This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player)

1. Make Implicit Assumptions Explicit

Take what’s implicit in your thinking and make it explicit to improve decision quality and identify when your intuition might be wrong.

2. Brainstorm Ideas Independently

Before group discussions, have individuals independently generate ideas, judgments, or forecasts with rationales, without seeing others’ input, to prevent cross-influence and capture a wider range of opinions.

3. Focus Meetings on Discussion

Restrict meetings solely to the discussion of ideas, ensuring that discovery (independent idea generation) and decision-making happen outside the group setting for greater effectiveness.

4. Make Decisions Independently

After group discussion, make the final decision outside of a collective meeting, either through a single designated decision-maker or via independent private voting, to avoid groupthink and social pressure.

5. Pre-Mortem with Kill Criteria

Conduct pre-mortems to identify potential failure signals for a project, then pre-commit to specific actions (kill criteria) you will take if those signals appear, helping to overcome sunk cost bias and enabling timely pivots or stops.

6. Shorten Long Feedback Loops

Identify and track intermediate signals or necessary conditions that are correlated with your desired long-term outcome, allowing you to get feedback much faster and improve decision-making without waiting years for the ultimate result.

7. Structure Unstructured Decisions

For complex decisions like hiring, break down implicit criteria into explicit components, create a decision rubric, and use structured processes (e.g., structured interviews) to drastically improve decision accuracy.

8. Employ ‘Nevertheless’ in Leadership

Acknowledge and validate others’ input and feelings (e.g., ‘I hear you’), but then clearly state the decision and the path forward (‘Nevertheless, this is what’s going to happen’) to balance empathy with decisive action.

9. Reject ‘Alignment’ as a Goal

Stop aiming for ‘alignment’ or unanimous agreement in group decisions, as it’s often unrealistic and can lead to coercive environments; instead, accept natural disagreement and focus on conveying information.

10. Convey, Don’t Convince

In discussions, aim to convey your ideas and the reasoning behind them, rather than trying to convince others you are right, to foster a culture of curiosity and open exchange of information.

11. Clarify and Reflect Input

When facilitating discussions, actively listen and reflect back what you heard others say to confirm understanding, without offering your own opinion, ensuring everyone feels heard and understood.

12. Use Structured Evaluation Rubrics

Create structured rubrics with defined criteria and precise rating scales for evaluating complex decisions (e.g., investments), ensuring consistency, reducing bias, and allowing for quantitative analysis of decision components.

13. Establish Shared Definitions

Ensure all participants in a decision-making process have a shared and explicit understanding of the terms and criteria being used (e.g., ‘market quality’) to prevent miscommunication and ensure consistent judgments.

14. Explicitly Forecast Probabilities

For long-term decisions, explicitly forecast the probability of key intermediate outcomes (e.g., a company funding at Series A) to make implicit predictions explicit, allowing for tracking of accuracy and feedback.

15. Track and Feedback Accuracy

Systematically track the accuracy of individual and team predictions and ratings against actual outcomes, then provide this feedback to decision-makers to foster continuous learning and improvement in specific areas.

16. Data-Driven Rubric Optimization

Continuously refine and optimize decision rubrics by analyzing data to determine which factors are truly predictive and which are not, ensuring the rubric focuses on the most impactful criteria.

17. Verify Intuition’s Predictiveness

Critically examine whether strongly held intuitions or emphasized factors are actually predictive of desired outcomes, as intuition can be both right and wrong, and testing it helps identify and correct non-predictive biases.

18. Assume Late Quitting

When considering quitting a project, job, or relationship, operate under the assumption that you’ve likely already waited too long, as strong human biases often cause people to delay quitting until it’s no longer a choice.

19. Apply ‘Start Today’ Rule

Evaluate ongoing commitments by asking yourself if you would choose to start them today, given all current information, to overcome the sunk cost fallacy and identify true waste.

20. Account for Opportunity Cost

When deciding whether to continue or quit, explicitly consider the opportunity cost – what other valuable endeavors you could be pursuing if you stopped the current one – to highlight hidden costs and make more rational decisions.

21. Cultivate Open-Mindedness Mindset

Actively seek out reasons why your current beliefs might be wrong and be willing to change your mind based on new information, as exemplified by Daniel Kahneman, to foster curiosity and uncover new insights.

22. Engage in Adversarial Collaboration

Partner with individuals who hold opposing viewpoints to jointly design studies or experiments that can resolve disagreements, objectively seeking truth rather than tearing each other down.

23. Gain Perspective on Importance

Remind yourself that current issues or decisions often feel more important in the moment than they truly are in the long run, helping to reduce emotional intensity and allow for a more rational assessment.

24. On-the-Fly Independent Brainstorming

If new ideas or challenges arise spontaneously in a meeting, pause the group discussion and ask everyone to independently write down their thoughts or estimates to prevent immediate groupthink and capture diverse perspectives.

25. Gain Edge with Frameworks

Actively apply decision-making frameworks and strategies, even if they are unnatural or difficult, to gain a significant competitive edge over those who know about these methods but fail to implement them.

26. Ensure Kids Feel Loved

Prioritize making sure your children deeply and unequivocally know that you love them, as this foundational love is the most important basis for their well-being, dwarfing other parenting styles.

27. Don’t Sweat Parenting Mistakes

Accept that mistakes will happen in parenting (e.g., dropping a baby), and don’t beat yourself up over them, as babies are resilient and not every small mistake will have a lasting impression.

28. Teach Kids Basic Manners

Focus on teaching your children fundamental manners like saying ‘please’ and ’thank you,’ as this is an achievable and valuable parental contribution, even if you have little influence on their core personality.