- The Transparency Principle: Make your decision-making process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible.
- “Evaluating other people’s decisions is different from evaluating our own. We rarely see other people’s intentions, thinking, or process, so it’s hard judging their decisions by reference to anything other than their outcomes.
Evaluating our own decisions is different. We can have first-person insight into the process itself. We can examine our thinking, distinguish what was within our control from what wasn’t, and what we knew at the time from what we didn’t. We can then take what we’ve learned and invest it back into our process for next time. Of course, this is easier said than done!” - “Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”
- “If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision—what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it—you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:
How can I keep my ego from distorting the truth?
- Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision. Don’t rely on your memory after the fact. Trying to recall what you knew and thought at the time you made the decision is a fool’s game.
- “Your ego works to distort your memories and convinces you of narratives that make you feel smarter or more knowledgeable than you really are. No one, we think, could make better decisions than the ones we’ve made ourselves. The only way to see clearly what you were thinking at the time you made the decision is to keep a record of your thoughts at the time you were making the decision.”
- “Writing down your thoughts offers several benefits. One benefit is that a written record provides information about your thought process at the time you made the decision. It makes the invisible visible. Later, when you reflect on your decision, having that record is helpful for counteracting the distorting effects of the ego default. You can truthfully answer questions like, “What did I know at the time I made the decision?” and, “Did the things I anticipated happening come about for the reasons I thought they would?”
- “A second benefit of recording your thoughts is that in the process of writing something, you often realize you don’t really understand it as well as you thought you did. It’s far better (and cheaper) to realize this before making your decision instead of after. If you do so in advance, you have an opportunity to get more information and a better grasp of the problem.”
- “A third benefit to writing down your thoughts is that it allows other people to see your thinking, which is mostly invisible. And if they can see it, they can check it for errors and offer a different perspective that you might otherwise be blind to. If you can’t simply explain your thinking to other people (or yourself), it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand things and need to dig deeper and gather more information.”
- “A final benefit to writing down your thoughts is that it gives other people an opportunity to learn from your perspective. Many organizations would benefit from having a database that recorded how every person in the organization went about making decisions. Imagine the value of a searchable catalog of decisions in your organization. A system like this would allow people in different parts of the organization to check each other’s thinking. It would allow management to distinguish good decision-makers from mediocre ones, and it would provide people with models of decision-making—both of how to do it and of how not to. If you build a system like this, I want an equity cut!” (p. 219)