Over the last 10 years, I’ve made decisions that have had big impact on my career and life. While I don’t ponder much on “what if?”, I have given some thought around how I make these decisions, or simply, “what is my decision making framework?”
I recently came across this video where Jeff Bezos talks about his decision making framework – his optimization function is “minimization of regret”. Watch the video below:
This led to me looking up online on what are some of the common decision functions, to see if I am of a particular type, at least with respect to career, business, etc. There are the usual suspects in there – maximizing upside, minimizing downside, maximizing potential upside (probabilities factored in), and so on. Good place to start: wiki.
I couldn’t slot myself in one of these directly. I am a risk averse person (yes, I don’t think entrepreneurship is “risky” for me – because I can always get a job again if I need to, and because of the strings).
My decision making framework is something like this – “What’s the worst that can happen from here? If I am OK with the worst outcome, I’ll go ahead for whatever has better upside.”
I mostly don’t look at the probability of the outcomes at making these decisions – if the chance for success is low, and chance for failure is high, that’s fine as long as the failure is one I can handle. However, I don’t consider the very very low probability (in my mind) outcomes (for the downside or upside).
So what’s your decision making framework like?
[cross posted from my personal blog]