decision-making - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "decision-making"

Total concepts: 152

Concepts

10-10-10 Rule - A decision-making framework that evaluates choices by considering how you will feel about them in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
ACE Framework - Action, Context, Experience - a framework for structuring decisions and learning.
Action Bias - The tendency to favor action over inaction, even when doing nothing would produce better outcomes.
Affect Heuristic - Making judgments based on current emotions rather than objective analysis.
Anchoring Bias - Over-relying on the first piece of information encountered.
Anchoring - The cognitive bias where people rely heavily on the first piece of information they encounter.
Anti-Goals - Explicitly defining what you want to avoid - paths, risks, results, and experiences you're not willing to accept.
Asymmetric Information - When one party in a transaction has more or better information than the other, affecting decision quality and market function.
Asymmetric Upside - Decisions where potential gains significantly exceed potential losses, creating favorable risk-reward profiles.
Attention as Currency - Viewing attention as a limited resource that can be spent, invested, or wasted.
Authority Bias - The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure.
Availability Cascade - A self-reinforcing cycle where a belief gains credibility simply because it is repeated and widely discussed.
Availability Heuristic - Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind.
Bandwagon Effect - The tendency to adopt behaviors or beliefs because many others do.
Base Rate Neglect - The tendency to ignore general statistical information in favor of specific case details when making judgments.
Base Rate - The underlying probability of an event before considering specific evidence or conditions.
Bayes' Theorem - A mathematical framework for updating beliefs based on new evidence.
Bias Blind Spot - The cognitive bias of recognizing biases in others while failing to see them in oneself.
Bikeshedding - The tendency to spend disproportionate time on trivial matters while leaving important issues unattended.
Bounded Rationality - The idea that decision-making is limited by cognitive constraints, available information, and time rather than being perfectly rational.
Bright Lines - Clear, absolute rules that eliminate decision-making and reduce temptation.
Buridan's Ass - A philosophical paradox illustrating decision paralysis when faced with two equally attractive choices.
Career Alignment - The compatibility between your work and your values, principles, goals, and priorities.
Chesterton's Fence - Don't remove something until you understand why it was put there in the first place.
Choice Architecture - The design of how choices are presented, which profoundly influences the decisions people make.
Choice Overload - When too many options leads to difficulty deciding and reduced satisfaction.
Choose Your Hard - A systems design principle about using friction strategically to make undesirable behaviors difficult and desirable behaviors easy.
Cingulate Cortex - A brain region involved in emotion, decision-making, and cognitive control.
Circle of Competence - Know and stay within the boundaries of what you truly understand.
Clustering Illusion - Seeing patterns in random data, such as 'hot streaks' in random sequences.
Cobra Effect - When a solution to a problem makes the problem worse through perverse incentives.
Commitment and Consistency - The psychological drive to align our actions and beliefs with our prior commitments and self-image.
Counterfactual Thinking - Imagining alternative scenarios and 'what might have been' to learn from past decisions and improve future ones.
DACI Framework - Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed - a decision-making accountability framework.
Decision Hygiene - Systematic practices for reducing noise and bias in judgment without targeting specific errors.
Decision Journal - A systematic practice of recording decisions and their context to improve judgment over time.
Decision Minimalism - Reducing daily decisions to preserve mental energy for what matters most.
Decision Tree - A visual tool that maps out decisions, their possible outcomes, and the probabilities or consequences of each path.
Decisional Balance - A psychological technique for systematically weighing the pros and cons of making a change.
Decoy Effect - Adding an inferior option makes another option more attractive by comparison.
Default Effect - The power of pre-set options - people disproportionately stick with defaults.
Deliberate Thinking - Conscious, effortful thinking applied intentionally to complex problems.
Devil's Advocate - A designated role for challenging assumptions and arguments to improve group thinking.
Diminishing Returns - The principle that benefits decrease after reaching an optimal point of investment.
Dunbar's Number - The cognitive limit (~150) to the number of stable social relationships one can maintain.
Effort Justification - A cognitive bias where people value outcomes more when they required significant effort to achieve.
Effort vs Impact - A prioritization matrix that evaluates tasks based on their effort requirements and potential impact.
Eisenhower Matrix - A prioritization framework using urgency and importance to categorize tasks.
Endowment Effect - Overvaluing things simply because we own them.
Environment Staging - Preparing your environment in advance to reduce future decisions, increase productivity, and maintain calm under pressure.
Epoché - A Greek philosophical concept meaning the suspension of judgment, creating a fixed reference point in time for evaluation.
Ergodicity - Whether time averages equal ensemble averages - a crucial distinction for risk and decision-making.
Expected Value - A probability-weighted average of all possible outcomes used to make rational decisions under uncertainty.
Fast and Frugal Heuristics - Simple decision rules that use minimal information yet often outperform complex analysis in uncertain environments.
Fighting Recency Bias - Strategies to counteract the tendency to overweight recent information in decisions.
The Four-Way Test - A non-partisan ethical framework developed by Rotary International to guide decision-making in business and personal life.
Framing Effect - How the presentation of information affects decision-making.
Fundamental Attribution Error - Overemphasizing personality and underemphasizing situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
Future Discounting - Valuing future outcomes less than equivalent present outcomes, often to an irrational degree.
Gambler's Fallacy - The mistaken belief that past random events affect future probabilities.
Game Theory - The mathematical study of strategic decision-making between rational agents.
Good Pain vs Bad Pain - Distinguishing between effort that leads to growth (good pain) and damage that harms you (bad pain).
Goodhart's Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Gut Feeling - Intuitive knowledge that emerges from experience without conscious reasoning.
Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hot-Cold Empathy Gap - The difficulty of predicting how we'll feel or act when in a different emotional state.
Hot-Hand Fallacy - Believing that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success.
Hot Paths - The critical decision points or actions that have outsized impact on outcomes.
Hyperbolic Discounting - Preferring smaller immediate rewards over larger future rewards.
IKEA Effect - Placing disproportionately high value on things we partially created ourselves.
Illusion of Control - Believing we can control or influence outcomes that we actually cannot.
In-Group Bias - Favoring members of one's own group over outsiders.
Incentives - People respond to rewards and punishments; understanding incentive structures explains much of human behavior.
Indecision Is a Decision - Recognizing that not deciding is itself a choice with real consequences.
Information Asymmetry - A situation where one party has more or better information than another, creating imbalanced dynamics.
Information Triage - Rapidly sorting incoming information by urgency and importance to allocate attention effectively.
Inversion Thinking - A mental model that approaches problems backward by thinking about what could cause failure.
Lindy Effect - The longer something has existed, the longer it's likely to continue existing.
Living on Default - The tendency to take the path of least resistance rather than actively choosing what aligns with your potential.
Loss Aversion - The pain of losing is psychologically stronger than the pleasure of gaining.
Map is Not the Territory - Models and representations of reality are not reality itself.
Margin of Safety - Building buffers to protect against uncertainty and errors.
Mental Accounting - The tendency to treat money differently based on subjective categories.
Mental Contrasting - A goal-pursuit strategy that alternates between envisioning desired outcomes and confronting obstacles that stand in the way.
Mental Models - Frameworks for understanding how things work in the world.
Mere Exposure Effect - The tendency to develop preferences for things simply because we are familiar with them.
Negativity Bias - The tendency to give more weight to negative experiences than positive ones of equal intensity.
Network Effects - A product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it.
Omission Bias - Judging harmful actions as worse than equally harmful inactions.
OODA Loop - A decision-making framework consisting of four phases: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
Optimism Bias - The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate negative ones.
Optimize for Happiness - Prioritizing choices that increase your happiness over career advancement or status.
Optionality - The strategic practice of keeping options open to benefit from uncertainty and unexpected opportunities.
Outcome Bias - Judging decisions by their outcomes rather than the quality of the decision-making process.
Paradox of Choice - Having too many options leads to anxiety and decision paralysis.
Pareto Principle - 80% of effects come from 20% of causes - focus on high-impact activities.
Past Performance Fallacy - The principle that historical results and past successes do not guarantee or reliably predict future outcomes.
Peak-End Rule - We judge experiences based on their most intense moment and how they end, not their average.
Peter Principle - People in hierarchies tend to rise to their level of incompetence.
Phronesis - Aristotle's concept of practical wisdom - knowing what to do in specific situations.
Positive Routines - Beneficial habitual practices that automate parts of daily life, reducing decision fatigue and supporting overall well-being.
Pre-Commitment - Making decisions in advance to avoid using willpower in the moment.
Pre-Mortem Analysis - A risk assessment technique that imagines a project has failed before it begins to identify potential causes of failure.
Prefrontal Cortex - The brain region responsible for executive functions like planning, decision-making, and impulse control.
Present Bias - The tendency to disproportionately prefer immediate rewards over larger future rewards.
Probabilistic Thinking - Thinking in terms of likelihoods rather than certainties to make better decisions.
Problem Solving Cycle - A structured iterative approach to systematically identify, analyze, solve, and learn from problems.
Problem Worth Solving - The strategic skill of identifying which problems deserve your attention and which ones are best left ignored.
Processing by Elimination - Prioritizing what to remove rather than what to keep.
Prospect Theory - A behavioral economics framework showing that people value gains and losses asymmetrically, with losses hurting more than equivalent gains please.
Recency Bias - The tendency to overweight recent information in decision-making.
Reciprocity Bias - The cognitive tendency to feel obligated to return favors, even when disproportionate.
Recognition-Primed Decision - A model of how experienced professionals make rapid decisions by matching situations to patterns from their experience.
Regression to the Mean - Extreme outcomes tend to be followed by more moderate ones.
Regret Minimization Framework - A decision-making approach that evaluates choices by imagining yourself at age 80 and asking which option would minimize lifetime regret.
Representativeness Heuristic - Judging probability by similarity to prototypes rather than by actual statistical likelihood.
Return on Investment (ROI) - A measure of the gain or loss generated relative to the amount invested.
Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions - A framework for categorizing decisions as one-way doors (Type 1) or two-way doors (Type 2).
Rosy Retrospection - Remembering past events more positively than they actually were.
Rumsfeld's Rule - You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want—a principle about working with current resources rather than waiting for ideal conditions.
Running Costs Influence - How ongoing operational costs affect decision-making, often more than initial investment costs.
Satisficing - A decision-making strategy of accepting a 'good enough' option rather than seeking the optimal solution.
Second-Order Effects - The indirect consequences that result from the immediate outcomes of our decisions and actions.
Second-Order Thinking - Considering the consequences of consequences before making decisions.
Self-Serving Bias - Attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
Signal Detection Theory - A framework for understanding how we distinguish meaningful information (signal) from noise.
Single vs Multiple Knowledge Bases - The tradeoffs between consolidating all knowledge in one system versus separating by context.
Six Thinking Hats - A parallel thinking method using different colored hats to represent thinking modes.
Skin in the Game - Having personal stake in outcomes leads to better decision-making and ensures accountability.
Spotlight Effect - Overestimating how much others notice our appearance or behavior.
Status Quo Bias - Preference for the current state of affairs over change.
Streisand Effect - Attempting to hide or suppress information often increases its spread.
Strong Opinions Loosely Held - Committing to a viewpoint while remaining open to changing it when presented with new evidence.
Sunk Cost Effect - The tendency to continue an endeavor because of past investment, regardless of future value.
Sunk Cost Fallacy - Continuing investments due to past costs that cannot be recovered.
Scientific Wild-Ass Guess (SWAG) - An educated estimate based on experience and intuition rather than rigorous analysis.
Switching Costs - The costs incurred when changing from one product, service, or state to another.
SySTEM Model - A decision-making framework: Sensing, Thinking, Experimenting, and Modeling together.
Temporal Discounting - The behavioral economics concept of reduced valuation of rewards as they are delayed in time.
Time Perspective - An individual's habitual orientation toward past, present, or future that shapes behavior.
Tragedy of the Commons - Individual rational self-interest can lead to collective ruin of shared resources.
Two-System Thinking - The mind operates through fast, intuitive System 1 and slow, deliberate System 2, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Type I and Type II Errors - False positives (detecting an effect that isn't there) and false negatives (missing an effect that exists).
Ulysses Contract - A pre-commitment device where you bind your future self to a decision made in a moment of clarity.
Unknown Unknowns - The category of things we don't know we don't know, representing the most challenging type of uncertainty in decision-making.
Value Alignment - Matching behavior, decisions, and life design to personal core values.
Values and Beliefs - Values determine why we think and act, while beliefs dictate how we think and act.
Values Clarification - The process of identifying, examining, and prioritizing your personal values.
Via Negativa - Improvement through subtraction and elimination rather than addition - what you don't do matters as much as what you do.
Weighted Decision Matrix - A quantitative tool for evaluating options by scoring them against weighted criteria.
Wisdom of Crowds - Under the right conditions, collective judgments of groups are often more accurate than individual expert opinions.
Zero-Risk Bias - Preferring to eliminate a small risk entirely over a greater reduction of a larger risk.

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