WIP

Decision making is an art; frameworks provide some structure.

Even without trying, you’re using some mental model to make your decisions. Should you make dinner tonight, or order in? Based on your goals (lose weight, try something new, support local, save money), your habits (subconcious short cuts that try to make a quick decision for you), and your environment (your peers preference, availability of food at home vs good restraurants nearby, etc.) you’ll arrive at your decision. If you’re asked, “how did you decide?”, you might be able to list off 1 or 2 key contributing factors, but you’re unlikely to articulate the full nuance of your mental model as it works in real time.

If you can communicate a framework, it becomes much easier to make the “right decision”, whatever that may be to you (or your team). At their core, a framework is just an agreed upon way of thinking about problems. So you’re already using them everyday. The question isn’t if you use frameworks (AKA mental models), it’s do you understand them?

If you find yourself struggling to make a decision, or your team isn’t on the same page, take a step back from the solutions, and discuss frameworks.

• What do you value? What does success look like?
• What are the objectives? Is there a priority?
• What is being done for similar problems elsewhere? Should you change their framework?
• How do you vet information, and share knowledge?
• How do you handle indecision?

For example, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a poweful framework for quickly communicating your teams framework. The what (objectives) and how (measuring progress) are clear. Consider stacking mental models, and creating new ones. To test your work, multiple parties should arrive at the same solution, if they’re using the same mental model(s). If not, the model isn’t clear enough, and needs refinement.

When there isn’t enough time for this excercise, you’ll be making decisions based on habit. That is, your subconcious. Your biases will come into play, and your solutions might suffer.

By using frameworks, you leave a trail for future you to revist, and improve. So next time your faced with a problem, ask yourself, “what framework am I using?” You might just improve the art of decision making.