Multidimensional Decision-Making I

What is this article about?

This article series approaches decision-making in a particular way.

First, I wanted to develop an approach of decision making importance, involvements, by proposing important pillars of decision making. It also shows an example of a way to decompose decisions in several dimensions, in order to classify them.

But as a logical-minded engineer, I also explain how we can decompose the complex decision-making challenge into a logical problem, and demonstrate a simplified approach to help sorting out complex decisions. This approach has been leading to the creation of the Multidimensional Decisioner tool.

This article is divided in 2 chapters and 3 parts:

Chapter I - Understanding the value of decisions (You are here)
Chapter II - A logical approach for simplifying decisions
1. Set-up of a decision framework
2. Calculate and interpret choices’ outcome

Chapter 1: Decisions value

1 - Understand our decision-driven reality

As you know, life is a lot about choices, they are part of our everyday life. Decisions are of many types, have many aspects and are omnipresent in our lives. We constantly go through them, one decision after the other, and it is really important to be aware of how decisions drive our lives, the world, but most importantly ourselves. Because it’s our ability to take decisions that makes us who we are.

"We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us." — Ken Levine

Our decisions influence the world around us, and decisions from others influence our lives, it constantly happens because every single decision taken somewhere by someone leads to consequences. The world is constantly being built on top of cascaded decisions and their consequences.

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.” — Robert G. Ingersoll

You can think of the Butterfly Effect from the Chaos Theory, applied to our everyday decisions. It would basically illustrates that even the smallest choices we make, when cascading in time with other decisions and events, can provide a completely different path of consequences in the future, than if we had taken different decisions. This means that even the smallest decisions can become impactful, even if in most of the cases it's impossible to predict completely the consequences.

"We are free to choose our paths, but we can't choose the consequences that come with them." — Sean Covey

2 - Be a (good) decider

The first step in learning to be a good decider, is learning to be a decider.

The problem about not making a decision in time when you have to, or not being convinced about it, is that you would feel like miserably falling into a default path. Perhaps it would not be that bad, perhaps it would even appear in the end it was the best path. But this is wasting the power the choice is giving you, and relying on external and random influences instead.

In other words, not being able to chose is being spectator of your own life instead of being an active actor, a decider. The best sensation, and the position you should have when facing an important decision, is being confident about the right choice to make and going for it. Being a decider drastically improve the control you have over yourself and your future.

"When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it." — Lois McMaster Bujold

A choice is a gift - A decision is a power.

You should probably feel lucky when given the chance to chose, because you could have no choice at all. And deciding is a power, a power of influence on your life and on the world.

In front of hard decisions, deciding is a demonstration of strength. When facing a hard decision, so hard that we would prefer not having to chose, we tend to forgot that this choice is a gift, because the harder the choice is because of its impact, the greater is the power it gives us, and the more responsibility it brings us.

“Where there is great power, there is great responsibility.” — Wiston Churchill

3 - Perfect your (challenging) decision making

We mentioned several things: that decisions are everywhere, that being able to decide is important, that even smallest decisions can have great impact. But we're only humans, we can't just take the time and effort to think every single decision thoroughly. We actually have built-in subconscious mechanisms like the cognitives biases helping us to tackle a lot of our decisions behind the curtains. So let's put Chaos Theory aside, and focus on what we can consciously and realistically work on: complex decisions.

Let's start to introduce dimensionality in the concept on decision-making itself:

Impactful choices are not necessarily the hardest ones, and the hardest choices are not necessarily the most impactful ones. Let's assume these 2 parameters are dimensions that participate to a decision's complexity: Difficulty and Impact.

If we play with each dimension's complexity:

We can build a matrix representing different types of decisions of different complexities:

Let's focus on the bigger and harder decisions. They are the more complex ones, the ones that challenge us. There are a couple of things can make them heavy, and really complex to make: When influencing other people lives, involving long-term implications, creating irreversible consequences (One-way door decisions), when being psychologically biased, and much more.

But the outcome of this article on this, is that the bigger a choice is, the greater is the power that the decision grants you. This is why facing a complex decision is the biggest challenge but also the biggest opportunity to embrace its power and make an effective decision.

If we think about working on these dimensions, we realize we can hardly influence the impact of a decision. On the other hand, we can work on ourselves to improve our position in front of them, and lower the difficulty to sort them out. Clarifying and simplifying this type of choices, converting Challenging decisions into Obvious decisions, is key to improve your position in front of them, and go from "I don't know" to "I know".

Continue reading

This kind of decision is a common life challenge, and there are a lot of resources you can find about this. But as an engineer I like translating life challenges into logical problems, and build simple processes, algorithms or tools to help overcoming them. If you're interested in such an approach on simplifying complex decisions, feel free to jump on the second chapter of this article:

Multidimensional Decision Making II - A logical approach for simplifying decisions