When was the last time you made a decision? That’s easy, you don’t need to think about it. In fact, even though I know nothing about you, I can answer that question for you: it’s when you decided to start reading this blog post. We make decisions all the time, it’s an essential part of what makes us … beings. We perform actions and every action starts with a decision to perform that action. But not every decision leads to an action. We can also decide to aim for a certain goal, pursue a certain strategy or, well, not to do something. And then there’s these decisions like “I’ll stop drinking alcohol … tomorrow”. But what they all have in common is that there was a decision process preceding them. And while there is no one-size-fits-all decision process that you can apply to every decision, people tend to develop certain habits. It’s those habits I want to talk about today.
You see, making decisions is exhausting. Maybe you can relate to that sentence, but only if you disregard the implicit decision to keep the status quo. Doing repetitive tasks, getting stimulated by some media or just sitting around doing nothing can feel great because the decision to keep going is easy to make. The brain does not need to expend any decision making resources. At some point we might get bored, but that laziness to not think about alternatives can be much stronger than boredom, so we often need external stimuli to snap out of it. This is the whole premise of the game “The Stanley Parable”, which is a game about making decisions. If you haven’t played it, I highly recommend it.
So let’s say you are at a point where you need to make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a big one like “what job should I apply to?” or “what house should I buy?” or “am I going to flip this lever that will redirect a trolley and kill one innocent person but save the lives of five others?”. It can be, but what we are about to discuss equally applies to decisions like “what should I make for dinner?” or “which video am I going to click on?” or even “what font am I going to choose for that cheesy quote about grief I put in my webcomic to induce Schadenfreude?”. Because we can decompose all decision processes, no matter how different they may be, into three fundamental parts: exploration, simulation and filtering.
Exploration is the part where you generate options. It’s not really a decision if there aren’t at least two. And while you might think that decisions like “pick any real number” could result in a continuous option space, the way our brains work means they are always discrete and finite. You can’t just pick a real number. Instead, exploration is exactly the process where you think “7? 2.5? pi? e? or just 0?”. In addition to just thinking about options, you might also ask other people or use a random process for suggestions. And yes, those are decisions again. Some decisions are part of a decision process.
Simulation is when you query your eidon and assess the consequences of an option. It’s where you imagine what it would be like to decide in a certain way before actually deciding. Just like exploration, it doesn’t need to happen in your head alone, you might do research or even perform experiments or run computer simulations. This part is what I keep going on about when I tell you what it means to have a useful eidon. Because even if you invest a lot of energy into this part, you might still get it wrong. Many historically bad decisions were made because of this.
Finally, filtering is the part most people would traditionally associate with decision making. It’s where you converge on one option that you commit to be the outcome of the decision making process. There are a variety of viable strategies for this part. You might exclude options until only one is left, you might rank the options based on some objective measures, you might just follow a gut feeling or you might even just throw a coin. It’s not just about consolidating the information from the previous steps, but a big part of it is convincing yourself of the option you pick. Often, this is the most emotionally exhausting part of the process.
Naturally, these steps are almost never performed strictly sequentially. Sometimes they might also be trivial. If someone asks you “do you want tuna or gummy bears on your sandwich?” there’s two options already and you don’t necessarily need to invest in exploration. Although you might want to because would you really trust a tuna sandwich from a person that would make a sandwich with gummy bears? Often the process is a lot more messy than I make it look by neatly decomposing it into these three parts. They might all be happening at the same time. You might think about what the consequences are for choosing option A and suddenly come up with option C but before you can look into that pick option B because it is convenient right now. You might invest varying amounts of energy into the different parts depending on the gravity or the difficulty of the decision or depending on how little you want to think about anything else right now. That’s right, decision processes can be an excellent form of procrastination.
But why am I telling you all this? Well, because it’s the design space of decision processes where many hidden problems lie. Everyone wants to make good decisions, but many people just pour resources into these decisions instead of ever stopping to think about the decision process. As a result, they tend to make mistakes that result in both objectively bad decisions but also in dissatisfaction with their decisions. I would go into detail here, but this post is already getting quite long. I’ll leave that for a future blog post, potentially next week if I don’t forget.
But until then, why don’t you start consciously observing your decision making process. How do you decide how much energy should go into which parts of the process? How do you approach each part? What are your habits when it comes to decision making and do you think they make sense? If you think of a bad decision you made in the past, which part of the process went wrong? If you truly want to make better decisions, these are some good questions to start.
