You make uncountably many decisions in the pursuit of day-to-day life and in pursuit of projects (both personal and interpersonal). Every big decision is made up of a never ending hierarchy of littler decisions that look at parts of it. If you’re not careful, big decisions will be made unintentionally through the net effects of the thousands (or more) of tiny decisions in aggregate. It’s impossible to holistically consider strategy in all decisions. Similarly, it’s difficult to determine the effectivity of a path chosen through these uncountably many decisions on the performance of the system as a whole. Both of those issues are resolved through the creation of good, unambiguous big choices that guide (or constrain) the many little choices made along the way. This is the Pareto Principle in action. It gives you a smaller set of levers and knobs to consider when you’re evaluating system (e.g. business) performance.
A really good practice is to make the decision that informs all subsequent decisions, be that through the use of some sort of a Manifesto, Mission Statement, Enterprise Architecture, and/or simply a couple of clearly-stated Guiding Principles. You need to be able to articulate to your future self (and/or to others) something that is easy to (1) access, (2) interpret, and (3) apply.
Effectiveness
If “the decision that drives the decisions” is hidden, too difficult to understand (too abstract or too vague), or not actionable, it won’t influence subsequent decisions and may as well not exist.
Access
The decisions made need to be “a click away” pretty much all times. If you’re in an office setting, post your guiding principles on the wall. If you’re building a digital system, keep a link in the top-level menu. These should be highly discoverable.
It’s also possible (and perhaps preferable) to bake-in decisions into Intermediate Packets like templates and Checklists. When possible, build the Pit of Success.
Interpret
The decisions made need to be stated plainly and clearly. They should Avoid Jargon and be written without need for context or specialized knowledge. Write them like you were Feynman explaining them to a child.
Limit the number1. Each one is diluted by all the others. Probably no more than 5.
Apply
The decisions needs to be generic enough to apply to significant portions of the system of interest2, but specific enough to adequately constrain the set of choices available to the agent making them to those choices that align with it. This is a balancing act.
Simple Examples
- In Notion - Everything is block.
- In Obsidian - Everything stores in Markdown and other durable, open formats in a folder on the users computer
- For Southwest Airlines - We don’t have ‘hubs’, we fly point-to-point, for as cheap as possible
- For my notes & blog - I will write for myself and not in pursuit of money/notoriety
Source
- Stringing together related notes
Related
Footnotes
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This doesn’t really apply when you’re making templates that you can co-locate with the work to be done. Go nuts there. Limiting the number of decisions only aids in the interpretation of those types of decisions you need to read and internalize. ↩
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Significant portions here could be in terms of volume (i.e. lots of potential for use) or importance (i.e. things that aren’t hit on frequently, but are vital to align). ↩