Decision Making

Last Updated on April 19, 2021

The science of decision making is something that has fascinated me for years. Partly from a macro philosophical perspective – hello causal determinism – but also from a day to day practical perspective.

Professional decision making

As a knowledge worker, decision making is a key skill, and probably the most important one!

Decision making for leaders

I wrote in depth about decision making for startup leaders in Better Humans. It’s a bit of a rant against relying on intuition too heavily! Read the whole post here.

Intuition is very good — provided that you have [first] gone through the exercise of systematically and independently evaluating, the constituents of the problem. Then when you close your eyes and generate an intuitive, comprehensive image of the case, you will actually add information.

— Daniel Kahneman

Decision making in your personal life

Choosing who to partner with – if anyone – and if/when to have children huge decision that will probably affect most of our lives more than anything else.

Integrative thinking

Integrative thinkers don’t break down a problem into independent pieces and work on them separately or in a certain order. They see the entire architecture of the problem—how the various parts of it fit together, how one decision will affect another. Just as important, they hold all of those pieces suspended in their minds at once. 

The Opposable Mind

Books on decision making

As usual, anything by Daniel Kahneman.

I also loved The Opposable Mind which introduced the idea of integrative thinking to me. This is a great post that introduces integrative thinking if you don’t want to read the whole book.

More on my favorite books here.