The Art of Decision Making

Deepak Singh
Jul 21, 2017 · 6 min read

“The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. A professional has professional habits.”

One of the key things that you do on a day-to-day basis, in both your personal and professional life, is making decisions. Whether you are building your company, thinking of accepting a job offer you just got, or simply making a weekend plan, decisions are being made everywhere.

Yet, very few people have formal training in decision making. Like it or not, biases/prejudices plays a major role in decision making, and often result in bad decisions.

So how does one get better in decision-making? Is there a way you can almost always make good decisions? And did I throw the quote at the beginning of this post just like that, or it has anything to do with decision-making? We will try to answer these questions in the subsequent paragraphs.

Let’s understand first how do habits get formed. When you study the science of habit formation, there are three distinct elements to a habit. Cue, Routine, and Reward. Let’s take an example. Many people have developed a habit of checking Facebook multiple times a day, even every hour. One major Cue to this behavior is boredom, when someone is standing in a line, or not engaged in a conversation on the table etc. The Routine is opening the Facebook app, and scrolling the feed. The Reward is you getting a rush of dopamine in anticipation of something good on Facebook feed, i.e. a message from a friend, likes on your photo etc. Dopamine is a neurochemical released in the brain that controls pleasure centres of brain. It makes you feel better instantly. So the next time when you are bored, your brain picks the cue, and your hands reach your smartphone. You open the app (routine), and get a hit of dopamine (reward).

Habits are very powerful. Aristotle said ‘ We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit’, be it in sports, academic, or even decision-making. So when you are indecisive (the Cue), most of us follow an ad-hoc decision-making process where we might miss critical elements (the Routine), and arriving on the solution. Arriving on a solution makes us feel good and relaxed (the Reward) because decision-making is a mentally exhausting process .

You might have concluded on what I am going to say next. We just need to change the Routine to a better decision-making process. A better decision process will substantially improve the results of your decisions. There is a framework described below, which you can use to make decisions. The framework is based on numerous books on this topic, along with my day-to-day experiences of many people I have been fortunate to talk and get ideas from.

For the sake of simplicity, I have kept it brief, including examples wherever possible. There are 5 steps to this framework:

STEP 1 (most important) — Define Jobs-to-be-done (JBTD, in short) to solve the right problem: Clayton Christensen, after studying ‘What makes products/companies succeed?’ for nearly two decades, came up with the theory of Jobs-to-be-done. The core of this theory is to discover the jobs-to-be-done, and then come up with a variety of solutions.

But why is this relevant here? Because every decision has a specific job to do. For example, we all get hair-cuts all the time. And at the surface it seems like the job to be done. But if you think carefully, the job is to cut down the unwanted growth of hair. So while a company providing high-tech instruments to Salons, can focus on the next gen-product for cutting hair. The real-job might be solved by someone who produces a chemical that controls hair growth.

So by not thinking through and defining jobs-to-be-done, you have a risk of picking the problem on the surface, and it might come back to bite in your back.

Care needs to be taken in making sure that you don’t define this job narrowly. Defining the real job will help you see other alternatives to the one solution you have in mind. And in order to define the job, Professor Christensen advices to follow this two-step process:

  1. First, description of JTBD shouldn’t contain adjective or adverb, like convenience. It should be all verbs and nouns. ‘We should aspire to be more honest’ isn’t a job really.
  2. Second, if products in the same class can solve the problem, you are not uncovering the job. This is to ensure we are thinking on optimum level of abstraction. For example, ‘finding a good place to stay’ is the right job, whereas ‘finding a good hotel to stay’ isn’t. By thinking first, you can book cheaper alternatives like AirBnB, or your friends might suggest some other good alternatives. This will save you some bucks.

STEP 2 — Evaluate window of opportunity to make this decision: Can the decision-making be delayed? If it can be delayed for later, you can wait for more information to come in, and decide later.

STEP 3 — Size up the decision: Sizing up the decision helps you decide how much time you want to invest in researching, and exploring options.

  1. 10/10/10 rule — will it affect 10 days, 10 months, or 10 years? One should never spend same time for deciding on taking a home loan, versus going out for dinner.
  2. Is the decision reversible? If it is, you shouldn’t be investing a lot of time. Boiling the milk, versus making curd anyone.
  3. What is the upside and downside? Quantify outcomes in both cases. Decide with upside, protect the downside. For example, should you be hosting a dinner party in the lawn, or indoors? While hosting a dinner party in the lawn might be more enjoyable (upside), a drizzle might spoil your evening (downside). In the rainy season, you should host your parties indoor then.

STEP 4 — Research: Once you have sized up the decision, it’s time to research the options.

  1. Has someone made this kind of decision before? Can we use their advice on this?
  2. Find and weigh options. Make a list of pros and cons. Most of the time we go ahead with the first feasible option that comes to our mind.

STEP 5 — Write down the decision once you have been through the four steps. Since you would have a list by now, figure out the most important outcomes (1–3) and choose the option closest to meeting these. You can’t have an option to meet all your needs :)

Bonus tip: Beware of parkinson’s law of triviality, i.e. the tendency of people to give disproportionate attention to trivial issues and details.

The example Parkinson used to illustrate his law was a committee’s discussion on using an atomic reactor compared to painting their bike shed. The reactor is expensive and understandable by only a few people, so people assume that the decisions that need to be made about it can be made easily by those who work on it. In contrast, everyone can have an opinion on the colour of the bike shed — and understands its implications — where everyone participates and want to add their ‘expertise.’ As a result, the atomic reactor is discussed for 10 minutes, and the bike shed for rest 50 minutes in an hour meeting.

I wasn’t natural at decision-making. Many people keep ruminating for years on the decision to stay in the job, or start a business, never making a decision because they get overwhelmed when they think about it. I have stayed there for a long time, and understand how regretful it becomes sometimes. This is a humble attempt to help all those thinkers, who can becomes doers. This is to save all those ‘If only’s’ both in near future, and later. These rules have helped me immensely in relationships, work and at a personal level. I hope it does the same for you :)

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Deepak Singh

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