Two things determine how your life will turn out: luck and the quality of your decisions. Want to know how to make high-quality decisions with your team at work? A thread: ⬇️
2/ Poker can teach you a lot about business and life. I drew on my time playing poker in the @WSOP and my cognitive science work at @Penn to teach you how to make high-quality decisions in my book, #HowToDecide.
3/ A key insight from the book that I’ll re-emphasize here: Treat the outcome and quality of a decision separately. You can make a great decision on a bet and still lose the hand. So I’ve developed 4 exercises to help you make better bets.
4/ Exercise #1: Find areas where you disagree with your team through an exercise I call “Worlds to Likelihood.” Assign percentages to words based on how likely the thing will happen and find discrepancies.
5/ Exercise #2: Re-create what you knew and the outcome of a decision with a Knowledge Tracker. This exercise allows you to uncover resulting (assigning outcome quality to decision quality) and hindsight bias (knew-it-all-along thinking).
6/ Exercise #3: A project pre-mortem is just as important as a post-mortem. Each member on your team can create a Decision Exploration Table to explore and organize all the potential outcomes from a decision.
7/ Exercise #4: As the project leader or meeting facilitator, tie everything together with a Better Team Conversations exercise. Gather opinions and feedback and share with the rest of the team.
8/8 Adapt these 4 exercises for your own team with this @coda_hq template.
Copy my doc to get started—and let me know how it works for you.
In < 2 weeks (Nov. 28) I’m launching my 1st cohort-based decision-making class on @MavenHQ. It’s for entrepreneurs, executive-level decision makers, investors & anyone seeking to make higher quality decisions in their business, work, and personal life.
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I've been studying how to make better decisions under uncertainty my whole adult life: professional poker player career, work in cognitive science, writing 3 books about decision making & consulting w/ incredible companies like @firstround@RenegadePtnrs and @mParticle.
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My clients have to make high stakes decisions under conditions of uncertainty every day.
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Quitting gets a bad rap. Language favors grit over quitting. We’re taught that people who quit are cowards and that quitting is an obstacle to overcome.
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I reject this. I wrote #QUIT to rehabilitate quitting’s image and to show people that it is a valuable decision skill and our best tool for making decisions under uncertainty.
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It allows us to change course when new information is revealed, let go of things that aren’t worthwhile, and make the best next move.
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It’s critical to understand that while your intuition is probably telling you that improving quitting behavior won’t make a difference in your decision-making or your business – that intuition is not correct.
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Quitting is your secret weapon. It’s a superpower that takes time to master, but once you do, you will save your organization time, energy, and money.
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Lead your team through this exercise during my Flight Cohort on @BalloonPlatform. You'll identify mission-critical parts to tackle first, create experiments to decide what’s worth pursuing, identify tasks to put on the backburner & build a project plan around these pieces.
I can guarantee using this framework with your team will help you make the best next move and save your team time, energy, and money.
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If you’ve already purchased #QUIT, you can get a discount code for 10% off of the Balloon Flight Cohort by filling out this proof of purchase form: surveymonkey.com/r/QuitADuke
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Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
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After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object.
The goal becomes the object of our grit, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal, even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve.
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The conditions in the world change.
Our knowledge changes.
The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change.
In #QUIT, I outline the various cognitive and motivational forces that work against good quitting behavior. There’s sunk cost bias, desire for certainty, escalation of commitment, status quo bias, and endowment bias (to name a few).
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I go into different mental models and frameworks to build good quitting behaviors into your toolbox, like thinking in expected value, increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting criteria” and contracts, etc.
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I can’t emphasize enough how important these tools are — but it can be difficult to bring your team or company along as well, especially when collaborative settings add in a whole host of additional group dynamics and biases that work against good decision-making.
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