To Make Good Decisions, Do the Opposite

Two unconventional strategies to improve decision-making

I boarded the aircraft on January 13th, 1991 in a green pantsuit and a pair of cowboy boots. My sister and I were heading to JFK International Airport in New York, from Kingston Jamaica. There, we were told, we would finally have the much-envied opportunity to experience an exciting new life in the United States of America.

Many years before this life-altering trip, my parents had already decided that we would leave our close circle of family and friends to emigrate to the USA. For them, this decision was a no brainer. And being very Jamaican parents, it was just another decision made with no input from us.

Some decisions seem obvious and can be made easily without consternation. For my parents, the choice to emigrate to the USA was one of those decisions. There are other decisions however that challenge us. They keep us up at night, stalking us so much in their urgency and sense of importance that they prevent us from thinking of anything else.

It is these hugely important decisions that often require us to pause; to be slow, deliberate, and thoughtful in our process, knowing that it’s so critical that we get it right.

Deep down, we all know that there’s little that matters more in life than the quality of our decisions.

I don’t mean whimsical (and ill-advised) green pantsuit and cowboy boots kind of decisions. I mean the life-changing ones. The types of decisions that allow us to build and lead an amazing organization, find and maintain an above-average romantic relationship, and raise the kind of children who want to make the world a better place.

Yet despite the impact of strong decision-making skills on quality of life, many of us simply pull from a shortlist of common (and not highly effective) strategies in making important decisions.

A shortlist of common strategies:

● Writing a pros and cons list

● Asking only folks within our circle for their opinion

● Doing what most people are doing (herd mentality)

● Going with the first option that pops into your head

● Going with the option that feels safe and comfortable

Needless to say, the fact that something is common doesn’t mean that it’s best. Common approaches yield common results while doing the opposite can generate uncommon results.

This article is designed to provide you with two opposite and unconventional approaches to decision-making. Consider these and add them to your toolkit as you grapple with important decisions that beg for a deeply thoughtful approach.

Decision Making Strategy #1: Map Out Your Fears

It would be nice to be able to talk about making important decisions without bringing up the F word. But we may as well admit that fear is an emeffer. Fear lurks in the background, waiting for the time when your sink is full, your house is a mess, and you are least prepared for a visit to start banging down your door.

To make matters worse, many of us have an unhealthy relationship with fear, driven mostly by our automatic negative thoughts.

For example:

● We assume that if we’re scared of something then that thing must be bad for us

● We think that if we encounter too big of an obstacle, that we will more than likely fail

● We believe that our fear is protecting us from something that may hurt us. So we stay away out of a sense of self-preservation

For those of us who crave certainty and stability, fear can wreak havoc on our decision-making process. We want to make the decision that keeps us safe; that makes us feel protected. We know that we need to challenge ourselves and take risks yet we worry that our knees may buckle and we may never be able to walk again if we push ourselves too hard.

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” — Jack Canfield

Before we make a decision about something that is fear-inducing, we owe it to ourselves to first map out our fears. This is the opposite of what we feel like doing in these situations, but critical.

When we map out our fears, we have another layer of information that strengthens our ability to even more effectively evaluate the decision.

Tim Ferriss, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur blogs about a process that he calls Fear Setting. Fear setting is an exercise for planning for your fears that has been incredibly useful to me in making important decisions.

I have adapted the Fear Setting exercise and created the acronym, CALMER, to facilitate remembrance and routinization of this exercise.

Clarify the decision (or dilemmas surrounding the decision) as succinctly as possible

Ask, “ What is it about this decision that scares me the most?”

List everything about the decision that excites you. Then, list everything about the decision that scares you, including all of the “what ifs” that you can come up with

Map out your fears. Create a detailed plan and response for all of your fears and “what ifs” from the list. In mapping out your fears, use the following sentence frame: “If this (negative thing) were to happen, I would (response to the negative thing.)”

Envision your fears coming true, then see yourself responding to the fear exactly how you mapped it out above.

Reflect

○ If my fears were to come true would I still think the risk was worth it?

○ Would I be willing to work through the plan to address my fears if they were to come up?

○ Would I have any regrets if I didn’t?

After going through this exercise you will have a better sense of what fears are negatively impacting your ability to effectively evaluate the decision. You will also have a plan and vision for how to address those fears were they to come to fruition.

Having mapped out your fears, you will also be able to now think more clearly about the decision. If you decide to make the decision that wasn’t the scariest for you, you at least now know that it’s not because you didn’t deeply explore and plan for it, but that there were perhaps more compelling reasons not to.

Decision Making Strategy #2: Study Poor Decision-Making

As a society, we can be obsessed with the winners, the champions, and the peak performers known for making great decisions to get to the top of their game.

There are advantages that come from learning from the best. After all, success leaves clues. But on many occasions, learning what not to do can be as valuable as learning what to do.

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” — Napoleon Hill

Regret is a sore loser but an amazing teacher.

So what if instead of learning from the best, we did the opposite? What if we studied the worst?

How would we make decisions if we had an in-depth understanding of the pattern of behaviors and thought processes that lead to poor decision-making? What insights would we gain from that in-depth study? And how may that impact how we make important decisions?

I set out to answer these questions by reading and learning more about some of the worst decisions in history. Below, I have briefly outlined three of the “worst decisions in history” as discovered by the research.

Poor Decision #1 — Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (1812)

Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with one of the largest armies ever assembled for battle. He was so confident in winning that he bragged that the war would be over in 20 days.

Napoleon’s army of over 600,000 soldiers was defeated with only 100,000 men remaining after the battle. His men were defeated in part due to many unexpected challenges including lice infestations, typhus infections, food shortages, and freezing temperatures.

Poor Decision #2 — The Titanic (1912)

The Titanic was outfitted with only enough lifeboats for a third of the total passengers and crew it could carry.

Poor Decision #3 — Kodak’s Bankruptcy (2012)

The digital camera was first invented by an engineer at Kodak as early as 1975. By 1981 Kodak executives were already aware that digital was likely to replace Kodak’s film camera business in about 10 years.

Instead of using this time to plan, prepare, and capitalize on their invention of digital cameras, they decided to focus on making their film cameras even better.

Patterns

There are patterns of thoughts and behaviors that lead to success and there are those that lead to failure. The three catastrophic events above occurred exactly 100 years apart from each other and yet contain very similar patterns of poor thinking and decision-making. When we don’t learn from history, history repeats itself.

Studying and gaining insight from these patterns can help us to do the opposite in our approach to making good decisions.

Patterns:

Pattern of thought: Overconfidence

○ Being amongst the largest and most powerful in their industries and having had tons of successes under their belt created a sense of overconfidence which led to sloppy decision-making

Pattern of behavior: Insufficient preparation and lack of foresight

○ Not doing enough research or not taking seriously the results of the research led to faulty planning and ultimately, the untimely demise of these giants.

Insights:

● In making important decisions:

○ Don’t let your fears control you, but also don’t let overconfidence blind you from potential dangers ahead.

○ Do your homework. Study and learn all that you can about your allies, opponents, and competitors

○ Use your learnings to plan proactively and strategically

○ Be as prepared as possible for worst-case scenario

Conclusion

There are no guarantees in life. Sometimes we randomly flip a coin and end up in the best possible predicament. Other times we make slow, well informed, and deliberate decisions and lose our shirt. At times we can get incredibly lucky and other times it can seem like everything is working against us.

In the midst of life’s uncertainties, many of us are simply trying to do the best that we can to increase the odds of making a good decision even with the understanding that increased odds is not the same as a guarantee.

When we use common decision-making strategies, we get common results.

When we ignore or fail to explore our fears we make decisions with incomplete information. When we do the opposite and map out our fears, we expose ourselves to the full scope of possibilities. This allows us to make decisions with a more complete picture which increases the likelihood of making the one that’s best for you.

Similarly, when we study only the greats, we can fall prey to survivorship bias. Survivorship bias leads to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored.

Doing the opposite and studying failures, particularly those who failed due to poor decision-making can provide a level of wisdom and insight that will only strengthen your decision-making skills.

The next time that you’re faced with an important decision and you’re tempted to use one of your default strategies please instead do the following:

● Pause

● Pull up this article

● Try one of these approaches

● Reflect, refine and routinize

In a world replete with the conventional, be unconventional.