The Case For Fast Decisions

We as humans are confronted with decisions all day, every day. Most of them are really inconsequential ("what pizza place should I order from?"), while others can can affect the trajectory of your entire life ("should I really take that job offer?").

We're not really trained to make decisions during our education. And making decisions is really uncomfortable for many folks, especially because we rarely have the full picture.

Making a decision may reduce opportunity in the short-term, but it is crucial for opportunity in the long-term. My experience is that there are few things as crippling as indecision. In a way, indecision is making a decision and avoiding responsibility for it. Unfortunately, most environments do not incentivize taking risks. Taking risk and failing is reprimanded or punished.

Fast decisions are an asset in their own right

A decision's rate of improvement flattens out very quickly with time. This has made me place a high value in decision speed. It is rarely the case that a decision is unrectifiable. It is the spirit of the agile mindset to fail quickly and course correct if necessary - the exception is of course if you are either deciding something with a high magnitude of impact or very low reversibility. We all have the friend who is trying to solve relativity when ordering food in the restaurant, when in reality the decision is very inconsequential.

The only real benefit of more time is the opportunity to gather more information or more time to think. Who would you ask, and what is the benefit of that extra information? By how much would your decision improve with that input? What would need to happen for you to change your mind?

Ask yourself what your decision right now would be if you were forced to decide. I would even go as far to say that twice as many decisions with half the precision are better. At least for us regular Joes where not every decision is a high stakes one. "Question askers" and the "let's have another meeting"-folks want to reduce their uncertainty to zero. That is not a feasible mindset.

Accept the burden of uncertainty

I have made my peace with the uncertainty of decisions. Uncertainty is caused on the one hand by luck (randomness exists, and we do not control the actions of others) and by the fact that there is a veil of ignorance in every decision. We are not omniscient and new information may arise with time. The remedy to this is be wary of mental traps (such as sunk cost fallacy) and be genuinley open to change your mind

Going fast in uncertainty undoubtedly increases the chances of error. How well can you stomache a poor outcome? If the worst possible scenario has only small ramifications, then you have found the prime example for a case of fast decision-making being. And if your decision is reversible you should move fast too - you can always pivot.

Thinking in bets

Immanuel Kant postulates that the willingness to bet is a good indicator of your convictions. It's a mental game I like to play with myself. How much would I bet on the decision I am about to make? A bet is essentially the monetary value of your opinion. Are you willing to bet the farm on your belief, or does the size of the bet reveal a doubt you hadn't admitted to yourself?

There are many lessons about decision making to be drawn from poker. Losing a important hand - especially when the odds were in my favor - is one of the most tilting experiences you can endure. And it is in these tilted moments where I really feel emotion seeping into and clouding your decision making on following hands. You are not a robot. It is normal to feel emotion, but it is important to do your best in seperating them from your decisions. Poker is really fascinating because it forces you to think about your thinking and decisions in a metacognitive way and reverse engineer your belief back to the nucleus.

Do not rate the quality of the decision by it's outcome. The action must be distinquished from the outcome. Things may go awry, but the initial decision may still have been the correct one with given information. We are resulting everywhere all the time.

You also don't always have the option to walk away from the table. Sometimes you must play to the end and deal with a really bad hand. But even if the odds are unfavorable, you must play to your (sometimes miniscule) outs. I had a big "Risk" phase, and I always observe the one guy who loses a creeping loss rather then taking his small long-shot opening when it presents itself.

Think about second order consequences

One of the most underused thinking tools is asking not just "what will this decision cause?" but "what will that cause?"

In the 1950s, Mao Zedong ordered the mass killing of sparrows in China. Sparrows consumed rice seeds, so eliminating them would increase the harvest. The immediate consequence played out as planned. The second order consequence: a skyrocketing locust population with no natural predator, which devastated crops and is considered one of the leading causes the Great Chinese Famine, which was responsible for killing up to 50 million people. China ended up importing sparrows to rebalance the ecosystem. Mao did not consider second order consequences.

Before committing to a decision, ask what the non-obvious downstream effects are. The first consequence is usually visible. It is the second and third that bite you.

Reflecting on past decisions

I've written before about how accountability is core to my person and about keeping track of your decisions to remain accountable. It's already a challenge to rate one's own decision after the fact (hindsight bias), but even harder to assess decisions of others (even close team members). It's virtually impossible to replenish the entire mental state and context of the decision of the time that it was made. No one sets out to make a wrong choice, and it requires empathy to put yourself in different shoes and understand the rationale. We often experience this memory creep with our own decisions, thinking information we did not have yet was available at decision time.

Generally I see a pattern of too many inexperienced people making decisions guided by intuition too quickly. I also have much to learn, which is why I try so hard to systemize decisions. Intuition is acquired through experience, and you should only fully trust your intuition if you have good experience.

But the goal is not to be right every time. That's not achievable, and chasing it is what produces paralysis. The goal is to build a process that gives you the best possible chance with the information available. And to stay honest
about what that process actually was, separate from how it turned out.