What are some tools to use for effective decision making? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Charles Duhigg, Staff Writer, New York Times and Author of, Smarter Faster Better, on Quora.
Here is what scientific studies say will help you make better decisions: Thinking through various, contradictory possibilities, and then trying to force yourself to figure out which ones are more or less likely, and why. This is known as probabilistic thinking, and studies show that it significantly increases the quality of people's decision making.
Say, for instance, that you are trying to decide whether your group of rebels should attack the Death Star. Seems like an easy decision, right? After all, the Death Star is filled with jerks, and it has a big glaring weakness that apparently no architect considered when designing the ship: one well placed shot can blow up the entire thing.
If you are some hillbilly from Tatooine, you'll charge off into space. You'll think about this decision in binary terms ("The Empire=bad. The rebels=good. What can go wrong?") But, if you are practiced at decision making, you'll probably do something a bit differently: you'll sit down with Adm. Ackbar, and you'll try to envision the dozens of different outcomes that are possible. "We could get defeated before we make it to the ship. We could make it to the ship and not have enough X-wings. We could have enough X-wings but then miss the shot. We could make the shot but our intel could be wrong. We could have good intel and make the shot and the Death Star blows up, but our reward is Jar Jar Binks..." You get the point.
Now, here's the thing: you aren't going to be very precise at assigning probabilities to all those possibilities. ("What are the odds that our intel is bad?") But forcing yourself to think through all the possibilities and then simply trying to assign odds will be really helpful in revealing what you do and don't know. So, maybe you are pretty certain that your intel is good, and maybe you are pretty certain that, if they can get close to the Death Star, your pilots will hit the target (because, after all, you've got the force on your side), but you aren't particularly certain that you have enough X-wings to make sure that you'll get close to the Death Star. Now you know which parts of your plan are weakest, you know what you need to learn more about and what problems you need to solve to increase the odds of success.
Our brains, left to their own devices, prefer to think about choices in binary terms and, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is really efficient. But to make better decisions, we have to force ourselves to think probabilistically, and then we need to get comofortable with the fact that probabilistic thinking tends to reveal how much we don't know. It is scary to confront uncertainty. It can make you crazy and anxious. That's why it is so much easier to look at choices as binary options ("I'll either succeed or fail") or deterministic outcomes ("I ended up married to her because she was my soulmate.") But if you genuinely want to make better decisions, you have to fight that instinct, and make yourself think about multiple possibilities - both the good and the bad - and be really honest with yourself about what you do and don't know (and what is knowable and unknowable.) And then you have to take a leap, and make a decision, and see it as an experiment that gives you data, rather than a success or failure that you should congratulate yourself on/beat yourself up about.
Because, unfortunately, the force doesn't really exist. But probabilities do.
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