Introduction
Books on the problem of optimal decisions often advise you to trust your intuition or rely on a careful analysis of the pros and cons of each option. Why is it so difficult to make the right choice?
There are four enemies of decisions in our thinking. You need to know them, understand how they work and how to deal with them.
Four enemies of correct decisions.
The purpose of the book is to study a four-step process that will help you make the right choice, change your life for the better, become wiser and more decisive. To be successful, you need constant practice, training, until the process becomes second nature. Its value is that it helps us see options that we might have missed, and get previously unnoticed but important information.
Expand the selection box
Avoid narrow bezels
The first step is not to trust the yes or no approach. If you put your effort into a broader search, you will find more options than expected.
Try the alternative cost trick by asking yourself, "What else can you do in the same time and money?"
The test of the disappearance of variants is also effective. Consider what you can do if the alternatives disappear.
Multitracking
Multitracking is the simultaneous consideration of several options (two or three are quite enough). This way you will get a more accurate idea of the problem, you will be able to use the features of all the original options, combining the good elements and omitting the bad ones. Remember: AND, not OR! This is especially important for business projects.
Comparing several options, a person feels more confident and makes decisions faster, since there is a backup plan. Variants should combine elements of promotion and prevention, drive to win, and caution. This increases the chances of prosperity and emotional health, which is important both at the level of organizations and at the level of personal decisions. When one attitude prevails, an alarm should be triggered.
If life suggests “choose one or the other,” we must be brash enough to ask: maybe the correct answer is “both”? If we can make both moves, find options that minimize harm and maximize opportunities, then we are more likely to cover the full range of our choices.
Find someone who has already solved your problem
Analyze competitors' good ideas and best practices. Look for light spots within yourself - try to reproduce your own success, your positive experience.
Record your search results - they may come in handy in the future. Do not forget about analogies, because you can use the world's piggy bank of solutions, and not look for an answer on your own, which is unreasonable and will not work out quickly.
Check your assumptions in real life
Consider the opposite
We tend to favor information that confirms our opinion. This distorts the assessment and is harmful.
There are three ways to combat bias.
Zoom in and out
Psychologists distinguish between a view of the situation "from the inside" and "outside". The look from the outside is more accurate, it is not the impression of one person, but a wide range of similar situations, a brief overview of real experience.
If you really need quality information and real validation of your ideas, use every scrap of experience, use an outside perspective, talk to an expert, and your life will become much easier.
But looking from the outside does not take into account the peculiarities of your situation. And we continue to trust the look from the inside - our impressions and assessments, and this often drives us into a trap.
When evaluating options, a close-up is often the best addition to the big picture. It enhances intuition, brings out nuances, adds information to our decisions.
When we zoom out, we take an outside perspective and learn from the experiences of others who have already made choices in a similar situation. Both strategies are useful, and both improve understanding. We have to use both approaches.
The mixture of the big picture and the close-up was the strategy of F. Roosevelt, who is considered a master of information gathering. He asked a wide range of questions, noticed and analyzed everything.
Uching
To do uching means to test your results in a real-world environment before taking action. Uching gives more complete information to make the right choice. This idea has spread to different areas (design, business, etc.).
Uching allows you to confirm the idea and start working with confidence, as it makes positive changes to the project, and its development is gradually improving. It is best suited for situations where we need to collect reliable data quickly.
People often do not want to mess with uching, considering it a waste of time and being confident in their ability to predict the future. But a new employee's work pattern will say more about him than the best interview experience.
The biggest enemy of wise decisions is man himself. What to do with it?
Distance yourself before the decision
Overcome Instant Emotions
This is especially important when we are faced with difficult choices. Blinded by particulars, we doubt and suffer, changing our minds every day. Instant emotions are bad counselors. To combat them, there is a 10/10/10 strategy, following which we will consider our decisions in three time frames. How are we going to treat them in 10 minutes? And in 10 months? And in 10 years?
10/10/10 helps to cope with nervousness and fear of a negative answer. What we feel now is intense and poignant, and the future appears to be blurry. It gives the present too much power. By offering the same intensity to present your emotions 10 months later, the method helps to put instant emotions in perspective, showing that they are not only important in the discussion.
A subtler form of instant emotion is the principle of simple exposure: people prefer familiar things. We may think that we are making choices based on facts, but in fact we trust more things that are familiar to us.
Another prejudice is loss aversion: the magnitude of negative emotions upon loss exceeds the magnitude of positive ones from an equivalent gain. When these two forces — the sense of the unfamiliar and the fear of loss — come together, we experience a powerful bias against losing the status quo.
So, emotions can lead us to make the wrong choice. To prevent this from happening, you need to distance yourself. Distance adds clarity; when we think of friends, we see a forest; when about ourselves - we get stuck between the trees. Advice to others has one advantage - we advise you to ignore instant emotions and strive to highlight important factors. Perhaps the most useful question for personal decisions: "What advice would I give to my best friend in this situation?"
All of these techniques allow us to better see the general outlines of the situation and make wiser and bolder choices.
Clarify basic priorities
Before everyone, at some point, the question arises: “What do I value more? What is the purpose of my work? " The often painful decision process is a sign of a conflict of "basic priorities." For people, these are goals and aspirations, beliefs and values; for organizations, it is a system of referrals that ensure the health of the company for many years.
The most difficult decision is to make a choice between two basic directions, to sort out your preferences in life. “I work to have money for travel and hobbies. But if I don’t have enough time to do it, money will not bring joy ”- this is how we base our decisions on our priorities, decisions become more consistent and less painful.
How do we ensure that decisions reflect our core priorities? How to defeat less important tasks that threaten to distract from them? To devote more time to priority activities, we must reduce the time we spend on other things.
Ask yourself, what can you give up in order to make time for the activities you need? Create a list of things to stop doing. It is not easy. You can also set a timer that rings once an hour, and at the time of the call, ask yourself: "Am I doing the most necessary thing now?" This productive interruption reminds us of our priorities.
Prepare for a possible mistake
Extreme futures
When we think about extreme options, we stretch our feeling to all available possibilities, and this range better reflects reality. We must be prepared to face any option between the two extremes that we have outlined. Don't give in to high hopes. It's like a "vaccination" - we don't just think about difficult situations, but think about how to react when we find ourselves in them.
The most effective methods for coping with problems and finding real opportunities are pre-death analysis and pre-parade: “A year has passed since now. Our solution failed completely. Why? "Or“ A year has passed since now. We are heroes. Are we ready for success? "
Another method of protecting against obscurity is to set a reasonable margin of error. After all, we are prone to overconfidence and are not ready for unpleasant surprises. We need to view the future as a spectrum, not a point, move our spotlights from side to side, and map the entire territory. This way we can prepare for both bad (using pre-death analysis) and good (using pre-parade) situations. It is easier for us to cope with obstacles when we are mentally ready for them.
But even with the best planning, things may not go well. How do you know when it's time to reconsider your choices? How to avoid missing out on a chance to cut losses or maximize opportunities? To do this, we need mine streamers.
Install "mine streamers"
We go with the flow of life on autopilot, in the wake of past decisions, forgetting that we can change direction. The purpose of stretching is to shake us out of the unconscious routine and make us understand that there is a choice and it is time to decide. The most familiar form of stretching is to set a deadline. The timing is grabbing us by the collar: if you are going to do this, you must act now.
Another strategy, "separation", is an effective way to think about whether to continue. For example, investors prefer to give out money in rounds, gradually, each time weighing, is the plan correct? Mine Stretching ensures that we don't waste money or time down the drain. In this way, they limit risk, give confidence and create psychological comfort, as they allow you to remain on autopilot until the trigger is triggered - a sense of danger or the possibility of success.
People need to be reminded that the current trajectory of life does not have to be constant. Stretch marks provide a sudden invaluable awareness: I have a choice!
Trust the process
Group decisions are harder to make. How can you convince those whose ideas have been rejected that the decision you made is fair?
The most direct and difficult way to make a fair decision is to involve as many people as possible and achieve a common consensus. The discussion is held until a solution is found that satisfies the majority.
Hear what others have to say! Use accurate information to make decisions and give people the opportunity to challenge the data if it is wrong. Avoid bias and personal interests, do not forget about self-criticism, explain why this particular decision was made. At the same time, compromise and time is inevitable. Negotiation is indeed the slower way to make a decision, but it has a major advantage: it speeds up implementation.
Conclusion
When we make a choice, we cannot know if it will be successful. Success depends on the quality of the decisions made and on luck. We have no control over luck. But we can control how we make choices. The right process is an ally in every situation.
This book aims to inspire you to use a better decision process. How to choose a job offer? How to deal with a difficult relationship? How to get the best deal? All of these decisions are made through the same process. It instills the confidence that comes from knowing that you've made the best decision possible.
Using the decision process does not mean that your choices will always be easy, but you can calm your mind, stop the cycle of torment. By trusting the process, you can confidently take risks (like climbers with insurance) and make bolder choices.
Our solutions will never be perfect, but they can be better. Go bolder. Wiser. The right process can guide us towards the right choice. And the right choice at the right moment can mean a lot. Through the process described in such detail, people turn the odds in their favor, make the right decisions, and do not regret their choices.
Books on the problem of optimal decisions often advise you to trust your intuition or rely on a careful analysis of the pros and cons of each option. Why is it so difficult to make the right choice?
There are four enemies of decisions in our thinking. You need to know them, understand how they work and how to deal with them.
Four enemies of correct decisions.
- Narrow framework, limitation of the options under consideration. We need to find alternative solutions. Expand your selection!
- Confirmation of bias (selection of information confirming the correctness of our choice). Collect more data, test your assumptions in real life.
- Instant emotions. We need perspective - distance yourself before the decision!
- Overconfidence. We are too sure that we are right. Prepare for a possible mistake.
The purpose of the book is to study a four-step process that will help you make the right choice, change your life for the better, become wiser and more decisive. To be successful, you need constant practice, training, until the process becomes second nature. Its value is that it helps us see options that we might have missed, and get previously unnoticed but important information.
Expand the selection box
Avoid narrow bezels
The first step is not to trust the yes or no approach. If you put your effort into a broader search, you will find more options than expected.
Try the alternative cost trick by asking yourself, "What else can you do in the same time and money?"
The test of the disappearance of variants is also effective. Consider what you can do if the alternatives disappear.
Multitracking
Multitracking is the simultaneous consideration of several options (two or three are quite enough). This way you will get a more accurate idea of the problem, you will be able to use the features of all the original options, combining the good elements and omitting the bad ones. Remember: AND, not OR! This is especially important for business projects.
Comparing several options, a person feels more confident and makes decisions faster, since there is a backup plan. Variants should combine elements of promotion and prevention, drive to win, and caution. This increases the chances of prosperity and emotional health, which is important both at the level of organizations and at the level of personal decisions. When one attitude prevails, an alarm should be triggered.
If life suggests “choose one or the other,” we must be brash enough to ask: maybe the correct answer is “both”? If we can make both moves, find options that minimize harm and maximize opportunities, then we are more likely to cover the full range of our choices.
Find someone who has already solved your problem
Analyze competitors' good ideas and best practices. Look for light spots within yourself - try to reproduce your own success, your positive experience.
Record your search results - they may come in handy in the future. Do not forget about analogies, because you can use the world's piggy bank of solutions, and not look for an answer on your own, which is unreasonable and will not work out quickly.
Check your assumptions in real life
Consider the opposite
We tend to favor information that confirms our opinion. This distorts the assessment and is harmful.
There are three ways to combat bias.
- Make it easier for people to disagree with you, argue without becoming an enemy, incite constructive disagreements in the team.
- Ask questions that reveal the opposite information.
- Test yourself by looking at opposing points of view.
Zoom in and out
Psychologists distinguish between a view of the situation "from the inside" and "outside". The look from the outside is more accurate, it is not the impression of one person, but a wide range of similar situations, a brief overview of real experience.
If you really need quality information and real validation of your ideas, use every scrap of experience, use an outside perspective, talk to an expert, and your life will become much easier.
But looking from the outside does not take into account the peculiarities of your situation. And we continue to trust the look from the inside - our impressions and assessments, and this often drives us into a trap.
When evaluating options, a close-up is often the best addition to the big picture. It enhances intuition, brings out nuances, adds information to our decisions.
When we zoom out, we take an outside perspective and learn from the experiences of others who have already made choices in a similar situation. Both strategies are useful, and both improve understanding. We have to use both approaches.
The mixture of the big picture and the close-up was the strategy of F. Roosevelt, who is considered a master of information gathering. He asked a wide range of questions, noticed and analyzed everything.
Uching
To do uching means to test your results in a real-world environment before taking action. Uching gives more complete information to make the right choice. This idea has spread to different areas (design, business, etc.).
Uching allows you to confirm the idea and start working with confidence, as it makes positive changes to the project, and its development is gradually improving. It is best suited for situations where we need to collect reliable data quickly.
People often do not want to mess with uching, considering it a waste of time and being confident in their ability to predict the future. But a new employee's work pattern will say more about him than the best interview experience.
The biggest enemy of wise decisions is man himself. What to do with it?
Distance yourself before the decision
Overcome Instant Emotions
This is especially important when we are faced with difficult choices. Blinded by particulars, we doubt and suffer, changing our minds every day. Instant emotions are bad counselors. To combat them, there is a 10/10/10 strategy, following which we will consider our decisions in three time frames. How are we going to treat them in 10 minutes? And in 10 months? And in 10 years?
10/10/10 helps to cope with nervousness and fear of a negative answer. What we feel now is intense and poignant, and the future appears to be blurry. It gives the present too much power. By offering the same intensity to present your emotions 10 months later, the method helps to put instant emotions in perspective, showing that they are not only important in the discussion.
A subtler form of instant emotion is the principle of simple exposure: people prefer familiar things. We may think that we are making choices based on facts, but in fact we trust more things that are familiar to us.
Another prejudice is loss aversion: the magnitude of negative emotions upon loss exceeds the magnitude of positive ones from an equivalent gain. When these two forces — the sense of the unfamiliar and the fear of loss — come together, we experience a powerful bias against losing the status quo.
So, emotions can lead us to make the wrong choice. To prevent this from happening, you need to distance yourself. Distance adds clarity; when we think of friends, we see a forest; when about ourselves - we get stuck between the trees. Advice to others has one advantage - we advise you to ignore instant emotions and strive to highlight important factors. Perhaps the most useful question for personal decisions: "What advice would I give to my best friend in this situation?"
All of these techniques allow us to better see the general outlines of the situation and make wiser and bolder choices.
Clarify basic priorities
Before everyone, at some point, the question arises: “What do I value more? What is the purpose of my work? " The often painful decision process is a sign of a conflict of "basic priorities." For people, these are goals and aspirations, beliefs and values; for organizations, it is a system of referrals that ensure the health of the company for many years.
The most difficult decision is to make a choice between two basic directions, to sort out your preferences in life. “I work to have money for travel and hobbies. But if I don’t have enough time to do it, money will not bring joy ”- this is how we base our decisions on our priorities, decisions become more consistent and less painful.
How do we ensure that decisions reflect our core priorities? How to defeat less important tasks that threaten to distract from them? To devote more time to priority activities, we must reduce the time we spend on other things.
Ask yourself, what can you give up in order to make time for the activities you need? Create a list of things to stop doing. It is not easy. You can also set a timer that rings once an hour, and at the time of the call, ask yourself: "Am I doing the most necessary thing now?" This productive interruption reminds us of our priorities.
Prepare for a possible mistake
Extreme futures
When we think about extreme options, we stretch our feeling to all available possibilities, and this range better reflects reality. We must be prepared to face any option between the two extremes that we have outlined. Don't give in to high hopes. It's like a "vaccination" - we don't just think about difficult situations, but think about how to react when we find ourselves in them.
The most effective methods for coping with problems and finding real opportunities are pre-death analysis and pre-parade: “A year has passed since now. Our solution failed completely. Why? "Or“ A year has passed since now. We are heroes. Are we ready for success? "
Another method of protecting against obscurity is to set a reasonable margin of error. After all, we are prone to overconfidence and are not ready for unpleasant surprises. We need to view the future as a spectrum, not a point, move our spotlights from side to side, and map the entire territory. This way we can prepare for both bad (using pre-death analysis) and good (using pre-parade) situations. It is easier for us to cope with obstacles when we are mentally ready for them.
But even with the best planning, things may not go well. How do you know when it's time to reconsider your choices? How to avoid missing out on a chance to cut losses or maximize opportunities? To do this, we need mine streamers.
Install "mine streamers"
We go with the flow of life on autopilot, in the wake of past decisions, forgetting that we can change direction. The purpose of stretching is to shake us out of the unconscious routine and make us understand that there is a choice and it is time to decide. The most familiar form of stretching is to set a deadline. The timing is grabbing us by the collar: if you are going to do this, you must act now.
Another strategy, "separation", is an effective way to think about whether to continue. For example, investors prefer to give out money in rounds, gradually, each time weighing, is the plan correct? Mine Stretching ensures that we don't waste money or time down the drain. In this way, they limit risk, give confidence and create psychological comfort, as they allow you to remain on autopilot until the trigger is triggered - a sense of danger or the possibility of success.
People need to be reminded that the current trajectory of life does not have to be constant. Stretch marks provide a sudden invaluable awareness: I have a choice!
Trust the process
Group decisions are harder to make. How can you convince those whose ideas have been rejected that the decision you made is fair?
The most direct and difficult way to make a fair decision is to involve as many people as possible and achieve a common consensus. The discussion is held until a solution is found that satisfies the majority.
Hear what others have to say! Use accurate information to make decisions and give people the opportunity to challenge the data if it is wrong. Avoid bias and personal interests, do not forget about self-criticism, explain why this particular decision was made. At the same time, compromise and time is inevitable. Negotiation is indeed the slower way to make a decision, but it has a major advantage: it speeds up implementation.
Conclusion
When we make a choice, we cannot know if it will be successful. Success depends on the quality of the decisions made and on luck. We have no control over luck. But we can control how we make choices. The right process is an ally in every situation.
This book aims to inspire you to use a better decision process. How to choose a job offer? How to deal with a difficult relationship? How to get the best deal? All of these decisions are made through the same process. It instills the confidence that comes from knowing that you've made the best decision possible.
Using the decision process does not mean that your choices will always be easy, but you can calm your mind, stop the cycle of torment. By trusting the process, you can confidently take risks (like climbers with insurance) and make bolder choices.
Our solutions will never be perfect, but they can be better. Go bolder. Wiser. The right process can guide us towards the right choice. And the right choice at the right moment can mean a lot. Through the process described in such detail, people turn the odds in their favor, make the right decisions, and do not regret their choices.
