A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

I once had a coworker who was also a friend. One day he walked into my office with some news. “I figured out what I’m doing wrong,” he said. "I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.

The best decision-makers know that the way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions. The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right. This part of the process offers invaluable insight. Since you can’t solve a problem you don’t understand, defining the problem is a chance to take in lots of relevant information.

It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details— details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind. You can't be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can't make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.

A third benefit to writing down your thoughts is that it allows other people to see your thinking, which is mostly invisible. And if they can see it, they can check it for errors and offer a different perspective that you might otherwise be blind to. If you can't simply explain your thinking to other people (or yourself), it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand things and need to dig deeper and gather more information.

A final benefit to writing down your thoughts is that it gives other people an opportunity to learn from your perspective. Many organizations would benefit from having a database that recorded how every person in the organization went about making decisions. Imagine the value of a searchable catalog of decisions in your organization. A system like this would allow people in different parts of the organization to check each other’s thinking.