Decision Tools

Much has been written on biases that occur in decision making and the potential of tools to help make better decisions.

In particular, The Behavioural Insights Team and Institute for Government's Behavioural Government report summarises the most recent academic literature.

It is clear issues emerge in decision making, solution design or idea generation in three distinct phases: noticing a problem or opportunity, deliberating about an idea, and executing against that idea.

On this site, we are interested on practical, easy to use tools that help individuals and teams make better decisions. Whilst these tools have broad use, we are primarily focused on tools that are useful for people making decisions or working on ideas within an organisation.

Tools

Red Teams

Red Teams are a tool that can be used across a decision's lifecycle. They are defined as "a team that is formed with the objective of subjecting an organisation’s plans, programmes, ideas and assumptions to rigorous analysis and challenge."

In essence, they form a counter-point to your own decision making. A respectful but challenging friend who questions your approach and solution. As one of our first beta tools, we created an automated Red Team. This guides you through questions that any good and curious challenger would ask. Get in contact if you would like to try it out.

Pre-mortems

Most people have heard of retrospectives or post-mortems. These occur after a project has ended or, perhaps, an incident has occurred. They review what went well, what could be improved, and allocate tasks based on the findings.

Pre-mortems occur before an idea is implemented. First, you invite a cross-functional team that includes all parts of your organisation impacted by the decision or idea (IT, HR, Legal, Engineering, Operations). Second, you make sure everyone is properly briefed on the decision. Third, you ask people to consider all the things that may go wrong including their most outlandish ideas. Finally, you gather together these ideas and identify as a group whether you need to put in place a mitigation plan based on their potential impact and likelihood.

Anonymous Idea Generation

In a traditional session focused on idea generation, people gather around a real or virtual whiteboard and shout out their best efforts. Unfortunately, this often means the person who is most senior or has the loudest voice has their idea adopted independent of whether it is the best idea or not.

A simple way to solve this issue is to open a collaborative document (such as google docs) and ask people to write their ideas anonymously. You can start an idea generating session with 10-20 minutes dedicated to this task. Once complete, people can then rank the ideas before they have any idea who wrote them in the first place. The group can then discuss the top ideas or any wildcards they would like to consider.

This process ensures the best idea wins rather than simply the loudest idea in the room.

Forecasting

Most of us agree that good feedback helps us improve over time. Yet we do not take a structured approach to gathering feedback on decisions and predictions made by our teams

Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting reveals the importance of good, structured feedback to help people improve their judgement over time.

Like on websites such as Metaculus teams can also make predictions about the future and track how successful their judgement is over time. As a beta version, you can find a team-level prediction format in google sheets here

The Right Questions

Improving judgement and decision making is often about asking the right questions at the right times. Some good questions to ask yourself about any idea or implementation are:

Software Solving These Problems Today

There are tools that already exist that attempt to improve judgement and decision making. Some of these include: