Our theme this week is all about decision-making!

We make decisions big and small every day, but how do we know if we’re making the right ones? 

For some of us, decision-making can be quite challenging. Perhaps because we weigh other’s opinions over our own… or we’re choosing to prioritize what is expected of us rather than what we value. 

There can be many reasons why our decisions don’t feel “quite right” and so this week we’re sharing some strategies for how to move through decision-making with confidence and ease!

Don't Seek Consensus

Our first tip might feel a little wrong but… we suggest not to seek consensus. 

If you’re making a decision for your company or your family it can be tempting to want to seek consensus amongst everyone as your way of deciding.

This is a very egalitarian approach, however according to the research, it often leads to a less optimal outcome. 

This is because trying to find a broad consensus requires a lot of time and compromise, and in the end, it leads to an outcome that everyone can live with, but no one is happy with. 

To be clear, making good decisions does not mean you should avoid collecting other’s input, it just means consensus shouldn’t be your goal.

By seeking valuable input, you will gain greater understanding of the decision and be better suited to come up with ideas. 

How to seek valuable input

⚡️ When seeking other’s opinions, choose the right people with the relevant expertise to clearly articulate their views and help with the decision

✨ Choose people who are most impacted, have the most knowledge and experience with the decision at hand to seek advice from

Write Out Your Thoughts

Did you know that the average adult makes around 34,000 decisions each day? Some of these decisions don’t take much forethought, while others do.

When you’re faced with a big decision, we suggest writing your thoughts down beforehand to avoid what psychologists call the “framing effect.”

The framing effect is a “cognitive bias” that causes people to make decisions based on how information is presented, rather than the information itself. 

There was a great example of this phenomenon in a study at University of Michigan, where researchers gave students a prompt about what should be done in the case of a potential disease outbreak and asked them to make a decision about what responses were the best. 

Knowing about the framing effect, they intentionally framed one of the less effective answers in a positive light to see who would fall susceptible to this bias. 

The participants who wrote about their decisions beforehand were much more confident in their decisions and therefore less likely to fall victim to the framing effect. 

The act of writing forces you to organize vague feelings and the act of rereading what you wrote reveals your own logic (or lack thereof). Try these prompts below next time you have a big decision to make.

Two Questions to Ask Yourself About a Decision

✍️ What are the costs and benefits?

✍️ What is your motivation behind the decision, and is that a value you want to cultivate in yourself?

Know Your Values

As expected, it always comes back to values!

Making decisions can often feel confusing… probably because we are conflicted between a few different values. So the first step in any good decision-making process is to know your values. 

Knowing your values will help you prioritize what is truly important to you and decisions that align with those values. 

For example, let’s say you’re deciding between taking a safe and stable job vs taking a job that is more unstable, but offers more flexibility and opportunities for travel.

If you are someone who values stability and financial assuredness, you might consider choosing the “safe job,” however if you are someone who values adventure, you might consider taking the “riskier job.” 

By grounding our decisions in our values, we avoid getting distracted by trivial details and external pressures… and instead focus on what really matters to us in the end. 

Two ways to connect your values to your decisions: 

✨ Do a thought experiment: “if I had to give up X or Y for the next 10 years, which could I not live without?”

✨ If you journal, read through past journal entries and look for patterns of what you focus on the most? (i.e. Relationships? Career? Family? Health?) This might shine a light on what is truly important to you. 

Consider a "Pre-Mortem"

A "pre-mortem" is a risk management technique used to identify potential problems before a project begins. 

For example, let’s say you’re a principal of a middle school and there is gum all over your campus. You decide to offer a token to every student who has evidence of having scraped gum from the ground. 

This idea works at first, however… more children start to buy gum, so they can spit it on the ground and then scrape it up to get more tokens. You quickly realize this is happening, and scrap the token program. This leads the gum problem to become worse because now even more students on campus have gum and continue to spit it on the ground. 

As you can see, only focusing on how a potential outcome can go right leaves you unaware of all of the ways in which it can go wrong. 

Doing what’s called a “pre-mortem” helps you consider what could go wrong before making a big decision. It is a low-stakes way of coming to the best solution. 

3 steps for applying a pre-mortem to decision making: 

✨ Start with a potential decision, and think of at least 2 ways it could go awry.

✨ Pick one of the worst outcomes, and work backwards from that to identify the risks associated with your decision.

✨ Determine whether those are things you have control over or not.

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Our final takeaway is to embrace the uncertainty that comes with decision-making.

We’re all fearful of making the “wrong” decision, and so we get caught up in researching, asking others, and overthinking in an effort to find the “perfect” option when it doesn’t exist. 

In order to be a confident decision-maker, you need to embrace the truth that all decisions are just choices. And those choices will set off a complex series of outcomes that we cannot control for. 

We hope this theme was helpful this week!

P.S. If you could use help accomplishing your goals this season, please join us at one of our live guided work sessions, or morning planning sessions!

Take care,

— Darya, focused space host