Decision making: high quality & high velocity
Dear friends,Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on. I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me! If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! If you like it, please share it on social networks! In decision-making, speed often reigns supreme. Quality, without speed, leads to missed opportunities. The adage “Good slow decisions don't exist. Only good fast decisions” encapsulates this idea. Slow decision-making often incurs high opportunity costs—lessons remain unlearned, and valuable insights are lost. The faster we move, the more we can learn, iterate, and improve. As a result, your skill in decision-making is directly proportional to two things:
Let’s deep dive into the art and science of rapid yet high-quality decision-making. The momentum of speedSpeed is a self-reinforcing cycle: the more you exhibit speed, the more feedback and interaction you receive, and the faster you grow and learn. If you respond to people’s messages quickly, they send more messages. The sender learns to expect a response, because the projected cost of the exchange in their mind is low. What’s true of individual people turns out also to be true of whole organisations. If contributors discover that you’re slow to merge pull requests, they’ll stop contributing. Unresponsive systems are sad, people don’t like to interact with them. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll do more. The contrary is true. If every time you write a blog post it takes you three months, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive. Are speed & quality opposite?The good news is that speed and quality are not the opposite. If you watch Formula One races and you look at the pit crews, they work really fast and with high precision. If they make a mistake, their team loses the race, and worse the driver could die. Where do I start?My experience has been to push myself to go faster than I believe it is healthy by timeboxing tasks and being intentional on producing high quality fast.
I love this tip on writing from the writers of The Simpsons: “Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can.” I think it applies to every topic. Go fast, then iterate, iterate, iterate. Acquiring InformationThe quality of your decisions is only as good as the information you base them on. That is why we built a culture of radical transparency where all information is accessible. I suggest searching on Github, Slack & Notion to understand in-depth the context and the strategy of the company, or using Dust. User research and interviewing members/customers/stakeholders is also one of the important channels of information acquisition. Sometimes, it is better to go slow at the beginning in order to go even faster. Spend the time reading the information, asking yourself questions that make sure you understand it well:
Those questions will help you sift through the noise, and learn to differentiate between what's crucial and what's not. Not all information is valuable. Mental modelsExpanding Your Mental ModelsMental models shape how we perceive the world. Expanding them can improve decision-making quality. Not every model applies to all situations. Part of building a latticework of mental models is about educating yourself regarding which situations are best addressed by which models, and to apply them as fast as possible. My way to increase my number of mental models:
Applying First PrinciplesAt the end of the day, the most important mental model is to apply First Principles thinking. First principles thinking involves breaking down complex problems into their fundamental truths and then rebuilding a solution from the ground up. It prevents us from making decisions based on assumptions or established beliefs. Elon Musk used first principles thinking in the design and manufacturing of SpaceX rockets, breaking down the cost of components instead of accepting the industry's standard prices, leading to significantly reduced costs. ConclusionIn summary, high-quality, fast decision-making requires proactively acquiring contextual information, filtering out noise, expanding mental models through diverse experiences and perspectives, and applying first principles thinking to break down problems. With practice, these skills allow rapid yet thoughtful decisions, creating a momentum where speed and quality reinforce each other. Some articles I have read this week👉 The 3-Person Unicorn Startup (NfX)
👉 Modern Health (Contrary Research)
👉 Confidence and Vitality (Farnam Street)
👉 Teladoc's Q2 beats Wall Street expectations
👉 A Tweet from Nikita Bier (Twitter)
👉 Clear Thinking (Farnam Street)
It’s already over! Please share JC’s Newsletter with your friends, and subscribe 👇 Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week! |
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