3 Simple But Effective Frameworks for Making Better Decisions

Read Time: 4 minutes 13 seconds

We're pretty terrible decision-makers.

Emotion. Biases. Mistakes. Politics. Laziness. We get in our own way—a lot.

And while I could give you yet another list of cognitive biases, I wanted to push past understanding what disrupts our thinking and into practical methods that we can use to make better decisions.

Awareness of these biases is critical. And simply being less confident is a meaningful step towards better decisions.

But we don't want to just understand the decisions we made.

We want to apply these lessons to decisions we've yet to make.

Here are three frameworks I've refined over the years.

• Operating Principles

• Decision Journal

• Daily Answer Drip

I breakdown each one below.

Management Practice?

Unfortunately, leaders don't get do-overs. There is no practice before making big decisions or having hard conversations.

But there is help. And proven systems.

Leaders who completed the MGMT Accelerator said it was worth 23x what they paid. Pretty decent return on investment for 12 hours of work.

And now we've added two modules:

1. How to Diagnose Problems to Root Cause

2. Amplifying Your Culture with Your Cadence

On October 5th, we kick off our 15th cohort of the MGMT Accelerator and the last one for 2023. 

We'll meet live for 90 minutes twice weekly over 4 weeks and build your tailored management system with ~50 peer leaders.

Operating Principles

Perhaps the biggest gift I got from working at Bridgewater was learning the leverage that comes from principles-based decision-making.

We'd take the lessons from how we wanted to operate and what we've learned to be true, write them down, and then agree to use them when making future choices.

That doesn't mean they won't evolve. But operating this way allowed for two things:

1. Shared language

2. Compounding of knowledge

And it's not just Bridgewater that operates this way.