I discovered something very interesting about how a particular intelligence agency - one of the world's best - goes about its decision-making. It quite freaked me at the time, actually.
When they're planning operations, in which the stakes are even higher than the mere life or death of the individual operative because they're about national security, they recognise that the reason why people can't make decisions is very simple. Every time you make a decision, you must automatically sacrifice all the other options on the table. And nobody likes to lose options, which is why nobody likes to make decisions.
If you ask yourself which option is the best, then you're on a hiding to nothing. You might as well write a letter to Santa, because you're in wish-land.
Instead, ask yourself, "Which of these options can we live without? Can we live without this? Can we live without this?"
Whatever is left, you can't live without - and there's your decision. It's brutally simple, which is why it works.
Go on, try it.
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3 comments:
Can you live without yourself though? I am not sure that this is not just very negative - the positive decision making would be "what would make me the happiest?" and this is almost certainly something I could live without.....
Sorry, plenty o'typos in my previous comment.
You're absolutely right Dan - what would make you happiest is definitely something you can live without. And you're right that it's negative, and that's fine. Decisive thinking needs to be negative, because it's a cull.
Decisive thinking is not creative thinking or visionary thinking. There are times when you need to be visionary and times when you need to be creative - when you're generating options - and then, when it's time to make a decision, you have to let things go. The question "what can I live without?" makes it easy to do this when asked in the context of the options you have on the table. If you ask, "what would make me happiest?" then you'll find it hard to drop any of your options.
Like I said - try it!
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