Your Personal Decision System

🔄 Quick Recall: Throughout this course, you’ve learned decision frameworks, bias detection, risk analysis, stakeholder management, and speed calibration. Now let’s build your personal system.

Your Decision Toolkit

Here’s the complete system, organized by when you use each tool:

Step 1: Classify (30 seconds)

Every decision starts here:

• Reversible + close options? → Decide in 5 minutes. Any option works.
• Reversible + clear tradeoffs? → Spend 30 minutes. Use pros-cons-mitigations.
• Irreversible + moderate stakes? → Spend 1-2 hours. Use weighted matrix + bias check.
• Irreversible + high stakes? → Spend days/weeks. Full process (framework + bias audit + risk analysis + pre-mortem + documentation).

Step 2: Choose Your Framework (1 minute)

Step 3: Check Biases (5 minutes)

Run the quick bias audit on any non-trivial decision:

Quick bias check for my decision about [topic]:

I'm leaning toward: [your preference]
Because: [your top 2-3 reasons]

In 5 bullet points, tell me:
1. What bias might be driving this leaning?
2. What am I probably not considering?
3. What would someone who disagrees with me say?
4. Am I avoiding an option because it's uncomfortable rather than wrong?
5. Would I give the same advice to a friend in this situation?

Step 4: Decide and Document

For important decisions, capture your reasoning:

Decision record:

Decision: [what I chose]
Date: [today]
Alternatives considered: [what else I evaluated]
Key reasoning: [top 3 reasons for this choice]
What could make this wrong: [trigger conditions for reconsidering]
Review date: [when I'll evaluate the outcome]

✅ Quick Check: Why include “what could make this wrong” in every decision record?

Because it turns conviction into conditional conviction. Instead of “I chose A and I’m committed no matter what,” you have “I chose A, and I’ll reconsider if X or Y happens.” This prevents both stubbornness (ignoring evidence that your decision was wrong) and anxiety (constantly second-guessing without clear triggers). You’re committed until the evidence says otherwise — and you’ve defined what that evidence looks like in advance.

Capstone Exercise: Your Decision Audit

Part 1 — Review Your Course Decision

Take the decision you’ve been working with throughout this course:

1. What framework did you apply? What did it reveal?
2. What biases did you identify? How did you address them?
3. What risks did your scenario planning surface?
4. What did the speed calibration tell you about how much analysis it deserved?
5. Based on everything you’ve learned, what’s your final decision and why?

Part 2 — Retrospective on a Past Decision

Choose a significant decision you made in the last 1-2 years:

Help me do a decision retrospective:

The decision I made: [what you chose]
When: [date]
What happened: [the outcome]

Analyze:
1. Was this a good decision with a bad outcome, or a bad decision that happened to work?
2. What biases were likely at play that I didn't see at the time?
3. What information did I have that I underweighted?
4. What would I do differently with the frameworks from this course?
5. What pattern does this reveal about my decision-making?

Part 3 — Build Your Recurring Decision Templates

Identify 2-3 decisions you make regularly and create quick-reference templates:

Create a decision template for: [recurring decision type — e.g., "should I accept this meeting," "should I take on this client," "should I invest in this"]

Auto-pass criteria (if ALL true, say yes without analysis):
1. [criterion]
2. [criterion]
3. [criterion]

Auto-reject criteria (if ANY true, say no without analysis):
1. [criterion]
2. [criterion]

If neither auto-pass nor auto-reject, evaluate:
1. [quick criterion 1]
2. [quick criterion 2]
3. [quick criterion 3]

Decision threshold: If 2 of 3 evaluation criteria are positive, proceed.

Course Review

What you’ve learned across eight lessons:

1. Why decisions fail — Predictable biases, not lack of intelligence
2. Decision frameworks — Weighted matrix, PCM, decision trees, 10-10-10
3. Bias detection — Devil’s Advocate, pre-mortem, AI bias audits
4. Risk analysis — Scenarios, expected value, information sufficiency
5. High-stakes process — Full analysis with documentation and triggers
6. Group decisions — Preventing groupthink, stakeholder alignment
7. Speed calibration — Two-way doors, decision fatigue, analysis paralysis
8. Personal system — Classify → framework → bias check → decide → document

Key Takeaways

• Start every decision by classifying it: reversible or irreversible, high-stakes or low-stakes — this determines the level of effort
• A simple system used consistently beats an elaborate system abandoned after two weeks — start with 3-4 frameworks and the quick bias check
• Review past decisions quarterly to identify your personal patterns — which biases affect you most, where your judgment over- or under-estimates
• Document important decisions with reasoning and trigger conditions — so you can learn from outcomes and know when to reconsider
• Create templates for recurring decisions to reduce them from 30-minute deliberations to 2-minute checklists
• The goal isn’t perfect decisions — it’s consistently good decisions made with appropriate effort for the stakes involved

Congratulations! You now have a complete decision-making system — frameworks for structure, bias checks for honesty, risk analysis for uncertainty, and speed calibration for efficiency. Use it on your next big decision. The more you practice, the more natural the process becomes.