5 Tips for Making Better Decisions

Big decisions.

You can’t get away from them.

They fill you with dread. “How do I even get started?” “What if I make the wrong decision?”

Is the first thing you think of a reasonable decision? What about taking one of three possible decisions and picking the best one?

Is a decision made under time pressure good enough?

Better decisions require you to avoid bad decisions. Let’s talk about that.

Some causes of bad decisions

1. No pre-mortem. A pre-mortem, a strategy for making better decisions, goes as follows: assume that your desired result has failed. Working backward, make a list of actions that could cause it to fail. Use this new info to modify your initial decision and the path you’ll take to reach your desired result.
2. Assuming that nothing will go wrong. People throughout history have made this statement: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” You should make a decision that will survive a pre-mortem.
3. Your first decision is not your best decision. Your first decision is built on top of what immediately comes to mind, which is built on what worked in the past, on social and group expectations, and working with incomplete or inaccurate information. Plans made from first decisions usually draw strongly from the status quo.
   As a personal example of exploring multiple possibilities, when I am creating a title for an important article, I often generate 30 or more possible titles. Almost always, the title I use is one of the last ten titles I generated.
4. Making a decision that closely matches your beliefs. Good decisions must consider all the evidence, good and bad. Making a decision based on your beliefs means ignoring the evidence that may undermine the decision you want to make. This is a recipe for failure.
5. Not being given enough time to make a good decision. Most organizations, especially businesses, feel a pressing need to move as fast as possible. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous pronouncement “Move fast and break things” exemplifies this sentiment. On the other hand, Jeff Bezos of Amazon requires a team to write a well-reasoned six-page memo, which is read by all members of a meeting. Which company do you think makes the better decisions?

Now it’s your turn: If you skimmed this article and are about to go to the next one, you’ve just wasted your time. To improve your life, you have to do something with what you’ve read.

You can use any of these five actions to make a better decision. Pick one of them and look for places where you use it in your life. (Believe me, the world will provide multiple opportunities to try things out.) Do this for two weeks and see what happens.

Congratulations! You’ve just improved your life.