When the stakes are high, and there are no take-backs, you want to decide at the last moment possible, and keep as many options on the table as you can while continuing to gather information.
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Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.
We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.
I asked, “If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?”
“That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”
The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds. They were focused on outcome over ego. By contrast, he said, the people most likely to fail were those obsessed with minute details that supported their point of view.
When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
Not every bad decision is rushed, nor is every good one made slowly. It’s not that simple.
People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling. Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But that inaction is a choice.
Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”
If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:
Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.