Ray Dalio on Making Better Decisions
When two people believe opposite things, chances are that one of them is wrong. It pays to find out if that someone is you. — Ray Dalio
Say you’re giving a presentation, you’ve prepared for it for the last couple of weeks and have researched thoroughly about the subject. By the time you present you’re pretty confident that you’ve mastery of the subject and all of the content that you’re striving to communicate. You stand in a room of important decision makers and people that you depend on to take that next career step. After you’ve finished the presentation you’re pretty confident you’ve communicated the subject very clearly, you give yourself a pat in the back for making through it.
Then the Q&A session comes — let’s see who of this folks wants to argue with my point — you’re prepared to answer any question that may come in your way. You answer the first couple of questions very clearly and without any trouble, however, amongst the last questions one of the key decision makers dares to argue against your main point — how dare he?. You know that this is a very important subject and that it would be for the benefit of the organization to find the truth. Nonetheless, you feel threatened, almost as if the value of your contributions to the organization were put into stake. Even though you know what’s the right thing to do there’s this instinct to prove you’re right and assert yourself in front of the group. What do you do?
Would you in that moment:
A) Debate with the questioner in order to find the root of his argument and seek the truth
B) Emphasize the validity of your point and how you’ve prepared for weeks for this presentation and you’re completely confident of the subject matter
Many people choose option B and there are indeed biological reasons for this. In his book, Principles, Ray Dalio — founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in existence — exposed why deep inside in our reptilian brain we want to protect our decision-making process — event at the cost of finding the truth.
He says that the two biggest barriers for decision making are: a) your ego barrier and b) your blind spots. Both of these components make it difficult for us to arrive at the truth and reaching a common solution.
Understanding our Ego barrier:
Remember that feeling we talked about in the beginning? That moment when you felt as if your personal capabilities, your value as a contributing member of the group felt threatened. That is your ego barrier. Before we go on and blame ourselves for behaving as such we first need to understand that this is already programmed in our genes and the only way through is around.
Our ego has two components: the “executive” and the “irrational monkey”
The Irrational Monkey:
The irrational monkey makes the decisions without our acknowledgement. He cares about our human survival and contains all of our deepest-seated needs and fears. He also craves for praise and perceives criticism as an attack to his personal capabilities — even when the executive does not agree with him.
If we do want to get more technical about it, he is actually located in the amygdala. This is the primitive part of our brain that manages all of our emotions and group behavior. What’s important to understand about it is that this part of our brain is not accessible to our conscious awareness. In layman’s terms, we cannot control it nor can we know it’s motivation, we can just be mindful of its impact and that it affects how we react to people’s comments.
The Executive:
Now this is who we really want to be with — let’s imagine him as a clever guy with suit and tie (because clever people wear suit and ties). He thinks things through and analyzes the pros and cons of every situation. He would pick option A during our introduction and truly debate whether he’s right or not. He applies logic and reasoning to the debate and seeks to find the truth behind every argument.
The Executive lives in the neocortex, more specifically it is based on the prefrontal cortex. While this doesn’t mean much to us at the moment, what we need to know is that it is larger in human beings than in animals and is the fundamental reason behind our conscious awareness.
Why should I care about the Ego barrier?
While it would be excellent to keep the irrational monkey at home and just carry with us the executive, we cannot cage the monkey and they both form part of our decision-making processes. They constantly argue against each other and strive to battle for our attention.
Put into context, say you’re “angry with yourself” — don’t ask me why — your executive (prefrontal cortex) is actually mad with your irrational monkey (amygdala). When you ask “why did I eat the entire chocolate cake”, it is actually because the irrational monkey won the argument against the executive.
This means that when we communicate with people there are at least four beings seeking attention and driving the conversation, our two us — our clever executive and the irrational monkey, and the other person’s own executive and irrational monkey. Now we wonder why some discussions end-up being a mess.
According to Ray Dalio “to be effective decision-makers we must not let the need to be right be more important than the need to find out what’s true, if we’re too proud of what we know or how good we’re at something we will learn less, make inferior decisions and fall short of our true potential”
Understanding our Blind Spots barrier:
As if it wasn’t enough with having an executive guy and an irrational monkey behind every part of our decision-making we also need to care about our blind-spots.
Thankfully, blind-spots are just the different lenses through which we see reality. While we do not need to worry about multiple guys trying to guide our decision-making abilities in this instance we do have to care which lense we use to interpret reality and whether it is the right one for the type of problem we’re facing.
Now what are these lenses I’m talking about. We all see things in different ways. Some people are of the “big picture” type, they can make connections between a broad spectrum of items — even at the expense of missing the small details; others are really good at details while they often fail to see the big picture. Basically, we all have different ways of interpreting reality and these have advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation we’re in. Ideally, we would want a healthy mix of lenses in order to see the true nature of the problem ahead — this is why diverse teams are so important.
Why should I care about these blind spots?
Not only do they prevent us from seeing reality as it is, but most of us do not even accept we have them to begin with. When someone points at our psychological weaknesses we start to perceive them as if it were a physical weakness, we don’t like it, we feel bad about it and negate its existence.
Even though communication is a two-way street, most of us strive to purely communicate what’s inside of us without actually seeking to understand the other person’s point of view. Seems harsh? Remember the last time you were in a conversation and while the other person was talking you were already preparing what you were going to say. Thought so.
Ray Dalio argues that the way to work around these blind spots is by:
a) Teaching your brain to work in a way that doesn’t come naturally (if you’re creative you would learn to be organized through discipline and practice)
b) Using compensating mechanism (if you’re forgetful setting programmed reminders)
c) Relying on the help of others who are strong in areas where you’re weak.
How to Make Better Decisions:
Now that we’re aware of the many barriers that stand between us and making better decisions it is time we understand how to overcome them.
Practice radical open-mindedness. That’s it. Seems too easy? Let’s see what Ray Dalio says about it:
Radical open-mindedness is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally.
It is the ability to effectively explore different points of view and different possibilities without letting your ego or your blind spots get in your way.
It requires you to replace your attachment to always being right with the joy of learning what’s true.
Most people would think of open-mindedness as being “open to being wrong”, and then stubbornly clinging to whatever opinion we have in our heads, failing to truly understand the reasoning behind the other person’s alternative point of view.
Lucky for us, Ray Dalio has a framework to deal with this and through his book Principles he provided key insights that will allow us to truly understand the concept and become more open-minded ourselves:
- Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know.
- Recognize decision making is a two-way process. First, seek to receive all the information, then decide.
- Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.
- Realize that you can’t put out without taking in (It is better to be eager to learn than to convey your thinking or your “vast amount of knowledge” in the subject)
- Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer you can come up with yourself. (Other people might have the right answer for your personal issue)
Good decision making is not only useful for our business meeting or for high-stakes situations. Every day we’re faced with the choice between asserting our point of view or seeking to understand the other person. From common decisions such as where should we go to dinner? up to where should I go to college? it pays to be right. The only way to make sure we’re right is by taking-in all the valid information we can — no matter where it comes from — and truly asking ourselves: Who is making this decision, the Executive or the Irrational Monkey?
Now that we’ve gathered all of these insights and are aware of the multiple barriers behind making good decisions we’re faced with a big question:
Would you pick Option A or Option B?
Major Takeaways:
- You’re not as smart as you think. We all have mental blind spots and biases that prevent us from making the right decisions.
- In thoughtful disagreement, your goal is not to convince the other party that you are right — it is to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it.
- People who change their minds because they learned something are the winners, whereas those who stubbornly refuse to learn are the losers.
- A good exercise to make sure that you are doing this well is to describe back to the person you are disagreeing with their own perspective. If they agree that you’ve got it, then you’re in good shape.
Further Reading:
- Source: Principles by Ray Dalio (Amazon)
- Thoughtful disagreement: Crucial Conversations (Amazon)
- Making better decisions: Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath (Amazon)
- On blind spots: Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Amazon)
Other Articles & Readings by the Author:
- Anders Ericsson on Peak Performance
- Simon Sinek on Leadership & Trust
- Shawn Achor on Success & Happiness
Andres Crucetta is originally from Venezuela, currently based in Texas. He writes about personal growth, education and Latin American issues through his blog: The Weekly Acumen and in Quora.
