Guided session · Thinking · About 12 minutes
The Decision Record
Six months from now, someone will ask why you made this decision, and by then you will know how the decision turned out. This session writes the decision down before you make it: the options, what matters, how reversible the choice is, how confident you are and what would change your mind. You finish with a one-page record and a date to review it.
The research behind this session
Sources
- Remembering what you expected. Fischhoff, B. and Beyth, R. (1975). “‘I knew it would happen’: remembered probabilities of once-future things.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13(1), 1–16.
- Decision records. Nygard, M. (2011). “Documenting architecture decisions.” Cognitect blog.
- Judging a decision by its outcome. Duke, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets. Portfolio.
- Considering more than one option. Nutt, P. C. (1993). “The identification of solution ideas during organizational decision making.” Management Science, 39(9), 1071–1085. Described in Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2013). Decisive. Crown Business.
- One-way and two-way doors. Bezos, J. (2016). Letter to Amazon shareholders for 2015.
- Putting a number on a belief. Tetlock, P. E. and Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown.
- If-then plans. Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
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