The core skill and almost nobody was taught it.
You will decide before you know. Every time. That is not the exception, it is the job.
Here is how to do it well.
The four questions
Under five minutes and it handles the large majority of decisions.
One: Is this reversible?
The most useful question available and men do not ask it.
A reversible decision should be made fast, with less information, by whoever is closest to it. You can undo it. The cost of deliberating exceeds the cost of being wrong.
An irreversible decision earns time and earns other people's input. Hiring, firing, a large commitment, anything involving a person's livelihood.
Most men treat every decision as irreversible and deliberate uniformly, which means they are slow on the cheap ones and no more careful on the expensive ones.
Two: What is the actual downside?
Not the imagined one. Written out, in numbers where possible.
If I am wrong, what specifically happens, to whom, and what does it cost?
Men catastrophize decisions they have not written down, and the exercise of writing the downside frequently reveals it to be survivable, and occasionally reveals that it is not, and both findings are worth five minutes.
Three: What would I need to know to be certain, and can I get it in the time I have?
Four: What does the delay cost?
The question men never ask. Deferring a decision is itself a decision and it has a price, and the price is invisible because nobody bills for it.
A crew waiting three weeks for a call is three weeks of a crew waiting, and that cost is real and it never appears on anything.
A worked decision
The four questions applied to a real call, so the framework is not abstract.
The situation: a customer of nine years wants work done at a price that is roughly break-even. Taking it fills a slow month. Declining it may end the relationship.
Is this reversible?
Partly. He can decline and the relationship may survive. He cannot un-take it once he has committed.
Which means it earns more than a snap call and less than a week.
What is the actual downside?
| If he takes it | If he declines |
|---|---|
| Roughly $400 of margin on $18,000 of work | Crew idle for eleven days |
| Sets a price precedent with this customer | No precedent set |
| Three weeks of capacity committed | Capacity stays open |
| Cannot take a better job if one arrives | May take a better job |
Written out, the downside on both sides is survivable, which is the first useful finding, and it was not obvious before it was on paper.
What would he need to know to be certain?
Whether a better job is coming in three weeks. He cannot know that.
And whether declining actually ends the relationship. He could find that out with one phone call.
That is the second finding and it is the important one. Ten minutes rather than a week of deliberation.
What does the delay cost?
A crew that does not know whether it is working in eleven days. Real, invisible, and never billed.
The decision. He calls the customer, says the price does not work, and asks whether there is room.
That is the most common outcome when men run this framework. Not that the decision was hard. That one of the unknowns was cheaply knowable and nine days of deliberation was substituting for a phone call.
The seventy percent rule
The practical version, and it is the most useful heuristic here.
Decide when you have about seventy percent of the information you wish you had.
Below that you are guessing. Above that, in most cases, you spent more on the gathering than the accuracy was worth, and the delay cost more than the improvement.
The rule has two conditions.
It applies to reversible decisions and to time-bound ones. An irreversible decision with no deadline deserves ninety.
And it requires you to actually decide at seventy rather than treating it as a milestone on the way to ninety-five, which is what men do with it.
What to do with the thirty percent
Name it out loud.
To yourself, and to the people affected.
I am making this call with incomplete information. Here is what I do not know. Here is what would change my mind.
Three things that does.
It is honest, and people can tell the difference between a confident man and a man pretending to certainty he does not have.
It sets a review point. A decision made with a stated unknown has a natural moment to revisit, and men who skip this end up defending a call long past the arrival of information that should have changed it.
The three failure modes
Deciding on the loudest input. Whoever advocated most recently or most forcefully. A man deciding on volume is not deciding, he is being operated by whoever is willing to push.
And deciding to end the discomfort. The worst of the three. He makes a call because the not-knowing is unpleasant, and speed feels like decisiveness, and he has traded a good decision for relief.
The tell for the third: he feels better immediately and worse in two days. A sound decision made at seventy percent does not produce immediate relief. It produces a settled uncertainty, which is a different sensation entirely.
The decision log
The one practice I would defend above everything else in this part.
Write down every significant decision, the date, and what you expected to happen. Three lines. Thirty seconds.
Then review it once a year.
Two things it does, and the second one is the reason.
It shows you your actual hit rate, which is nearly always better than your memory reports, because memory retains the misses and discards the routine successes.
And it teaches you your own failure pattern. Every man has one. Too slow on people, too fast on money, consistently optimistic about timelines. You cannot see it in the moment and it is obvious across forty entries.
Drawn from Carry the Weight