227 cards
Decision making is the process of choosing a course of action from multiple options based on goals, evidence, and trade-offs. At its heart, every decision involves selecting among alternatives using some standard or set of standards, and recognizing that accepting one benefit usually means giving up something else. Tha...
Few distinctions in decision-making matter more than reversibility. A reversible decision can be changed cheaply later; an irreversible one is costly or difficult to unwind. The same idea appears under different names: Jeff Bezos calls them Type 1 (irreversible) and Type 2 (reversible) decisions, while other frameworks...
Human decisions are shaped by mental shortcuts that serve us well in familiar settings and betray us in unfamiliar ones. Kahneman's distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, pattern-based) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, analytic) frames the rest of the topic: most everyday decisions run on System 1, which is why...
Most consequential decisions are made without full information, so reasoning well under uncertainty is a core skill. Frank Knight drew the foundational distinction between risk, where probabilities are known, and uncertainty, where they are not. Under risk, expected value thinking guides choice: weighing likely upside...
Good decisions benefit from choosing an approach that fits the situation. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework sorts contexts into five domains. In Simple contexts, cause and effect are clear and best practices apply: sense, categorize, respond. In Complicated contexts, cause and effect require expert analysis and good pra...
Decisions in organizations rarely belong to a single mind, which is why roles and processes matter. A decision owner is the person accountable for making the call after gathering input, embodying the one-throat-to-choke principle that prevents paralysis when a group cannot agree. The RACI model clarifies this by separa...
Good judgment is built, not born, and several practices compound over time. A decision journal captures the reasoning, predictions, and emotions at the time a choice is made; reviewing it later combats hindsight bias, reveals patterns in your judgment, and calibrates confidence. A decision log is the team's running rec...