Making Good Decisions Part 3: Fall in Love with the Problem and Generate Good Options

When faced with a challenge, we often fall into the classic decision-making pitfall of asking too narrow of a question. This drives us to “this or that”, “yes or no” and other binary options.  This one-zero logic can lead to bad decisions. For example, if I’m hungry after dinner, I could ask myself whether to have cake or ice-cream for dessert. A better question is “how might I satisfy or prevent after-dinner-hunger?”  That question opens up a world of options, from considering other dessert types, to changing eating times, to eating a bigger dinner, etc. 

Fall in love with the problem, before you settle on either-or solutions. A few simple ways of doing this are:

• Ask others with different perspectives how they see the challenge. State how you see it and ask “what am I missing?” or “what’s another way of looking at this?”
• Look at the issues below the surface, the root causes, which may be the actual problem that needs to be solved
• Frame a question in a way that does not contain a solution in it, is broad enough to generate lots of options but narrow enough to be practical

​Once you settle on a broad question, generate good options using these steps:

• Get clear on design criteria, the attributes that any solution you come up with must meet
• Diverge before you converge: brainstorm many options before you settle on a few and then compare the few side-by-side to see what might be possible
• Gather representative evidence to form options. Beware of “availability bias” where you put too much value on the info in hand; “recency effect”, where you pay too much attention to the most recent piece of data you’ve seen; and “anchoring” where you hyper-focus on one piece of evidence instead of looking at the body of data as a whole
• Figure out what your known unknowns are and how you’ll address these in your options
• Surface assumptions and limits to knowledge, and ask for those weighing in to rate their level of confidence in their assertions
• Balance your biases by inviting counterarguments and disconfirming questions 

And finally, don’t keep on collecting data in the hopes that the answer will magically appear.  In this world of uncertainty and ambiguity, there’s often more than one right answer. Colin Powell advises to shoot for between 40 and 70% of the info, and Jeff Bezos uses a “70% of the info” rule before making a decision.  Uncertainty is to be expected and something to manage.  We’ll talk about that in the next blog post.