You are smart..and that's the real problem 😎 #DecisionMaking
Thinking in Bets
“If we aren’t wrong just because things didn’t work out, then we aren’t right just because things worked out well.”
It’s February month and we switch the theme to the art and science of decision making, a topic most of us often struggle with.
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Talking about decision making, one of my fav books on this topic is Thinking in bets by Annie Duke, a professional poker player.
Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.
When something good happens, we attribute it to our skills.
When something bad happens, we attribute it to bad luck.
5+2 #AtomicIdeas from the book 👇
Life is Poker, Not Chess
Life is not like chess. Chess contains no hidden information and very little luck.
Life is more like poker. You could make the smartest, most careful decision and still have it blow up in your face.All Decisions Are Bets
A bet is a decision about an uncertain future. Thus, most of the decisions in your life—switching jobs, choosing a partner, selecting your field of study, not doing something—are bets.
They’re choices that you make in the face of an uncertain future.What’s a good decision?
“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of ‘I’m not sure.’”
Most of us evaluate the quality of our decisions based on the outcomes we achieve. But you can make a bad decision that turns out favorably and a good decision that turns our poorly.
Equating outcomes solely with the quality of your decisions is one way in which we fail to improve our thinking and understand the world.Being smart makes it worse.
“It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to your beliefs.”
Smart people are not more rational thinkers. In fact, they’re more prone to letting biases cloud their vision of the world. Because smart people are better at taking in constructing narratives that support their beliefs, they find more creative ways to rationalize and frame data to fit their preexisting points of view.
The Rashomon Effect
Even when people experience the same event at the same time, if you ask them about it, you will often get two very different accounts of what happened.
That’s because the way we interpret the world is not only a function of our objective experience but also includes how we see and choose to understand the world.
How To Engage In Truth-Seeking
Express uncertainty: If we start by making clear our uncertainty, our audience is more likely to understand that the discussion held does not always have to be about right or wrong but about openness to different perspectives.
Lead with assent: Everyone likes to be affirmed. Avoid the language of no. Use ‘and’ more than you use ‘but’ in an expression of possibly polarizing ideas
Ask for temporary agreement: Whenever one is offloading emotion to us, we can ask them if they are looking to vent or if they are looking for advice
Focus on the future, rather than rehearsing what has happened.
7. Scenario Planning
Scenario planning is a productive skill to develop in decision making. There are two types of scenario planning:
Backcasting – If you backcast, you imagine that you’ve achieve your goal. Then you work backward to think about how you got there. This is a positive frame that helps you imagine the outcome you want.
Premortems – When you do a premortem, you imagine a world in which you don’t achieve your goal – aka your plan failed. You then think about all of the reasons the plan might fail, and this helps you create a plan that reduces the probability of these things from happening.
“Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after making the best possible bets.”
Happy decision making!