Making Decisions

The New York times has a great article about Making Big Decisions. Here's a nice summary:

Don't limit yourself to a single option. Simply by expanding your options you are 66% more likely to view the outcome as a success. The best way to expand your options is to diversify the group of people who have input.

Build stories for your multiple options: One where things go right, one where things go wrong and one where things go weird. Normally we build a single narrative, but by making multiple narratives we have a chance to figure out where things might go wrong.

Last, create a value model. List the values that are important and give them a score from 0 to 1. Then go through your three scenarios and grade them against your values in 1 to 100. Multiply the values to the scenarios and add up, the highest score is the one that fits you best.