One of the strangest things about being human is that we can’t trust our own memories of what we were thinking. Not because we forget but rather because our brains actively edit the past to make us look better and smarter.
This wouldn’t matter much except that, for most people, your career is a series of decisions compounded over time. When you make one that turns out well, your brain quietly edits the story to make it seem like you knew what you were doing all along. And when you make a one that goes sideways, your brain adds in doubts and thinking you never actually had. The result of this process is that you don’t really know what you actually thought at the time.
This helps explain something puzzling: why smart people keep making the same mistakes.
Organizations Don’t Help
Organizations don’t really help. They treat decision-making ability as if it were fixed, like height. Either you have good judgment, or you don’t. This is strange, given that we improve at nearly everything we practice with feedback. So why don’t we do this with decisions?
The answer reveals something interesting about organizations: they don’t actually try to help people make better decisions. Instead, they try to identify people who already make good ones.
So, if organizations are not going to teach you about your blindspots when making decisions, you’ll have to teach yourself.
Everyone has blindspots; the best way to discover yours is to keep a decision journal.
What is a Decision Journal?
You can think of a decision journal as quality control for our thinking — something like what we’d find in a manufacturing plant or a restaurant.
The strangest thing about most decisions is that we often don’t know what we think until we try to write it down. While we’d like to think we fully understand the problem before we make a big decision, that’s mostly not the case.
Something surprising happens when you have to explain it on paper: you discover that what seemed like crystal-clear thoughts in your head are now murky and messy.
A decision journal is really a mirror – one that shows you your thinking before your brain has a chance to polish it. The key is looking in this mirror before you act, not after.
A Decision Journal Template
The key question is what information to include in your decision journal. And you will have to use a bit of trial and error to figure this out.
Here’s the template we use at FS.
Whenever you’re making a consequential decision, either individually or as part of a group, you take a moment and write down:
- The situation or context
- The problem statement or frame
- The variables that govern the situation
- The complications or complexity as you see it
- Alternatives that were seriously considered and why they were not chosen (think: the work required to have an opinion)
- A paragraph explaining the range of outcomes
- A paragraph explaining what you expect to happen and the reasoning and actual probabilities you assign to each projected outcome (The degree of confidence matters, a lot.)
- The time of day you’re making the decision and how you feel physically and mentally (If you’re tired, for example, write it down.)
You have to make this part your own. I’ve seen others include:
- What’s the primary thesis
- What is the expected outcome(s)
- What are the second and third-order consequences
- What is the worst-case scenario and why that’s ok
- What is the potential upside beyond the core thesis
- What emotions am I experiencing
- What is the opportunity cost (by doing this what am I not doing)
- What unique advantages or insights do I have in this situation
- Who is the best person to make this decision
- What does this look like in 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years?
An Example Decision
Perhaps an example will help illustrate. Here’s a real decision that I made using the FS decision journal template.
Tips on Using a Decision Journal
Here are some tips to remember as you implement your decision journal.
Your decision journal can be tailored to the situation and context. Specific decisions might include trade-offs, second-order effects, weighting criteria, or other relevant factors. These examples are only to get you started.
We can’t improve our thinking if we can’t see it. Don’t spend too much time on the brief and obvious insights. Often our first thoughts represent the thinking of someone else and not our own thinking.
Any decision you’re journaling is inherently complex and may involve non-linear systems. In such a world, small effects can cause disproportionate responses whereas bigger ones might have no impact. Remember that causality is complex, especially in complex domains.
Two common ways people wiggle out of their own decisions are hindsight bias and jargon.
It’s hard to remember what we knew at the time and what were thinking. Hindsight makes things far more explainable and changes our story. A decision journal helps combat this by recording what you knew and what you thought at the time. When you look at your own handwriting you come face to face with the person you were when you made the decision. There is nowhere to hide.
The words we use are also important. When we use vague terms, we give ourselves wiggle room. If we want to get better at making decisions we can’t give ourselves wiggle room. Be clear. Be direct. Be simple. An 8-year-old should understand what decision you’re making and why.
Your Two Lives
When you start keeping a decision journal, you discover something unsettling: you’re living two different lives. One one hand, there’s the story you tell yourself, where your successes come from insight and your failures from bad luck. On other other, there’s what actually happened, which the journal reveals with uncomfortable clarity.
The gap between these two stories is where the real learning happens. Not because you were stupid, but because your brain is so good at editing and explaining away your mistakes that you never see the patterns in your thinking.
Once you start to keep a decision journal, these patterns become clear. And that’s when you start to get better – not at being right, but at understanding why you’re wrong.