How to Make Better Decisions

The short answer. To make better decisions, separate the quality of a decision from the luck of its outcome, frame the question carefully before answering it, consider what happens after the obvious consequences, and pay attention to the incentives and pressures acting on you and on everyone else involved. Good decisions are less about cleverness than about seeing clearly.

Most of the important things in a life or a business are the result of decisions. Some are made deliberately, after long thought. Many more are made quickly, out of habit, or by default, because nobody noticed a choice was being made at all.

This section is about how those decisions get made, by individuals and by groups of people working together, and about what helps them get made well.

A decision is not its outcome

The first step toward deciding better is to stop judging decisions only by how they turned out.

A good decision can lead to a bad result through bad luck. A careless decision can work out well by chance. If we learn only from outcomes, we learn the wrong lessons: we repeat lucky mistakes and abandon sound judgments that happened to meet an unlucky moment. Better decision makers look at the process. What did they know at the time? What did they assume? Which risks did they see, and which did they miss?

This sounds simple and is hard in practice, because outcomes are vivid and processes are easy to forget.

Seeing the situation clearly

Many poor decisions are good answers to the wrong question. The choice was framed too narrowly, as a yes or no when there were other options, or around a symptom rather than the problem underneath.

Useful thinking tools help here. A mental model is a simplified picture of how something works, a way of asking a better question rather than a formula that delivers an answer. People who decide well tend to carry a number of them and to know when each one applies. See Mental Models.

One of the most useful is the habit of asking what happens next, and then what happens after that. First consequences are obvious and often pleasant. Second and third consequences are where the trouble tends to hide. See Second Order Thinking.

Attention: the resource underneath every decision

You cannot decide well about something you have not really looked at. Attention is the raw material of judgment, and it has become one of the most contested resources there is.

The economist Herbert Simon observed in 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Half a century later, entire industries are built on capturing and reselling it. The result is a daily environment designed to interrupt, provoke and hold people, which is close to the opposite of the conditions good decisions need.

We look at how that environment works, and how people protect their capacity to think, in Attention Economy.

Decisions among people

Very few decisions are made alone. Most are made inside families, teams and organizations, where judgment is shaped by incentives, status, loyalty and the quiet question of who gets credit and who gets blamed.

Understanding those forces is not cynicism. It is part of seeing clearly. A proposal fails not because it is wrong but because it threatens someone. A meeting reaches a decision nobody believes in because nobody wanted to be the one to object. A good idea from a junior person goes nowhere until someone senior repeats it.

People who get things done inside organizations tend to understand these dynamics, and to work with them without being corrupted by them. See Office Politics.

The judgment traps

Human judgment has well documented weaknesses. People see patterns in noise, give too much weight to recent and vivid events, seek evidence that confirms what they already believe, and grow more confident than their information justifies.

Knowing about these tendencies does not make anyone immune to them. It does make it easier to build habits and structures that compensate: asking someone to argue the other side, writing down the reasoning before seeing the result, slowing down when the stakes are high and the feeling of certainty is strong.

What you will find in this section

Pieces on how people think and decide, alone and together. Essays on the ideas that improve judgment and the pressures that erode it. Writing on work, influence and organizations, from the point of view of people trying to do something worthwhile inside them.

What you will not find is a single method that guarantees good decisions. No such method exists. What exists is a set of habits, questions and ideas that, used with care, make good decisions more likely. That is a modest promise, and we think it is the honest one.