Better decision making app
Hey everyone,
Background:This Tuesday evening I was speaking with a friend of mine and an interesting product idea occured. Instead of spending a lot of time on building something and making it perfect, he convinced me first to post it in a Slack channel where a couple of my friends are exchanging random business ideas. After the first validation round on Wednesday, he further pushed me to share it also here for additional feedback. So here I am, looking forward to your feedback.
Problem statement: I have sometimes (mostly) problems to make hard decisions. Even more importantly, there is no way for me to revisit my past decisions and critically evaluate where did I make mistakes in my decision making and how to improve my decision making in the future.
Solution: app that allows in a visual way to set your goal and different routes you can take. Later you can revisit different steps that need to be taken to reach the goal, log changes and add comments what went wrong in your decision making. Eventually you would create a whole picture of your life (not only professional decisions) and see how they all interconnect.
Product roadmap: I have created a v 0.5 version Wednesday mornin how it might look like (see below). I believe in the future the app could not only allow you to track and revise your decisions, but also would recommend how certain steps are feasible by aggregating data from other users and their past performance.
Next steps: I have been doing some additional research about the topic. Although I am familiar with some of the behavioral economics stuff and statistics, I still feel like missing something. That is why I started with reading a lot of previews of different decision making books and writing down the essence of them. I understood quickly that reading them all from cover to cover will take too much time, so I am taking a shortcut and trying to create a shortlist of the books that would help me. At the same time I have started experimenting more with how the framework of the tool should look like. I must admit that the whole topic is becoming even more confusing the more time I spend on it. And I feel like I am going further and further away from what I wanted to achieve in the beginning.
How can you help: If you are interested in the topic or have a friend who want to improve their decision making process, let me know. Would like to talk with you and incorporate the feedback in my thought experiments. Also, let me know if some of you is interested to hear the existing feedabck. Would love to share it here.
Thank you a million times.
Janis
I come from an insurance and risk management background and have looked at this sort of thing a lot in terms of identifying risks with given solutions/routes. Your proposal is, potentially, looking a bit more like a "vision board" where you're more identifying an ideal outcome rather than a defined plan.
You might look more into frequency/severity of risk. Essentially, a person could identify all the potential decisions, then start building risks with frequency/severity ratings for each risk. With that info you'd then have the decision/path of least risk and, in theory, the path least likely to fail.
I could see value in combining risk management with critical path to identify points of no return and the risk impact of given decisions.
Hope that helps,
Thank you. That is a very an excellent point. I was tinkering around with the idea and came to a similar conclusion.
This is how far I have gotten. To be honest, I feel like instead of being to some answers I am much further away from them than I was in the beginning. Nevertheless I will continue with this as it seems a fascinating subject to explore. If not for a product, then maybe for myself.
I'm just finishing reading The Lean Startup by Eric Reis, so everything in my world relates to that book right now. That being said, it might provide good insight for you in terms whittling a complex idea down to an MVP that is testable.
For me personally, I prefer to think about monetization and commercialization of an idea at the early stages; a good idea that no one will pay for will just become a time-suck and unhealthy addiction. Someone else commented, and I agree, I think you'll have a hard time convincing personal users to pay for this (until it's built a reputation of success, then ambition people will pay for it for career planning). So, you might want to start off focusing on project managers and business leaders while also building it to work for yourself.
I'd suggest, without hijacking your idea or telling you what/how to do, the app might do one or more of:
1.) Identify a desired end result and the things that must be true for that desired end result.
2.) The critical path to an end result and the one or more "point(s) of no return".
3.) The risks present in achieving the end result and a rating of the likelihood with a better understanding of how likely that desired end result will actually happen.
4.) A checklist of risks/decision points/critical-path and the ability to check them off once they are past and no longer need to be considered.
5.) The ability to breakdown a critical path to yes/no answers that is then a checklist going forward to remove subjectivity/emotion from the process
In fact, you could use an extremely early version of the app to build the app. Determine what you want out of the app; profit, fame & fortune, work for yourself, better decisions for non-profits, better decisions for individuals, etc. Then on paper, Excel, Webflow, mind-map, etc come up with the decision/risks/events and so on.
I hope that helps,
Thank you. This is great input and a valid point. I need all the time to look at both - adding value for users and thinking about how to monetize.
By the way, great to hear that you are reading The Lean Startup. Great book 👌
I wouldn't use your solution, for the following reasons:
.. Making hard decisions is much more nuanced than some flowchart-ty thing. Free form text is actually pretty good format for pondering and documenting hard decisions, perhaps with a spreadsheet as support.
.. I don't trust the security of your solution or any 3rd party solution for documenting hard decisions, which by nature are either personally sensitive or financially confidential/critical.
.. I don't trust that your solution will be around forever. When it's shutdown, I'll lose the decision making history, which was your "even more importantly" selling point.
Thank you excellent points. About the first point:
I think tackling this problem consists of two parts.
A. Helping people in decision making process and showing their biases. This is very hard to achieve and would require a lot of research on the topic. I would start with this as a next step.
B. Helping people to follow up on their thinking process when making decisions. That would be something more in the lines I tried to put in the demo. Instead of advising them, I would just allow to record their goals and sub-steps. Maybe what is missing there are emotions what you had when you made the decision. Sometimes when I revisit older decisions I rationalise why I did what I did, but am not sure if that was the case. Would be good to check if there aren’t any emotions that cloud decisions to be made, and, if there a pattern emerges - it should be addressed.
As for the security and and solution being around, it is a very good point that should be addressed when the solution is being built. I think this will be a very important for people when to decided whether or not to use the product, however I do not want to go yet into details of this because there are ways how it can be sold and I am not yet sure if for the production or even test versions this will be in the end an important factor - maybe the whole idea will shift significantly on the way of exploring the topic.
I make hard decisions mainly based on emotions, for two reasons:
#1 The analytical side is impossible to estimate with any reasonable accuracy.
#2 Your emotions impact the outcomes massively. For example you estimate that making some boring software has 75% chance of success, and making interesting software has only 10% chance. But because of your emotions/motivation the probabilities may in reality be same, or even flipped so that the hard but interesting software is actually more likely to succeed.
Thus, it is more important to understand your emotions, than to estimate and write down analytical crap that will remain massively inaccurate no matter how long you spend on it.
Very good point. That is were my thoughts are at the moment as well: ideal outcome vs reality. I think when typically setting up goals we over rationalize everythink, so helping understandand your emotions will help better to understand what should I focus and what not.
When I started this exercise I thought that emotions are cloudibg decisions. But now I rather think that they should be a part if the decision making process.
I think the answer lies in finding the right balance between two. Just making decisions based on the emotions would be a very reactive approach. Just purely on logic, too idealistic. I think there still needs to be some direction set up by logic and then double checked with emotions. Now, the challenge is how to mske this all in a way that it is not over complicated and people want to use it as a framework.
A very interesting point raised by the OP. I agree with the two supporting points he makes, but I reach the opposite conclusion: I would be happy to eliminate emotions from the decisionmaking process completely.
To their point #1, it is very hard to weigh inputs to decisions. But I'd say the same applies to emotions. Even your mood at the time of making a decision can impact you.
What about an iterative process, where you don't aim for estimating something correctly or being in the right mood. Instead you:
Different. It is impossible to estimate probability of success accurately, but it is possible to learn to listen your emotions accurately.
And the iterative process is cute idea, but in case of hard decisions, like selling company, migrating to different country or leaving a partner, the consequences of bad decisions are too severe and the frequency of decision making too low for it to work.
Interesting. Can you describe the process how you have learned to listen to your emotions accurately?
And about second point. I think with the hard decisions you should iterate more, not less. I am not convinced that you should make a decision and then stick to it even if new inputs appear. Nevertheless, you are right that having a very exhaustive process for decision making makes more sense on really hard decisions than everyday decisions. This will be a challenge that will need to be solved - finding a framework that is simple enough but not too narrow.
Meditation helps, but of course I'm far from perfectly accurate at listening emotions [Edit: added realism]
About iterating on hard decisions: would be great but usually impossible in practice. E.g. if you sell a company, you cannot iterate on that decision, it's done.
Alright, this is a good input. Will take into consideration when designing a solution.
It's not some weighted average balance between emotional and analytical side; those two sides have different roles at different stages of decision making process.
And both sides are affected by mental models, fallacies and that crap. And decision making varies a lot between individuals, and what is being decided on, and million other things...
If I were you, I'd start by doing some serious reading about the subject.
Good luck
I did not say about weighted average. I was more thinking that you should look at both. Not only one or another. As you said, there are many ways how you might be biased if you look only at one or another. My thinking is that by looking from two angles it might be possible to spot your shortcomings easier.
About books, any recommendation which ones?
Sorry, then I interpreted your "right balance" slightly wrong.
But anyways, the point was that it's not simple "balance" between emotional and analytical side, but complex, varying and interacting process between those two sides, which you'd need to understand better before you can build the software.
About the books, I'm not aware of any single authoritative "bible", but perhaps good way to start would be to read about mental models. It won't give you any grand theory how to solve your problem, but it will show how truly messed up human decision making is, and how complex the problem really is. After that I'd focus on cognitive psych books, and avoid economy/business books about decision making, which usually have simplistic linear step models.
Totally agree that it is a very complex process. Will search for the books you recommended. Thank you 🙏
I do seriously wonder if people with the mindset to need or want this, would be able to make the decision to buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtmUJye7t4c ~2:50 mark talks shortly about decision making.
There is the story about a friend trying to choose a camera to buy
He relatively quickly filtered his choices into 2.
After 3 months he bought one of them.
The friend asked, was the difference between the 2 worth the 3 months?
The camera buyer admitted he would rather have had the pictures over the last 3 months from the other camera, rather than the better camera.
I don't think you get better at decision making per say.
You do become a better you, the decision would change your learning / growth.
But look at something you decided on a few months or years ago.
You would not think about it the same = you would not ask the same question about it = the decision parameters would be so different that it's not the right question to focus on..
That's not to say there is no value with thinking about how you think, make decisions etc..
Just that it might be an almost infinite loop and lead to analysis paralysis.
It's better to fail your way to success, then finding the perfect bet.
The perfect bet doesn't come to these looking for it as they didn't learn what they need to find it.
It might be a bit like trying for a marathon by reading about it...
The stats are 9 out of 10 fail.
Don't try to be the 1 that doesn't.
Commit to making 10.
Each one teaches you new things for the next one.
Most successes had previous failures.
In reality it can't be seen as avoidable, just as prerequisite.
GL.
This is a very good point, analysis paralysis is a real thing.
It might be important to frame a tool like this correctly - i.e. something that makes sense to use when deciding on relocating your family, or which job offer to accept. But not for everyday tasks like which camera to buy.
Thank you, this is really good. When I was yesterday experimenting with how to create a framework for all of this so it could be made in a structured way, I came to the same risk - decision making can easily become so complex that it paralyses you and you do not want to continue the process all together.
Conceptually I think something useful will look like this - allows you to easily break down decision in smaller steps that need to be made while also not allowing you to think to narrowly. It is easy to be said, but finding the right balance will be very difficult.
What I want to avoid is to look at the tool similarly as Product Roadmaps are made. When organizing a product development, we rationalize all tasks and decisions made. And it makes sense, because we are in a professional environment. But the real life is more messy and you have to deal with emotions. So my thinking is also add to the milestones an input how it makes you feel (what emotional state you want to achieve with that). And revisiting those inputs might help. Maybe not becoming in the end better at decision making, but at least you would understand yourself better.
Again, thank you a lot for sharing this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrIrZRd0pGE