A skeptical reading of decision skills questions: honest answers and three a page cannot give

People ask a small number of questions about deciding, over and over. Most of them have an honest answer, some have an honest answer that is unwelcome, and a couple cannot be answered from a page at all. Those are marked as such, because pretending otherwise is the failure mode of this whole genre.

What to take away

Intuition is real evidence in domains where you have had fast, repeated feedback, and it is close to worthless where you have not.
"How much analysis is enough" has a testable answerenough that more would not change the choice.
Several of the questions below are about other people, and those cannot be settled by reasoning better on your own.

"Should I trust my gut?"

It depends on one thing: whether the domain has given you fast, repeated, unambiguous feedback. Judging whether a room has gone quiet, whether a supplier is stalling, whether a piece of work is finished. Those get corrected quickly and often, and intuition in them is compressed experience.

Judging whether a market will exist in three years, or whether a person will be good at a job they have never done, gets almost no feedback of that kind. The feeling is just as strong and carries much less information.

So the question to ask is not whether to trust the feeling. It is how many times this particular kind of judgment has been corrected, and how fast.

"How much analysis is enough?"

Enough that more would not change the choice. The test is available before you do the work: name the result that would flip your answer, then ask how likely that result is. If nothing would flip it, you have finished, whatever the spreadsheet still lacks.

The second half of the answer is about reversibility. A decision you can undo cheaply deserves less analysis than one you cannot, regardless of how much money is attached to either. The roles and process guide sets out how to size the process.

"Who should have the final say?"

Whoever bears the consequences and has the authority, and if those are two different people you have found the real problem. A page cannot tell you who that is in your organization; it can only tell you that the answer must be one person, and that a group is not an answer.

"What if we cannot agree?"

Then find out whether you disagree about the facts, the criteria, or the risk

Diagnose the disagreement

What kind of disagreement is this?

Yes

Facts -> find out

Criteria -> decider chooses

What if we cannot agree?

Disagreement about facts is resolved by finding out.
Disagreement about criteria is resolved by the decider choosing.
Disagreement about risk tolerance is resolved by naming who bears the downside.

"How do I know I am not just rationalizing?"

You do not, from the inside, and this is the honest answer. What you can do is build the check outside your head: write what would change your mind before you start gathering evidence, and hand the record to someone with no stake.

The mechanism you are guarding against is confirmation bias, which does not feel like bias from within. It feels like noticing relevant things.

"Can I un-decide?"

Sometimes, and the answer should have been established before you decided. If reversibility was never assessed, assess it now rather than arguing about whether reopening is allowed.

The thing to avoid is reopening because the discomfort has grown rather than because anything new arrived. That is one of the nine decision errors, and it is the one that most damages a group's ability to settle anything.

"Was that a bad decision or bad luck?"

Answerable only if you wrote down the reasoning at the time. Without a

Review the decision, not the person

Were the options right?
Were the criteria the ones actually used?
Was the uncertainty acknowledged?
Was the reasoning written down at the time?

With a record, the question is straightforward: were the options right, were the criteria the ones actually used, and was the uncertainty acknowledged? The decision review measures set out how to run that without turning it into an assessment of a person.

Questions a page cannot answer

Three, honestly.

Whether your particular manager will support a decision you make. That is a fact about a relationship, and it is discovered by asking.
Whether a specific opportunity is worth taking. Nobody who has not seen your numbers, your obligations and your alternatives can say.
Anything with legal, tax or regulatory consequence. General guidance from a public body, such as the Small Business Administration's guidance on staying legally compliant, tells you what kind of question you have. An advisor in your jurisdiction answers it.

A page that answers these anyway is not being helpful. It is producing text that resembles an answer, which is worse than silence because it is easier to act on.

Common questions

Is there a decision-making method that works for everything?

No. There is a small set of questions that apply widely: what is the choice, who decides, by when, and what would change the answer. The decision record fields hold those, and everything beyond them is domain-specific.

Should I decide alone or with others?

Alone where you have the information and the authority. With others where you need their information or their willing effort afterward. Involving people whose input you will not use is worse than deciding alone, because it teaches them that consultation is theater.

What if I am wrong a lot?

Then the record will show what kind of question you are wrong about, which is actionable in a way that a general sense of being wrong is not. Most people find the pattern is narrow.

How do I get better without waiting for outcomes?

Practice the framing, not the deciding. Restating badly framed decisions is a skill you can work on daily, and the twelve reframed decision statements are a reasonable set to start on.