The Decision Strategist

This week’s decision making technique is a little different. Problem restatement is a method designed to break you out of a situation that seems to have no solution. It avoids framing effects by shifting your point of view so that everything looks different. It forces you to think outside the box.

You can use problem restatement for decision making to clarify what it is that you are trying to decide on. Sometimes the decision we think we are trying to make is not the decision we are actually making.

I’ve found problem restatement particularly useful when considering future plans. Right now I am focusing on making What I want to Do With My Life happen, so this exercise is useful in helping me refocus energies.

What’s the current problem?

Start with a definition of the current problem. For me the problem is:

• How can I build this blog, work on decyder and complete applications to Ycombinator and the Peace Corps before the end of September all while working hard at my normal job?

Paraphrase

Paraphrase the problem. This is sort of like brainstorming with the question/problem as the focus.

• What can I do to make sure everything gets done?
• Why do I overload myself with so much work?
• Who would I have to be to accomplish my goals this month?

Reverse the Problem

Consider the reverse of the problem. This works by telling you exactly what things you can do to make sure you don’t solve your problem.

• How can I not get everything done that I need to this month?
  • be lazy (especially watching TV)
  • get distracted by less relevant tasks
  • become demoralized and quit

Narrow or expand the focus

Sometimes the reason a problem seems not to have a solution is that it is focused either too minutely or too broadly. Shifting the focus can give you the right perspective.

• How can I be more productive? (more general)
  • focus on the essential tasks
  • reduce distractions
  • emphasize productive time

• How can I build The Decision Strategist?
  • write quality articles with good information
  • be more active in the decision making community
  • see what articles people have found most interesting and emphasize those types of articles

Shift the focus

We adjusted the focus in the last step, now shift the focus. Often problems with no solution turn out to be not correctly focused on the true problem.

• How can I improve my writing?
  • practice
  • develop information resources
  • try writing in different styles
• How can I make my coding more efficient?
  • practice practice practice
  • take the time to understand tutorials
  • try to solve math puzzles
• How can I build income potential as I work toward starting my own business?
  • investigate advertising potential
  • work with potential clients
  • participate in the decision making communities forums (are there any?)

Ask Why?

The last step is to simply ask why. State the problem/question and then ask why. Continue to ask why until you feel satisfied. I usually start with a question updated by the four tasks I’ve just done. That way in incorporates the work I’ve done to try and make the question more accurate.

The question about building income potential is probably the most spot on. Income isn’t the only reason for wanting to do any of the things I am doing, but it is sort of the bottom line, because I need it to do anything else.

• Q: How can I complete the most necessary actions to develop opportunities to generate income?
  • why?
• Because I want to work for myself on the things I find interesting and useful.
  • why?
• Because life is more meaningful and fun when I am doing that.
  • why?
• Because it is difficult to be completely invested when working for someone else on uninteresting things.
  • why?
• Because it is hard to be passionate about work you don’t care about.

As you can see, by the end you can get down to some pretty philosophical statements. But these statements are good, because they help me focus on the real reason I am trying to do all these different things.

To ensure that I am focusing my energies where I should, I am going to examine each task in terms of how much it does to achieve my primary goals, which in this case are to start my own business and be working for myself on interesting things.

I fount a great (and slightly pink) example from a couple years ago of a student using this method to try not to procrastinate located here. If any of you have done this sort of analysis for anything, I’d love to hear about it.

-zot

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A reader left a comment on What am I Doing with My Life? Follow Up with a great suggestion. Here is part of Bob’s comment:

Have you thought of doing a values clarification exercise as part of this process? It starts with listing all your values, then ranking them in importance to you. Then, when an option or event involves two or more of your values in conflict, you will have a new level of clarity of which value to uphold and a new level of objectivity about why you are violating one of your lesser values. This is a great way to reduce the stress and “drag” associated with highly complex circumstances.

This is a really great idea. I’ve done a Primary Life Goals post, but I haven’t explicitly written about my values here.

I followed the procedure Bob describes above, but to list all my values I used the exercise described in Steve Pavlina’s How to discover your life purpose. I modified it slightly so that instead of focusing on life purpose, I’m focusing on personal values.

After getting my list of values, I grouped them into similar categories:

List of Values

I decided to go with a top seven values, ranked in importance. I figure seven because there are lots of fun ways you can refer to seven, such as “The Magnificent Seven” or “Values List Seven”. Also, since I have six groups, having seven top values lets me pick the most important from each group and have one extra slot. I think usually people say to go with five though.

So choosing seven and then ranking them in a simple pareto analysis, I come up with the following ordered list of values:

1. Integrity.
2. Creativity.
3. Connections.
4. Adventure.
5. Personal Growth.
6. Service.
7. Conservation.

This was an extremely difficult process. Typically things just jump out at you when using these techniques, but each of my values resonated so strongly that I had a hard enough time choosing them. Ranking them was nearly impossible!

In the end I ended up ranking them backwards. By choosing the seventh slot first, I was able to come up with a ranking system that I was satisfied with.

I’m still not convinced of it though. If I faced a situation in which I had to choose between working at a very automated job for the rest of my life or acting with integrity, I don’t know that I would choose the option with integrity.

Values are a very fluid thing, but Bob is absolutely write in suggesting that I need to have a defined values list before I go about trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

If I wanted to be more sure of the order of the list, I’d do a sort of paired comparison of each value.

Has anyone else done work like this to determine their values? I know that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has a method like this for determining your personal values. I’d be really interested to hear what values lists my readers have come up with, and what process they used to develop them.

-zot

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This blog exists because I think that social networking had a huge potential to completely change decision making as we know it. Making decisions based on the input of your network is a relatively unexplored but very interesting possibility.

I also discuss startups, game theory, economics, and other topics as the whim strikes me.

The ability to set up decision making frameworks and then garner input from multiple parties has a lot of potential. While separately we are subject to certain fallacies and decision making errors, together we might spot pitfalls that otherwise we wouldn’t see.

While there are a few sites, such as MindTools (affiliate link), dedicated to decision making techniques and classes, there has not been a lot of work to extend these tools to be used as a group in business and everyday decisions.

Imagine needing to choose what car to buy or where to move, and being able to get immediate feedback from others about whether New York is better than Seattle and how. Only instead of a haphazard discussion, it happens within a framework designed to minimize errors in human judgment.

My goal is to get us started on that path, to develop a better community understanding of how our decision making errors affect us and what we can do about them. To create new tools and extend current ones for dealing with decisions in a real life setting.

Ultimately, I want you to improve your decision making and to help me improve mine.

I’m also working to shift my career to be based more on ‘creative implementation of ideas’ instead of purely research and statistically oriented. This includes a fair bit of programming and web site development. My current project along this vein is decyder.

-zot

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We use metaphors all the time. Not just to create pretty language, but in our thoughts and decision making as well. in How To Fight Advertising, I talked about an exercise I had tried that involved examining the stories we like to tell about ourselves. Recognizing those stories lets us realize when advertisers are using those stories to try and sell us something.

That is a specific example of how we use metaphors in our daily lives, but I think we use metaphors in virtually everything.

Metaphors for Life Goals

One of my primary goals is to own my own company. But when I think about owning my own company, I am not considering the process of actually performing the service, thinking about whether I will enjoy it, how much paperwork there will be, taxes, and all the other administrative stuff. I’m thinking semi-abstractly of a man in professional but laid back clothes smiling and working…

And that’s it. There aren’t a lot more details. What am I working on? Why do I exhude an air of excitement, happiness, and satisfaction? What is up with that pale blue abstract wall color?

The point is that we think in terms of metaphors. Stories for our lives that describe how we want to live. Of course, the reality of the situation is that there is a lot of time in any part of life where we aren’t filled to the brim with excitement.

Do you imagine falling in love as a couple outside laughing while the sun shines on them, the grass green, an antique stone wall running in the background while a stream gurgles cheerfully nearby?

Do you think of martial arts and sports in terms of flying through the air, or running really fast, perhaps using footwork or other methods to beat your opponents and succeed?

These are stories that I think of when I think of those things, but none of the stories much resembles my experience with martial arts or relationships. These are metaphors that I’m using to describe events and emotions.

Why We Like Metaphors

Metaphors are so much better than facts because they engage our whole brain. When we are involved in a story our sense of smell and taste and touch activate. Our heartbeat responds to excitement. It’s ever so much more fun than if we were to cycle through our supposition of a given job imagining the grueling minute details of showing up, logging on, checking email, responding to coworkers questions, resolving disputes, ad nauseum.

Thinking in metaphors is good because it gets us involved and excited. Without them we might never do anything. But they are dangerous also, because they can lead us to associate stories we like with decisions that we don’t like.

Fun With Storytelling

It can be a lot of fun, and a worthwhile exercise, to play around with your metaphors. When you think about your life goals, what kinds of stories to you engage? I like this because it’s just plain fun to sit down and imagine what your life will be like 5, 10, 15 years from now. Once you have several stories in mind, you can start to evaluate them in terms of how you can make that story as close to reality as possible.

A lot of our actions seem oriented toward achieving a story that we’ve committed ourselves to at some point. Sometimes we don’t realize that we don’t want that story anylonger. Sitting back and creating a bunch of new stories for your life gives you a chance to experiment and to realign your less conscious actions with a future that you still believe in.

-zot

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