The first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models – because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models …
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.
Charlie Munger79
We started working on The Decision Maker’s Playbook in 2014. It was in that year that Google acquired DeepMind, a leading Artificial Intelligence company. Two years later, algorithms dethroned the incumbent Go champion, and social-media technology platforms arguably played a pivotal role in the outcome of the US presidential election.
In recent decades, the environments in which we work and live have changed tremendously. A hundred years ago, even if you lived in affluent societies, your options were limited. You could only be hired by a handful employers, limited further by the number of companies and the distance required to commute to work. Labour-saving technologies were fairly basic. You almost certainly married someone who grew up in the same town or region as yourself.80
By the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, the opposite is true. We have too many options, and our major decision problems are centered on how to make the best choices given the range of possibilities. Enter any department store and you are overwhelmed by the sheer variety of different brands. Take Amazon, which stocks more than 500 million different products. A well-educated and mobile young professional can work in large international companies or organisations and start a family with someone who grew up 12,000 miles away from her. In this environment, making sense of these challenges requires a set of tools to help us reduce, focus and decide which among the countless options are the most useful.
Today, algorithms and digital systems have come to the rescue and to help us make choices. They do this in a number of ways, but they primarily use our past behaviour and the revealed preferences of people similar to us to help filter our options. Take a review platform such as TripAdvisor. It’s nothing new that we follow the advice of our friends and visit the restaurant that most of them recommend. But the internet has made it orders of magnitudes easier to share and aggregate data such as reviews or recommendations. So even though we theoretically have many options, we end up booking the restaurant on top of the list.
Soon the world will be dominated by algorithms which predict fairly accurately what we want, prefer and do next. The more data these algorithms gather, the better their predictions will become. It’s not science fiction to suggest that, in the near future, algorithms will know which of our mental (and emotional) buttons to press in order to make us believe, want or do things. In itself, this is not necessarily bad. After all, we use these algorithms voluntarily because they offer us some kind of benefit. They take some load off our shoulders to sift through options and present us with the most suitable ones –or they present the pieces of information that we are most likely to latch on to. And they don’t have to do that perfectly. It’s enough for them to simply be better than what we can come up with ourselves. Google Maps’ routing feature occasionally leads us to blocked streets and we need to take a detour. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, it leads us the along the most time-efficient paths, saving us hours, days or even weeks of lifetime.
Remember the incentive systems from earlier in this book? It’s not hard to see that incentives may not be fully aligned. From the perspective of their owners, algorithms are tools to accomplish a goal, such as selling services or keeping us on a website so we can be exposed to ads. In solving these goals, such as profit maximisation, algorithms serve us suggestions, such as nuggets of news that are designed to stir outrage and polarisation. They may not be in line with the goals we set for ourselves if we are open-minded and weigh evidence of either side to form a balanced opinion. Our dependency on algorithms can make us subject to manipulation.
The more we use digital systems, the more data is collected. The more data collected, the better algorithmic models can be trained, and the more powerful the algorithms get. The more powerful these algorithms become, the more we delegate our decision-making authority to them. And this is where the problem lies. In doing so, we give up part of our autonomy, and we become dependent on algorithms. We become vulnerable against big tech, which is – thanks to large-scale effects of data – increasing the concentration of information and making it harder for us to opt out or switch. Just as Google Maps is better than a taxi driver at selecting the fastest route, we surrender to algorithms for much more important decisions: what we read, who we date, or who we vote for.
We are highlighting the potentially dangerous aspects of technology here, and the problems that are related to it: technological dependence, safety, biases, intransparency or ‘black boxes’. We don’t talk about the tremendous welfare gain that algorithms such as search engines have generated in the fields of logistics or healthcare. These achievements are clearly laudable, but they don’t take away from the risks.
Mental tactics as presented in this book serve not only as effective tools, but also as means to reflect on our preconceptions, beliefs and biases. Taking this meta view can be an antidote, a shield against being hacked by algorithms.81 Even when we are still in the last instance of decision making (in autonomous systems, this is called ‘human in the loop’), we surrender our authority de facto to machines. While we still have the possibility to override the suggestions made by algorithms, we typically don’t do it.
Thinking and decision making have got some serious competition: machine algorithms. Your individual set of mental tactics serve as a check, back-up and corrective so that you can maintain your independence and critical thinking.
Mental tactics, as you by now are aware, are models that aim to explain parts of reality, and provide a decision framework that helps you make better choices and drive the outcomes you intend. They are maps that aim to describe the territory (reality).82 A seafarer uses a map to locate his current position using various navigational instruments, dead reckoning (a navigational method calculating the current position based on known previous locations) and a triangulation of landmarks (mountain tops, harbours, buildings on land). He uses a map as a simplified copy of reality to simulate his position, and continuously compares the map against the observed reality.
Maps are necessarily reductionist. They de-emphasise data (observations or evidence) that isn’t relevant for the specific decision situation (many nautical maps don’t show elevations), and instead direct our focus and attention towards data that is relevant such as water depth. This is necessary, as our attention and time is scarce. Both creating and retrieving (reading/processing) complex maps is time-consuming and expensive.
All of us have already cultivated a number of existing mental tactics that we use on a daily basis. They might be simple or trivial. For example, you might put items that you frequently need, such as a pen, in the front of a drawer, and archive those that you don’t need as frequently in the back (such as tax invoices). Other mental tactics might be more complex, and uncertain, such as models about human behaviour or self-identity. You might hold the belief that humans are generally self-interested and have selfish reasons for everything they do, even seemingly selfless deeds. If that’s your map of the territory, you tend to think in terms of other’s individual motives, their benefits, gains and losses.
It’s important to be aware about your pre-existing maps and reflect on them frequently and consciously. Do they still hold up against the actual territory? By using them, are you able to make accurate forecasts about what’s going to happen? In our seafarer’s example, is the actual island that you discover recorded in the nautical maps? If it isn’t, should you lose confidence in the map, discard it and look for a different one that fits reality better? Or should you adjust the map? The same holds true for mental tactics. Test them frequently, and be honest with yourself. When is it time to adjust the mental tactic? When should you discard it and look for a new, more effective one?
We have tried to provide you with our ‘best of’ selection of mental tactics. We sincerely hope they provide valuable shortcuts for your work and life. If you’ve read The Decision Maker’s Playbook chapter by chapter, you’ll now have a strong toolkit that allows you to collect evidence, connect the dots, craft the solution and complete the mission more thoughtfully and effectively. We hope that you continue to adapt and refine these tactics to improve your decision making under changing circumstances.
Here’s a short recap of the key insights in each chapter.
As we conclude this book, we’re incredibly excited for you. We hope you had at least a few of the ‘aha’ moments we’ve enjoyed while collecting and refining these mental tactics over the years. Maybe you’ve learned about a mental tactic that you have witnessed in your work or life but didn’t know how ubiquitous it was. Or, during reading, you realised how these models apply to problems you have experienced in the past.
The next step is to use these mental tactics in your future work and life. We write this as an invitation to start applying these concepts from today. To get you started, we want to offer the following suggestions:
This is only the beginning of the journey. Connecting and building mental tactics is a lifelong endeavour – worthwhile but demanding. We hope that you will start to build your own collection of ideas, concepts, frameworks and tools that help you make sense of this VUCA world. In doing that, aim for general fluency in selecting, reflecting and discarding mental tactics, not comprehensiveness. And keep on experimenting.
As we said at the beginning, this book can be read from start to finish, or as a reference guide, or a field manual, or an introductory text to concepts that we think are vitally important. It can also be re-read in any of these ways. We hope that you’ll pick it up again and again – before a big meeting, at an inflection point in your life or when something happens that tickles your brain with a reminder of one or more of these mental tactics.
The most meaningful part of our work is hearing from people who’ve put mental tactics into practice – how they use options to think about future decisions, their approach to calibrating their beliefs and their meta sense in thinking about problems. You are a part of that community now – the growing number of people who are fluent with these mental tactics and are passionate about applying them in work and life. Welcome to the club – we are delighted that you are here.
Please visit us online at MentalTactics.com and follow us on Twitter (@MentalTactics). We can’t wait to hear where you take these ideas. Tell us:
As you go out into the world, we make this invitation and request: think clearly, analyse rigorously, decide carefully, act boldly.