Great decision-makers don’t remember all of these steps in a rote way and carry them out mechanically, yet they do follow them. That’s because through time and experience they’ve learned to do most of them reflexively, just as a baseball player catches a fly ball without thinking about how he’s going to do it. If they had to call each of the principles up from their memory and then run them through their slow conscious minds, they couldn’t possibly handle all the things that are coming at them well. But there are a couple of things that they do carry out consciously and you should do them too.
Simplify!
Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the relationships between them stand out. As the saying goes, “Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple.” Think of Picasso. He could paint beautiful representational paintings from an early age, but he continually pared down and simplified as his career progressed. Not everyone has a mind that works that way, but just because you can’t do something naturally doesn’t mean you can’t do it, you just have to have creativity and determination. If necessary, you can seek the help of others.
Use principles.
Using principles is a way of both simplifying and improving your decision-making. While it might seem obvious to you by now, it’s worth repeating that realizing that almost all “cases at hand” are just “another one of those,” identifying which “one of those” it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it. This will allow you to massively reduce the number of decisions you have to make (I estimate by a factor of something like 100,000) and will lead you to make much better ones. The key to doing this well is to:
Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision.
Write the criteria down as a principle.
Think about those criteria when you have an outcome to assess, and refine them before the next “one of those” comes along.
Identifying which “one of those” each thing is is like identifying which species an animal is. Doing that for each thing and then matching it up with the appropriate principles will become like playing a game, so it will be fun as well as helpful. Of course it can also be challenging. Many “cases at hand,” as I call them, are hybrids. When a case at hand contains a few “another ones of those,” one must weigh different principles against each other, using mental maps of how the different types of things I encounter should be handled. To help people do that, I created a tool called a Coach, which is explained in the Appendix.
You can use your own principles, or you can use others’; you just want to use the best ones possible well. If you think that way constantly, you will become an excellent principled thinker.
Believability weight your decision-making
I have found triangulating with highly believable people who are willing to have thoughtful disagreements has never failed to enhance my learning and sharpen the quality of my decision-making. It typically leads me to make better decisions than I could have otherwise, and it typically provides me with thrilling learning. I urge you to do it.
To do it well, be sure to avoid the common perils of valuing your own believability more than is logical and not distinguishing between who is more or less credible.
In case of a disagreement with others, start by seeing if you can agree on the principles that should be used to make that decision. This discussion should include exploring the merits of the reasoning behind the different principles. If you agree on them, apply them to the case at hand and you’ll arrive at a conclusion everyone agrees on. If you disagree on the principles, try to work through your disagreement based on your respective believabilities. I will explain how we do this in more detail in Work Principles.
This sort of principled and believability-weighted decision-making is fascinating and leads to much different and much better decision-making than is typical. For example, imagine if we used this approach to choose the president. It would be fascinating to see which principles we would come up with both for determining what makes a good president as well as for deciding who is most believable in making such determinations. Would we wind up with something like one person one vote, or something different? And if different, in what ways? It certainly would lead to very different outcomes. During the next election, let’s do this in parallel with our ordinary electoral process so we can see the difference.