Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

Buckminster Fuller proposed the development of a kind of mirror-image version of the Pentagon war games: a “world peace game”

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously adheres to a “70 percent rule” in making decisions that involve uncertainty: instead of waiting for total confidence in a choice—a confidence that may never arrive, given the nature of bounded rationality—Bezos pulls the trigger on decisions once he has reduced his uncertainty level to 30 percent.

Challenging assumptions, seeking out contradictory evidence, ranking certainty levels—all these strategies serve the divergent stage of the decision process well, helping to expand the map, propose new explanations, and introduce new variables.

If your organization seems to have settled into the comfortable assumption that Path A is the only route available to them, then imagine a world where Path A is roadblocked.

In the simplest terms, deliberative decisions involve three steps, designed specifically to overcome the unique challenges of a hard choice: we build an accurate, full-spectrum map of all the variables, and the potential paths available to us; we make predictions about where all those different paths might lead us, given the variables at play; we r

Part of the art of mapping a complex decision is creating a full-spectrum portrait of all the variables that might influence your choice. But part of that mapping process is also coming up with new choices.

students would learn a series of techniques that they could then apply to their own lives and careers: how to build a full-spectrum map of a complex decision; how to design a scenario plan and a premortem; how to build a values model and Bad Events Table.

“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”

be more widely utilized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. You can think of a red team as a kind of hybrid of war games and scenario plans: You sketch out a few decision paths with imagined outcomes and invite some of your colleagues to put themselves in the shoes of your enemies or your competitors in the market and dream up imagined responses.

scenario-based exploration of a potential move to the suburbs would take the elements that are most uncertain, and imagine different outcomes for each of them.