ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Bring structure to complex choices and trade-offs.
A decision-making framework that uses mental time travel to gain perspective by imagining how a decision or outcome will feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years, helping to reduce emotional overreaction and improve long-term thinking.
The 10/10/10 framework helps you gain perspective on decisions by asking how you will feel about them in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. It downplays short-term emotions to focus on long-term values.
Safety is an emergent property of complex adaptive systems, not a product. Leaders often mistakenly see safety as an ordered problem, but using the Cynefin Framework reveals that most safety issues reside in complex or chaotic domains, requiring different approaches.
This materiality standard uses hypothetical patients with different conditions and values to ask which risk information would change a modeled decision. It helps prioritize communication by examining what an audience needs to know, rather than assuming that every fact matters equally to every person.
When mistakes happen, acknowledge your contribution and take responsibility for handling the aftermath rather than letting emotions dictate your response.
Accountability mapping tools, such as the RACI model, RAPID model, and swim lane diagrams, clarify roles and responsibilities by visualizing who is accountable and responsible for tasks, revealing confusion and enabling alignment among managers.
Financial accounts, balanced scorecards and performance indicators help organizations track their condition. Their usefulness depends on reliable, relevant data: a dashboard can conceal problems through poor data quality or overwhelm managers with detail.
The concept that different individuals or cultures may place varying relative importance on distinct accuracy dimensions such as calibration and discrimination, influencing how they evaluate forecasters and judgments.
A step-by-step framework for defining mission, analyzing current situation, defining specific steps with deadlines, and establishing an actionable plan to achieve goals.
An action plan turns an objective into tasks, responsibilities, methods, timing, and resource needs. It makes the next steps visible and provides a basis for checking progress and revising the plan.
Actuarial methods, which rely on statistical algorithms, often outperform clinical judgment in predicting human behavior, but they have limitations and require careful application, periodic reevaluation, and quality controls.
Erikson argues for adapting communication to the person receiving it. In practice, observe how someone responds and adjust the level of detail, pace, and tone instead of assuming your preferred style works for everyone.
A framework using spider diagrams to explicitly capture and weigh trade-offs between competing priorities, such as cost vs. quality, to inform better decision-making in contexts like outsourcing or call center management.
Critics of evidence-based practice question both the quality of available research and the approach’s effect on professional judgment. Banasiewicz argues that using evidence can support dialogue and multiple perspectives rather than exclude them.
A decision framework that systematically evaluates your goals, personal strengths and weaknesses, and environmental factors to identify opportunities and threats for achieving objectives.
The author adapts PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces, and the Growth-Share Matrix to dating. The analogy separates wider conditions, perceived competition, and personal choices. Its gender categories and claims about law are assumptions of the account, not findings established by the business frameworks.
A vision must be grounded in a set of governing ideas—vision, purpose, and core values—that answer 'What?', 'Why?', and 'How?' to inspire genuine enthusiasm and avoid cynicism.
A framework for evaluating group decision-making by checking for substitution of easier questions, use of inside versus outside view, and diversity of perspectives to avoid correlated errors and improve judgment.
Thaler and Sunstein argue that transparent nudges can respect people’s capacity to deliberate and can remain effective after disclosure. Hidden defaults and difficult opt-outs raise a different concern: people may not understand or be able to change the choice made for them.
When facing a question spanning multiple domains, break it down by identifying relevant disciplines (e.g., economic, biological, ethical) and formulate sub-questions to avoid missing critical complexities.
Elder and Paul distinguish ethical questions about harm and rights from questions of law, convention, and religious doctrine. Their framework separates clear cases from harder disputes in which relevant ethical principles may conflict.
This framework categorizes questions into three types based on the reasoning required: one system (established procedure), no system (subjective preference), and conflicting system (multiple viewpoints with better or worse answers).
Review the results of a solution to determine its impact, identify what worked and what did not, and learn from the experience before tackling similar problems.
Legally binding obligations and behavioral norms shape stakeholder expectations within organizational ecosystems. These influences include black letter law, judicial decisions, and the corporate law principles of business judgment rule and duty of care.
A framework for categorizing evidence and matching it with appropriate analytical methods to extract decision-guiding insights. It links transactional data, empirical research, norms and standards, and expert judgment to probabilistic, thematic, summarization, and pooling analyses.
A decision framework that emphasizes stepping back from immediate emotions to gain perspective and make more rational choices.
A decision-making framework that encourages widening options, testing assumptions, gaining distance, and preparing to be wrong to overcome narrow framing.
Taleb’s barbell strategy combines a large protected allocation, illustrated as 85-90%, with a small speculative allocation of 10-15%. Its aim is to limit exposure to large losses while retaining a chance of substantial gains; protection depends on the assets and obligations involved.
Taleb's decision-making rule: be hyperaggressive in situations with potential positive Black Swans (limited downside) and hyperconservative when exposed to negative Black Swans, thus avoiding terminal risks while embracing beneficial randomness.
The BCG Box (or BCG Matrix) is a framework developed by the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s to evaluate a company's portfolio of investments based on market share and growth rate, categorizing them into cash cows, stars, question marks, and dogs with specific strategic recommendations.
Before starting a root cause analysis (RCA), confirm with stakeholders their commitment to act on findings, especially if systemic issues are suspected. Without that commitment, the RCA risks becoming 'theatre' that raises expectations without producing change.
Erikson’s behavioral profiles offer a way to discuss differences in communication. His story of Adam examines when adapting to another person feels helpful and when it feels manipulative.
Kahneman contrasts expected utility as a logic of consistent choice with the descriptive task of explaining how people actually choose under risk. He recounts how work with Tversky on simple gambles led to prospect theory, designed to explain systematic departures from expected-utility predictions.
The concept that a low probability of success does not necessarily make a bet unworthy, especially when the potential payoff is enormous. By evaluating expected value — the probability-weighted average of outcomes — one can identify bets worth taking even when failure is the most likely result.
Sensitivity analysis asks which uncertain beliefs could change a decision. The source uses a surgical example to show how this can guide the order and depth of a discussion, while conveying both the probability and nature of each risk.
The pure five whys technique, which searches for a single root cause, is limited and should be supplemented with systemic RCA methods that consider multiple causes and connections. Going beyond the five whys involves using techniques like modified fishbone with causal loops and being 'multilingual' in RCA tools to get a fuller understanding of incidents.
Kahneman examines two limits of prospect theory: disappointment when an expected gain does not arrive, and regret about an option not chosen. A model that values each outcome independently can miss these comparisons.
Bookending means considering a plausible low outcome and a plausible high outcome instead of relying on one forecast. It helps identify what could go wrong, what could go well, and how to prepare for either.
Boundary diagrams are a visual tool used in root cause analysis and systems thinking to define the scope of an investigation, enabling practitioners to consciously choose which parts of the system to include or exclude to avoid endless causal chains.
The Bowtie Technique is a risk assessment and analysis method that visualizes the relationship between causes, consequences, and barriers (preventative, detective, and recovery measures) around a central hazard or top event, helping organizations understand and communicate how multiple layers of defense can prevent or mitigate disasters.
Generate options by studying how others have solved similar problems and by examining successes within your own organization. For recurring decisions, collect useful questions and principles in a playlist that helps people consider options they might otherwise overlook.
A framework for using change management techniques in Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and systems analysis, emphasizing alignment of goal, problem, practical steps, roles, and rewards.
Learning communities connect people through shared questions, aims, and meaning. Leaders can help build those relationships as part of the organization’s work.
A framework for developing personal mastery to overcome ingrained cognitive defaults by cultivating self-accountability, self-knowledge, self-control, and self-confidence, and using rituals to create positive inertia that drives consistent good judgment.
This framework addresses the tension between optimistic commercial managers and cautious technical staff when developing business cases. It emphasizes the need for transparent processes, cross-functional collaboration, and respecting all viewpoints to avoid groupthink and make balanced decisions.
A structured decision framework from value investing that applies six sequential filters to evaluate a business: understandability, competitive advantage, management quality, price, disconfirmation, and downside consequences.
Business Intelligence (BI) encompasses technologies, applications, and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting business data to support better decision-making. It focuses on tools for data curation, summarization, visualization, and reporting, enabling organizations to derive insights from data.
A decision analysis exercise where a college president chooses to abolish or maintain a speech code, evaluating outcomes in campus disruptions, state funding, and enrollment using weighted utility analysis.
This exercise asks a manager to compare a San Francisco job offer with staying in Indiana using weighted career and family outcomes. The author reports preferring to stay, but the solution and its utility assignments are absent; the stated probabilities alone do not support that conclusion.
Causal flow diagramming is a visual framework for analyzing cause-and-effect systems, akin to disassembling a watch to understand its components. It helps identify major factors, interactions, feedback loops, and root causes of problems.
The 'Change Your Decision' maxim advises against waiting for information that will not alter the final course of action, preventing unnecessary delays and wasted resources by focusing on actionable data.
The concept warns against the pitfalls of pursuing illusory, overly simplistic measurable goals, particularly in complex social systems, and advocates for narrative-based, citizen-centered approaches like SenseMaker to achieve sustainable change.
Choice architecture is the way options are organized and presented. Defaults, reminders, and the effort required to act can influence what people choose. Thaler and Sunstein use employee benefits to show why a default should fit the decision rather than apply uniformly to every option.
When perfect solutions are rare, compromise using pros-and-cons analysis, seek input from others, and trust your judgment to avoid decision paralysis.
When improving Root Cause Analysis (RCA) practices, organizations face a choice: enhance existing RCA efforts or introduce RCA to areas lacking it. The decision depends on likely impact and feasibility, influenced by organizational role and influence.
A chronology or timeline organizes events in sequential order, leveraging the human instinct to think chronologically and understand cause-effect relationships. This technique helps identify patterns, gaps, and context crucial for decision-making.
Despite robust evidence that actuarial (statistical) methods outperform clinical judgment in prediction tasks, clinicians often resist using them. This resistance stems from unfamiliarity with the research, misconceptions about group statistics, overconfidence in subjective judgment, and professional values that prioritize intuition.
Clinical judgment involves human integration of information, while actuarial judgment uses statistical formulas based on empirical data. For a fair comparison, both methods should use the same data and actuarial methods must avoid capitalizing on chance through cross-validation.
Use shared stories to identify problems and possible changes, then test several small interventions in parallel. Watch what happens, expand changes that help, and stop or modify those that cause harm.
A decision framework where organizational purpose is broad enough for initiative but clear enough for intent, enabling employees to develop micro-strategies that align with strategic direction. This 'mission control' approach contrasts with traditional command and control.