Today, with the 50th post, I look back over the past 6 months and give you a guide to learning how to make better decisions. Click on each link below to read an article describing one piece of advice.

But first, I want your feedback.

If you have found these articles useful, let me know. What are your challenges when making decisions? What do you most need to learn? What articles have been most helpful for you so far?

Add a comment below, post a comment on Facebook or e-mail me at feedback [at] leandecisions [dot] com.

Your feedback is critical to helping me shape the content of this site.

I’ll be taking off for the rest of the year, but will be back next year with more articles. Have a happy holidays!

Build a Foundation

1. Read the 13 core principles of Lean Decisions
2. Learn the 4 phases of a decision
3. Know that a good decision doesn’t guarantee success

Develop a Strategy

4. Know when not to hedge
5. Know when to just flip a coin
6. Know when to embrace uncertainty
7. Avoid premature diversification
8. Treat commitments as portfolio decisions, not yes/no decisions
9. Choose what to focus on: the path, the journey or the destination

Follow a Process

10. Set your priorities first
11. Challenge your assumptions
12. Don’t limit yourself
13. But don’t overwhelm yourself either
14. Choose what to optimize your decision for
15. But choose wisely–efficiency isn’t always the right answer

Avoid Bad Decisions

16. Beware pitfalls
17. Surface your hidden decisions
18. Avoid using absolute costs
19. Avoid comparison shopping
20. Stop reading everything you come across
21. Learn how to get others to prioritize effectively

Use Your Body

22. Tame decision fatigue
23. And maybe hold your pee in

Be Decisive

24. Identify where your decisions get stuck
25. Work to overcome indecision
26. Don’t dilly-dally: decide or defer
27. Order from menus quickly
28. Decide who to vote for quickly

Learn Patterns

29. Learn the 5 families of decision
30. Learn the types of Choice decisions
31. Make better Go/No-Go decisions
32. Recognize Conveyor Belt decisions
33. Avoid the sunk cost dilemma
34. Make good Voting decisions

Study Techniques

35. Improve your pro-con lists
36. Make weighted pro-con lists
37. Use decision checklists
38. Use decision rules
39. Make preemptive decisions
40. Use unbalanced scales when weighting factors in a decision
41. Learn poker

Learn From Others

42. Listen to Noah Kagan talk about decision frameworks
43. Listen to Chad Modad talk about selecting a new vendor
44. Listen to John Knox talk about starting a t-shirt business
45. Listen to John Knox talk about why he decided NOT to buy a camera
46. Read about one of my bad decisions and what I learned from it
47. Read about the best decision I ever made
48. Read 19 more articles to help you make better decisions

Assumptions can limit our thinking, making us think the possible is impossible.

By challenging assumptions, we can unlock new creativity & take radical leaps forward in our thinking of potential solutions, allowing us to do what initially seemed impossible.

But how do you challenge assumptions?

Are there specific techniques that can help you unlock your creativity and come up with a radical new solution that dramatically improves upon the old one?

Write Down Your Assumptions

First things first. Before you can challenge your assumptions, you must write them down.

Spend time on this part. Often the mere act of writing down assumptions highlights ways around them.

Work with multiple people and brainstorm to uncover hidden assumptions you may not be aware of. Break down each piece of your problem or solution into parts and ask what assumptions you have about each part.

Examine Your Assumptions

Examine your assumptions by using the follow techniques:

1. Redefine Words
   Examine the meaning of words in assumptions. An assumption can be inaccurate because it uses words that are too narrowly defined, too broadly defined or interpreted differently by different people.

   Terms defined too broadly may mean an assumption that only applies to some situations gets applied to all situations. Conversely, terms defined too narrowly may restrict thinking and hide opportunities. Different people may state the same assumption, but interpret that assumption differently because they use different meanings for the core concepts.

2. Examine Your Qualifiers
   Qualifying words sneak into assumptions, turning accurate statements into over-generalizations. Watch out for words and phrases like “never”, “always”, “all of” and “none of”. Drill into adjectives and make sure they qualify your nouns correctly.
3. Test Negative Statements
   Re-state the assumption in the negative. Does it still make sense? Negative statements can highlight logical fallacies.
4. Cross-Validate Your Assumptions
   If you have multiple related assumptions, build a model that calculates one assumption from the other and vice versus. When dealing with numbers, a top-down versus bottom-up analysis can cross-validate your assumptions.

   For instance, calculate your revenue from the assumption of how many leads you can generate a month, then calculate the number of leads you need from your revenue assumption. If the numbers differ greatly between the two models, the assumptions are either wrong or the models are wrong. Most often, it’s the assumptions.

5. Hypothesize Without Your Assumption
   Do a thought experiment on what would happen if the assumption didn’t exist. How would that change your actions and the actions of those around you? What other assumptions wouldn’t make sense because they depend on the assumption you’re removing? Even if the assumption is valid, assuming it’s not highlights dependencies between assumptions.
6. Hypothesize With Different Assumptions
   Do another thought experiment, but instead of eliminating the assumption, narrow, broaden or change a parameter of the assumption. What consequences does this have?

   For instance, if my assumption is if I buy a red car I increase my chance of getting a speeding ticket, what happens if I assume buying a blue car increases this chance? Or if I assume that it has to be not just a red car, but a red sports car?

7. Ask Why
   Ask why the assumption exists. Uncover the reasoning behind them the assumption and examine that. Can the underlying reason be used to create a more accurate assumption?

   For instance, if the reason I assume red cars get more speeding tickets is because red cars get bought by people who like to speed, my assumption switches from the car to the person buying the car.

8. Follow the Rabbit Hole Down
   Iterate on each of these techniques as assumptions uncover further assumptions. Try to get to the root assumptions and validate those. Then derive additional assumptions if appropriate. Use the 5 Whys method to keep drilling into your problem.

Using these techniques you can quickly uncover problems with your assumptions and come up with creative new solutions.

Keep in mind, though, that even with these techniques, assumptions remain just that, assumptions. Use well-designed experiments to validate them if you can, but keep an open mind that any of your assumptions may not be true.

What assumptions do you need to challenge?

Ask a group to rate projects from least important to most important on a scale of 1-10 and most will be rated a 9 or a 10. Some people will get tricky and use 9.5 so they seem like they’re not rating everything a 10.

“But they’re all important,” comes the response.

Yet with limited resources, trade-offs need to be made. And if stakeholders won’t accurately say what’s important, the decision-maker has to choose for them, leaving people unhappy.

A good decision process can alleviate these problems. Follow these five tips to properly identify what truly matters when making a project choice or portfolio decision.

1. Identify Needs First
   Don’t start evaluating what features, benefits or attributes you need. Ask what problems you’re solving and get your stakeholders to rank the importance of those first. Identify the most painful pain points before searching for solutions.
2. Set Your Priorities Second
   Avoid researching or evaluating options until you have your needs clearly defined and prioritized. If initially you can’t determine what you want, try identifying what you want to avoid.
3. Include Common Features
   The process of comparison often causes us to overweight the importance of differences. Remember to include the features common to all your options. Often these common features outweigh the differences in importance, making any choice a good choice. Recognizing this can reduce the time spent squabbling over insignificant differences.
4. Use Relative, Not Absolute Scores
   Determining the value of a feature or project in isolation is difficult, especially when the decision involves trade-offs. Compare items against each other for the best results. Ask stakeholders to sort items from most to least importance; avoid asking for scores where multiple projects or features can all have the same score. Advanced users can use Paired Comparison or other techniques to identify each item’s importance.
5. Use Phases, Then Rinse & Repeat
   Looking at options can surface unspoken needs. But once a need is identified, don’t immediately jump back to prioritizing. Take time to identify additional needs. Once you’ve exhausted this discovery phase, then re-prioritize. Jumping back and forth between phases wastes time and effort when using a comparative approach, since all items will need to be re-prioritized.

Use these tips to improve your decision process when evaluating multiple options with multiple stakeholders.

What techniques have you found for avoiding the “But It’s All Important” syndrome?

Do you limit your options when you don’t have to?

I was walking with a friend the other day talking about a career decision.

After explaining the situation, he turned to me and said, “I basically have two options.” He then proceeded to explain his two options and why he didn’t like either one.

His problem: assuming he had only two options.

When faced with complex decisions, we seek to simply them by defining them as a choice between a limited set of options. As long as one option clearly stands out as the winner, this works. But when none of the options look good, we forget that other options exist. Not exploring other options can cause us to make poor decisions.

How can you improve the situation?

1. Recognize Flexible Option Scenarios

Learn to identify when flexibility exists in your options.

In a limited option scenario, you must pick from a fixed set of options. If you’re at the store buying jam, you’re limited to the flavors they sell.

In a flexible option scenario, you get to choose how you define your options. When deciding on a career change, a response to difficult situation or what to do this weekend, you have control.

Ask yourself what type of decision you are making.

2. Expand Your Options

If you have a great option, take it. But if you don’t, expand your options.

Consider variants of your existing options. Deciding whether to go back to school or take another job? Your variants might be what schools you attend, the subjects you might major in or what jobs to apply for next.

Combine options. Want more schooling and a different job? Make doing both an option. Use your creativity to come up with an option that combines multiple other options.

Explore extreme options. What about quitting your job and just traveling? What would need to be able to do this? Use options which seem extreme to you to brainstorm other viable alternatives. Think through these extreme options to help you challenge assumptions that might be limiting you with your existing options.

3. Delay Organizing Your Options

Avoid creating an organized list of your options until you’ve had time to brainstorm. Settling on a fixed set of options too soon can stop you from seeing other options that might be viable.

Instead, write down ideas of options without evaluating or organizing them.

Brainstorm, organize, then evaluate.

Return to brainstorming whenever you hit a wall evaluating your options.

4. Get an Outside Perspective

Talk to a friend, colleague or peer.

Once we decide on a set of options, it becomes harder to see alternatives. Find someone you can explain your situation to and have them ask you questions and propose alternatives you might have missed.

Don’t dismiss alternatives prematurely. If you decide an alternative won’t work, ask why it won’t work. Use the dialogue to explore your own assumptions. Too often we ignore alternatives proposed by others because we hold incorrect or outdated assumptions.

In the end, when you are having trouble making a decision among multiple options, expanding your options can often be a better approach than spending more time analyzing the options you do have.

What decisions have you made where you limited your options prematurely?

Credits: The photo used in this article was taken by Sean Vadilfari.

As part of my research into lean decisions, I interview people about the decisions they make and how they make them. This podcast publishes these interviews for you to learn from them too.

In this episode, I talk with John Knox (@WindAddict), a mobile developer at Evernote and creator of the blog Engineering Adventure, about a decision he made NOT to buy a camera. John talks about the process he went through to make this decision and the mental cost of letting decisions linger.

This episode is part 2 of 2 of my interview with John. If you missed the first part, where we discussed his decision to start a T-shirt company, you can listen to it here.

In this interview, John talked about his decision not to buy a camera. He decides not to buy his camera after considering:

1. How fast camera technology continues to evolve
   While the camera he wanted was technically superior, new types of cameras are being developed that will have similar quality at a much smaller size.
2. Better technology isn’t what he needs
   He has a backlog of photos and much of his joy comes from producing finished works and sharing them with others. The new camera wouldn’t help him do this faster.
3. The mental cost to letting decisions linger
   John talks about how not locking the decision in reduces your focus as you waste your time continually thinking about the decision.

To help him make the decision, John asked himself, would buying this camera make his life better in the long-term? In the end, he decided no and let the decision go.

The Lean Decisions podcast is a bi-weekly feature on this blog. To subscribe, enter your e-mail in the subscription box at the end of this post.

If you missed the last episode, where I interviewed John about his decision to start a t-shirt company before the Business of Software conference, listen to it here.

If you have any feedback on this episode, or would like to be interviewed for my research, please leave a comment below.

On Sunday, I wound up waiting over a half an hour to get my food. On purpose.

“Why?”, you might ask. The environment was the same. We still had only an hour for lunch and the food trucks were still packed.

But I was with a group of people having a deep discussion about decision-making, and a few people wanted to go to the Sheish Kabob food truck, no matter what the wait.

I had a choice. Optimize for speed and eat alone, or optimize for inspiring social interactions and wait to eat. I chose to wait.

Sometimes efficiency is not the right choice.

In my last article, I talked about the different between optimizing your decision and merely making a choice. But to optimize, you must choose what to optimize for.

Choose carefully.

Decide first whether to optimize for your choice, your experience or your outcome. Then ensure you pick the right measure to optimize for.

What do you optimize for when making your decisions?

Make your decision early.

Waiting to decide until a decision needs to be made can backfire. The pressure to make a decision can cause our emotions to take over, causing us to make less rational decisions.

Proper preparation can help us avoid poor last minute decisions.

Commit Early

If you know you’re going to need to make a decision where your emotions will hold sway, make the decision before you get to your decision point.

But don’t just choose a preferred option. Force yourself to commit to your decision.

If you only choose a preference, you’ll still be making your decision in the moment.  If you commit, your decision will be whether or not to hold to your previous decision.

The difference is crucial.

When choosing among a set of options, it’s easy to be swayed from one to another. But if you’ve already decided which option you want, you first need to decide not to go with your original option, then you need to choose a new option.

That extra level of effort in making your decision allows you to resist impulses and persuasion better. You’ve create a path of least resistance, which is to go with your original decision.

Need to Keep Options Open?

Don’t feel you can commit?

Then choose a default option. An option that, baring better arguments, you’ll choose once you reach your decision.

Comparing multiple options against each other can be draining. Having a default option allows you to compare your other options against only that option, reducing your mental workload.

The less effort you need to expend when making a decision, the more effectively you can spend the energy you do have making the right choice.

Using Preemptive Decisions

How can you use preemptive decisions in real life?

• In Sales Calls
  Make “not buying” or “I’ll decide later” your default option before you meet a salesperson. Be careful of the sales strategy of asking what you want to buy instead of if you want to buy.
• When Shopping
  Create a shopping list and decide ahead of time what you plan to buy. Create rules about when you can buy things not on your list. Default to not buying.
• At Thanksgiving
  Decide before you go to dinner how much you plan to eat. Choose an eating strategy, such as “one scoop per dish” or “no second helpings”.

Use preemptive decisions to change your focus when making a decision from “What should I do?” to “Should I do something different than I previously decided?”.

Our desire to stay consistent with our previous decisions will help you navigate decisions where impulse and persuasion can cause you to make a decision you’ll regret.

What preemptive decisions do you make?

Credits: The photo used in this article was taken by Stacy Spensley.

The summit was at the Newmark Theatre, a short walk away from one of Portland’s food truck pods, with over 3 dozen food trucks lining a block-sized parking lot.

Imagine 1,000 hungry people swarming three dozen food trucks. Enticing smells filled the air.

The Decision: Where To Eat

Jonathan and I took two separate strategies in choosing which food truck to order from.

Jonathan walked around, checked out the menu at each food truck, mused about what he was in the mood for, then picked a truck and ordered.

I also walked around. But I focused on the lines, noting which ones were short or moved fast. I looked at the menus too, but only to eliminate ones that were a clear no—like the one selling greasy hamburgers.

The Outcome: Eating in the Park

I wound up choosing Island Grill and ordering the Kalua pork with a side of spam musubi, a dish I hadn’t eaten in years. After a short wait, I got my food and headed over to the park. I met up with our group and joined in the discussion.

Jonathan arrived 5 minutes before lunch was over. He had gotten Thai food. But the line was long and the wait longer. He scarfed down his food, catching the tail end of the discussion before we all headed to our next session.

What Happened?

I optimized my decision for speed of delivery. I wanted tasty food, but most of the food trucks provided that. I chose the one with the short line.

But I didn’t choose solely on the length of the line. I filtered out some food trucks based on their menu and my personal dietary preferences.

Jonathan focused solely on what to eat. Speed of service was not a consideration.

Nor did Jonathan optimize his decision. He wasn’t looking for the most enjoyable dish possible. He wanted cheap, tasty food, which most of the food trucks could provide.

Without anything to optimize for, he optimized for nothing.

3 Lessons

Three lessons from this experience:

1. Know What To Optimize For
   Choose an outcome you want to optimize for. Make it something you can reasonably figure out from your options.
2. Expand Your Evaluation Criteria 
   Don’t focus solely on the obvious aspects of your options. Consider what happens between the decision (ordering) and the result (receiving food).
3. Vary Criteria Based on the Environment 
   Scan the environment to see if your default way of choosing should change. If none of the food trucks had lines, Jonathan’s strategy would have worked fine.

How do you decide where to order from?

Credits: The photo used in this article was taken by The Travelista.

As part of my research into lean decisions, I interview people about the decisions they make and how they make them. This podcast publishes these interviews for you to learn from them too.

In this episode, I talk with John Knox (@WindAddict), a mobile developer at Evernote and creator of the blog Engineering Adventure, about a decision he made to start a t-shirt company right before the Business of Software conference. John started out unaware he even had a decision to make. Once he realized he had a decision, he explains how he made the decision and the benefits he’s gained.

This episode is part 1 of 2 of my interview with John. Next time we’ll explore his  decision NOT to buy a camera that would have helped him take better pictures.

In this interview, John talks about his decision to start a t-shirt company. There’s three insights I want you to take away from it:

1. Consider the emotional and rational components of your decision
   John talked about how he emotionally made the decision, but only tentatively. Before finalizing his decision, he verified the numbers made sense for the outcome he was looking for.
2. Use thresholds to make decisions
   John set a threshold to help him make the decision. If the initial cost was going to be less than $1,000, he would move forward; otherwise he would abandon the idea.

   Think about how you can define thresholds before you start gathering information for your decision. If you define your thresholds ahead of time, it’s harder to rationalize going forward with a decision when you don’t meet them.

3. Unearth the decisions you aren’t yet aware you should be making
   What has been nagging you at the back of your mind? What’s been occupying your thoughts lately? Raise these decisions up to a conscious level so you can address them as true decisions.

Next week we’ll explore John’s second decision: why he decided not to buy a camera that would have helped him take better pictures, and why he decided to force a decision instead of keeping it on the back burner.

The Lean Decisions podcast is a bi-weekly feature on this blog. To subscribe, enter your e-mail in the subscription box at the end of this post.

If you missed the last episode, where I interviewed Chad Modad about how he selected a software vendor, listen to it here.

If you have any feedback on this episode, or would like to be interviewed for my research, please leave a comment below.

But just what is a vote? And how do you know when you’ve cast a good vote?

A vote expresses your preference for how to make a decision, but the final result of that decision comes from combining the preferences of others involved in the decision.

Votes differ from most decisions in that you have no direct control over the outcome. You can influence the final decision, but not determine it.

Voting Has Two Sides

Each voting decision involves two separate sets of decisions:

• Individual
  Each voter must make a decision on how they plan to vote.
• Group
  All the votes get aggregated together to determine the final decision.

How a group makes a decision by asking for votes from individuals and aggregating them together is called a voting system.

Today I want to address an individual’s vote and discuss what aspects are relevant to your voting decisions.

Votes Express Your Preferences

Votes express your preferences. A voting decision may allow you to express your preferences by:

• Selecting
  Indicating which options you prefer. For instance, selecting which candidates you want elected.
• Ranking
  Specifying the order in which you prefer your options. For instance, ranking the first, second and third choice for movies you want to see.
• Weighting
  Setting the value of each option to you. For instance, prioritizing options as high, medium or low importance.
• Proposing
  Adding your own options. For instance, writing in a candidate on a ballot.
• Abstaining
  Deciding not to vote.

Each of these become decisions you need to make in the process of determining your final vote.

The best strategies for determining each of these preferences varies based on the voting system. And most voting systems don’t allow you to express all of these preferences.

What Makes a Good Vote?

A decision pattern ideally helps us make better decisions. Which begs the questions:

What constitutes a good vote?

What constitutes a better vote?

In Why Successful Decisions Aren’t Always Good Decisions, I discussed how the terms “good” and “bad” don’t accurately describe our decisions. Instead, we should use the terms:

• well-informed
  Do you know the information that could affect how you vote?
• well-made
  Did you use a reasonable process to decide how to vote?
• successful
  Was the result of your decision what you were expecting?
• relevant
  Does it matter if you vote?

Let’s look at these from last to first.

Is Your Vote Relevant?

Not all votes count equally. The weight of your vote depends on the voting system and how others intend to vote.

In consensus, your vote has a direct effect on the outcome. A single No vote can cause no action to be taken.

In a simple majority, your vote plays a greater or lessor role depending on how many other people are voting and how they vote. In a close call, your vote could be the deciding factor.

From a lean perspective, if your vote isn’t relevant, any vote will do. Go with your gut, flip a coin or ask a friend.

Otherwise, vary the amount of information and process you use based on how likely your vote will affect the group’s final decision.

Is Your Vote Successful?

Rarely do we go back and evaluate our votes. We talk about successful or failed decisions, but rarely do we talk about successful or failed votes.

The problem lies in defining what “success” means to a vote and how to measure it.

If you aim simply to cast a ballot, then any random vote will do. Casting your vote becomes your measure of success.

If you aim to affect the future through your vote, you should think about what outcomes you desire. Do you want to:

• Change a specific issue
• Agree with the decisions being made
• Improve your situation
• See progress toward a goal
• Feel good about the decision being made

When looking at outcomes, write them down and be specific. Consider how they affect you, your business, your family, your community and society at large.

If you want a specific issue changed, what changes would you like to see? In what timeframe? What alternatives would be acceptable? And then, of course, which option do you believe can create this outcome?

If you want multiple outcomes, list each and rank how important each is to you. Use this as your guide to decide how to evaluate your options.

Is Your Vote Well-Made?

Flipping a coin may be an easy way to vote, but it removes any intelligence from the decision.

For votes where your vote has only a weak influence on the final result, making a gut-based decision makes sense. But to make a well-made decision, you need a process.

Use your success criteria to frame your decision. 

Look at your desired outcomes. Decide how important each outcome is. Then rank each option on its likelihood of producing each outcome. Multiply the importance of each outcome by the likelihood it’ll be achieved, then add up all your scores to get a total score for each option.

Is Your Vote Well-Informed?

Information can inform us, bias us or just overwhelm us. How do you know what information to use and when to stop gathering more?

Aim to gather only relevant information—information that has a direct impact on your final choice.

Rely on your desired outcomes to focus your attention. Ignore information which does not help you clarify these outcomes or each option’s likelihood of bringing about these outcomes.

All information comes from a point-of-view, whether consciously presented or unconsciously. When possible, triangulate your own understanding by choosing sources with differing viewpoints.

If pressed for time, use trusted sources as proxies. Delegate your information gathering to a person or organization you trust, and ask them for their opinion. But before you do, understand their viewpoint and make sure you agree with it.

Stop collecting information once most of the information you continue to gather repeats information you already know, or is irrelevant.

After the Vote

We improve only by examining our past decisions and figuring out what we would have done differently.

To become better at voting, take the time to reflect on your votes:

• Did the group decision reflect your individual preferences?
• Did the decision achieve the outcomes you expected?
• Do you have different preferences knowing what you know now?
• How could you have made your vote be better informed, better made, more successful or more relevant?

In the end, voting decisions can be the hardest to evaluate and learn from. When the group decides differently than we voted, it can be difficult to figure out how the result would have been different if our preferences had won out.

How do you evaluate and improve your voting decisions? 

Credits: The photo used in this article was taken by League of Women Voters of California LWVC.