My Vision: Painful Problems
#4
Foreword
(Note: The problem stated in this article was one of my past attempts. Currently, the problem I’m aiming to solved is illustrated here)
In the last article, The Origin of Product: My Ideologies, I shared two aspects of ideologies. The first is my ideology and dreams toward the world and how it has shaped my life choices. And the second are my business values driving the product-related decision-making. In the end of the article, I pointed out a general direction of the product: a service that facilitates understanding of highly complex matters to enhance organizational problem-solving capabilities.
Continuing to extend based on the conclusion of the previous article, in this article, I would like to introduce my vision by stressing on the painful problem I would like to solve, which is the struggle to enhance the quality and efficiency of decision-making in organization. And then, I will provide some insights on the methodology of solution I’m building.
The main purpose of the series of these articles is to invite people with similar visions and beliefs of solving this problem to join me as the co-founder, and push over the status quo of the world to the one we want to create.
Regarding the product, the direction is certain, but the path can be flexible. In fact, there are many choices of problems in different markets and area that has the great potential and thus worth considering becoming my initial product focus. The current one I’m proposing is based on my accumulated execution experience along the way. It is the one I currently think is most suitable.
However, it still requires further verification by taking the product in front of many users to ultimately determine my formal product focus based on the continuous two-way feedback. In other words, it hasn’t become a mature product idea which might change and evolve through the process of further execution.
And now, since I’ve completed building the first version of product myself, it’s time for me and the project itself to recruit more talents (2 people) to help pushing forward the product development. Jointly, hoping to build the fastest iterating product the world has ever seen, and ultimately become a viable business.
Important but unsolved problems
My vision is largely driven by the problem I want to solve, which is the low quality of decision-making. It is a common but serious problem in personal and organizational level.
At an individual level, we often neglect the importance of optimizing the quality of decision. As a famous angel investor Naval Ravikant advised for those who just went out of college, spending more time on 3 big decisions. Who you live, who you’re with and what you’re doing. However, the counter-intuitive reality is that we don’t really spend much time and effort into the dominating decisions. We usually have exhausted all our efforts to figure out how to deal with various problems in life. For example, we spend so much time in different relationships, but spend so little on deciding who to be or not to be with; We spend so much time into the preparation of job-seeking but spend so little into considering the city we work and live.
The same goes with organization. The organization is overwhelmed by daily tasks and trivial matters and has no extra effort to handle more dominant decisions. We all know that as the company representative, the output value of work comes from the quality of decisions. The rule not only applies for the highest level in company. For enterprises and medium businesses, the decisions made by managers at high-level, middle-level or even low-level management levels will greatly affect the company. For small businesses that each individual shoulder greater responsibilities, the decision every person make matters.
The importance of the speed and quality of decision-making definitely outweigh the speed and quality of solving day-to-day tasks in organizations. All tasks are simply the result of decision-making, meaning that decision-making is the dominant one that determines that existence of those tasks. Ironically, we created so many tools to manage various aspects of those tasks in order to enhance their efficiency and quality, such as operation, human resource, sales, finance, project management, product development, knowledge management, etc. But we neglect to optimize the quality and efficiency of decision-making at the organizational level, which happens at individual level as well.
Perhaps this is partially due to our nature. We are innately good at paying attention on mitigating immediate problems, addressing concrete tasks, preventing short term problems. But when it comes to decision-making, that is abstract, not urgent, and no significant immediate impact, we are not skilled at tackling it by nature.
Extremely hard and painful problems
Neglecting the decision-making especially in the quality aspect is simply the result, or the common phenomenon in organization. The underlying reason is its high difficulty. Why it’s so hard to make decisions? The reason mainly comes from lack of brain. We don’t have enough cognitive level which came from experience, information, knowledge. All of these shaped our view toward the world and the situation, and thus influencing our ultimate decision. From another perspective, we encountered the situation to make decisions that is far beyond our current cognitive level too often, making it the task that is beyond our current limits.
Hard decision-making in organization is more like asking you to solve a technical problem that you have no related background and experience. Hence, in order to better solve this problem, you have to acquire relevant knowledge in that field, building cognitive or knowledge model that you didn’t possess. And try to learn to think with it by flexibly manipulate this knowledge model to solve the problem. Only by pulling off this kind of hard execution process, can you elevate the past cognitive level to enough degree to have capabilities to make the hard decisions good enough.
On the other hand, there are two characteristics of our decision-making, the first is that it usually takes a lot of time. Good decisions usually take much time to accumulate and shape. We need put a lot of effort into thinking, in order to clarify the intricacies, or analyze and evaluate the current situation. But what we lack most in organization is time. The second is we usually formed our decision in our hand. It’s more like learning extremely complex knowledge. For most people, it’s already extensively proved that learning with the aid of visualization enhance the quality of learning. If decision-making is able to be visualized in a good way, it might provide some help.
Decision-making is so hard that even though we know that it’s highly significant and dominating, we still perform bad anyway, making it extremely painful. Within organization, bad decision-making is catastrophic in all levels. The failing decision in the lower level, mid-level, or senior executive can all lead to the crisis or even failure of business or organization.
The process of decision-making
The process of decision-making within different organizations might varies, but they basically follow similar principles. Step one, initiate this decision in the brain. Step two, collect and organize data and information by tools or in the brain. Step three, interact with other, and perhaps having some discussions. Step four, form the conclusion in the head, and produce and assign a series of tasks as the result.
Regarding the quality and efficiency of decision-making, the quality doesn’t have much to do with the process. It’s really hard to enhance the quality by refining the process. As for the efficiency, it depends on the organizational structure and its own internal process design, and most of the companies have already done optimizing the process to enhance its efficiency. Under the existing methods and framework, it’s hard to further optimize the quality and efficiency of decision making.
The characteristic of decision-making
Normally, our focus within organizations is on the result of decision, which are those follow-up tasks. Rarely placing much emphasis on the process and context of decision-making, let alone to optimize it. We rely much on each employee’s brainpower to maintain the level and quality of decision-making, just as we rely on employees with rich knowledge and experience to maintain the company’s competitiveness.
Not only does the quality of decision is largely determined by high-quality talents, so does the efficiency of which. The very reason that streamlined and efficient operating procedures can work is because the company have many self-managed and active talents to maintain this system.
In other words, any aspect about decision-making we would like to optimize is completely determined by the level of talents. It’s understandable that companies are always trying to recruit the best talents in the world.
Enhancing cognitive level
Since the efficiency and quality of decision of a company is determined by the level of talents, which is the cognitive level of that person. The solution of enhancing the level of decision-making under existing conditions lies in empowering decision-makers to transcend their current cognitive level. In other words, trying to go beyond their current level of knowledge, experience, and information
How are we able to pull this off? There are actually many similar characteristics that can be referred to in other examples. All these practices and methods in other cases are valuable experiences that are worth learning from and can be placed into the cohesive vision of improving decision-making.
In personal level, let’s take solving an unfamiliar technical problem as an example. We elevate our cognitive level by acquiring knowledge and experience related to the problem and solution, reaching the new extent of understanding that the past self could never had. Then, we manipulate the knowledge models that is full of rules and logics, flexibly applying them into describing the problem and thus forming suitable solution. In another case that is quite personal, such as choosing between multiple job opportunities, we have to actively talk to or consult others with related work experience in those areas, companies or positions, collecting valuable opinions and perspectives by asking the proper question. Then, we have to reflect our own interests, pursuits and goals in career and set the proper priorities. This is also an extremely hard steps, usually having no certain answers. After digesting large amounts of complex information and full self-clarification, we might find a clearer direction, but still stuck to make the final decision, for collecting many data alone is not enough. Ultimately, we have to rely on our intuition or simply guessing to make choices in the circumstances that we would never be able to know right from wrong.
In organizational level, it is quite common for companies to implement knowledge management, having rich knowledge database for empowering employees. Preserving the accumulated knowledge, processes, and experiences within the organization so that everyone can improve the problem-solving ability by effectively accessing to the resource according to the tasks they are facing, rather than reinventing the wheel.
In actual operation, a person can easily find the required data or experience within the company with very little time and can fully understand and absorb it swiftly. Thinking backwards of this process, it is the person who properly recorded this information in the first place, can the others easily find it, refer to it and thus flexibly apply in current task.
Accumulated research and huge knowledge system in academia is another great example. There are rigorous, reliable, and infinite research papers within all branches of science that each researcher can access. They all follow a standardized format and solid rules, so it is easy for researchers to distinguish the high-quality one. With advanced search engine and electronic database, we can efficiently search for and fully absorb the accumulated experience and knowledge of our predecessors. And on this basis, finding the strategy to innovate and pushing the boundaries of humankind’s scope of knowledge and understanding.
Four examples above in different scenarios regardless of being classified in personal, organizational, or even broader level, as different as they may seem, actually have one common trait that connect them together. The ultimate goal of all of them is to enhance the cognitive level, equipping oneself to have enough capability to tackle the current problem. They provide a good learning model and valuable insights for decision-making. Developing the method for empowering decision-makers to transcend their current cognitive level.
Product thinking
Decisions made by different people or made in different time can be repetitive or similar and thus worth referring to in the future. The essence of high-quality decision-making lies in its thinking process and context but remains in people’s hand. If the decision-making process is able to be recorded effortlessly, the collected data can be invaluable for an organization. These data can fully circulate, reuse, and be easily absorbed by others.
In order to make the data collection of decision-making effortlessly and naturally, we have to provide a tool that is easy and even a pleasure to use. Also, it has to be smart enough to understand whatever information decision-makers input. Based on the experience of knowledge management within organizations, every person suffers so much on spending extra time in documenting, recording, organizing the result of work. It’s a required procedure for organizations, but extremely painful, exhausting and time consuming.
Decision management tool
As a preliminary idea, I would like to make the core interface of this tool an infinite canvas with editable cards with texts, helping to clarify complex thinking and information to form proper decision. You could take the appearances of note-taking apps like the canvas view from Obsidian or Heptabase as a reference.
It might be easier to understand if I go through the decision-making steps via the aid of this tool. First, we initiate a decision and use to tool to aid the process. The tool itself can be seamlessly connect to the various software product or the internal database of the company. With the aid of advanced search engine or AI algorisms, we could easily find and import the required information both internally and externally that is highly related to this very decision. For example, automatically showing the related decision process and context made before in the visualization format we asked for and can be easily understood.
Second, freely create and expand our own cognitive architecture. Based on the aid of past experience and new information, data and consideration, the required understanding of this decision has already been substantially elevated compared to the starting phase. We are able to build more complex cognition by adding more viewpoints from current level of understanding and keep advancing. On the other hand, decision visualization presents all the messy things visually with a clear context, improving the clarity and execution quality of decisions. As ugly as the visual presentation might be, the tool is smart enough to reorganize it to become prettier and neater without affecting the context of your thinking process. Not only would it be a fun playground for users to clarify their thoughts, being able to solve and learn such complex problems via visualization, but also as a tool designed to free the users from wasting time on the chores surrounding the tools itself, which are notorious from many other tools.
Third, comes the need for communication with others. After the context is more complete and decision is about to be formed, it is a tool that is innately suitable for sharing and communicating with others. We can easily see the corresponding data to support each point of view or the descriptions and evidence that explains this argument. In this way, the decision and thinking process itself can be easily communicated and discussed with others, furthering enhancing its potential quality.
Fourth, the documentation and reusing in the future. The complete thinking process of decision-making is a precious asset accumulated by the organization. As a data, it is even much more valuable than knowledge and experiences we generally recorded and managed in the knowledge management tool.
The documentation process is actually already taken care of by the tool itself with least need of further effort. By automatically organizing and recording the decision-making, reasoning, and thinking processes, the valuable contexts and experiences are accumulated like knowledge in knowledge management system. But avoiding the drawbacks of time-wasting process to organize and document the content.
Additionally, there is no need to recall what the context was and what the key reasons were after the decision is made. The process is self-recorded by the thinking process when using this tool. With the help of this effective data collation process and advanced algorithms of the tool, in the future, the past organizational experience can be retrieved, reused, flexibly applied for new scenarios. Further improving the cognitive foundation for making decisions next time.
The conclusion
My vision came from the yearnings to solve the painful problems regarding organizational decision-making. The difficulties stem of the limited cognitive level of decision-makers, which are the knowledge, information, experience they possess. And by realizing the following the main part of the solution, can I have a chance to tackle this difficult and critical problems for organizations. First, the interface and tooling that users love to rely on for making decision and the tool itself should be smart enough to understand the complex context of the thinking process of users. Secondly, the advanced algorithms for others to retrieve the past accumulated experience easily and also be able to flexibly present the context in a visual method that can be easily understood and absorbed by others. Third, the visualization tool for building, creating, extending cognitive architecture to enhance the level of understanding, which has already been proven to be effectively helpful for users to clarify intricate topics in consumer market.
Status: 70% complete
- the first update: 2024/7/4
- the third update: 2024/8/22
