Decide
About This Tool
Decide helps you think through hard decisions with 15 guided cognitive paths — structured thinking exercises drawn from behavioral science and decision research — that help you approach the problem from different angles. The Cynefin framework classifies your situation into one of four domains (clear, complicated, complex, chaotic), and the system recommends paths suited to your problem type. Each path walks you through a series of prompts, captures your thinking, and produces a summary. When you are ready, the tool can create a journal entry in the Decision Journal for long-term outcome tracking.
How to Use
- Describe the decision you are facing — what it is, how reversible it feels, and optionally your gut feeling, emotional intensity, and what you already know
- The system classifies your situation using the Cynefin framework and recommends cognitive paths suited to your problem type — choose one and work through the guided exercise
- When you are ready, make your decision — the tool can create a journal entry in the Decision Journal so you can track outcomes and calibrate your confidence over time
Methodology
Decide uses the Cynefin framework (Snowden, 2007) to classify decision contexts into four domains: clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Based on the classification, the system recommends cognitive paths drawn from diverse research traditions. The 15 paths include: weighted decision matrices for structured comparison, elimination by aspects (Tversky, 1972) for screening options against must-have criteria, prospective hindsight (Mitchell, Russo & Pennington, 1989) for anticipating outcomes, pre-mortem analysis (Klein, 2007) for risk identification, means inventory (Sarasvathy, 2001) for starting from your available resources, affordable loss (Sarasvathy, 2001) for bounding the downside instead of predicting the outcome, and Even Swap (Hammond, Keeney & Raiffa, 1999) for trading across criteria to reveal dominance. The 10/10/10 framework (Welch, 2009) for time perspective, inversion thinking for identifying failure modes, satisficing (Simon, 1956) for avoiding analysis paralysis, implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) for action planning, values alignment checks with cognitive defusion (Hayes, 2013), first-principles reasoning, and behavioral experiments for testing hypotheses with low-cost probes.
Understanding Your Results
Decide is structured as a three-step process. First, you describe the decision you are facing, including reversibility, emotional intensity, and what you already know. Second, the Cynefin framework classifies your situation and the system recommends cognitive paths suited to your problem type. Third, you work through a structured exercise and the tool produces a summary. The 12 cognitive paths cover different types of decision challenges. For complicated problems with clear options, the weighted decision matrix helps you score options against criteria, and elimination screens out options that fail your must-have requirements. For complex situations where the answer is not clear, small experiments and outside-view thinking help you gather data before committing. For emotional decisions, inversion (what would definitely fail?) and values checks help separate signal from noise. When you make a decision, the tool can create a journal entry in the Decision Journal for long-term outcome tracking and confidence calibration.
Practical Examples
Example 1 — Quick decision: You need to choose between two job offers. You log the decision quickly: "Accepting Company A's offer" at 75% confidence, with a 90-day review date. Three months later, you review: the role matches expectations, so you rate it +1 (better than expected). Your Brier score for this prediction: (0.75 - 1)² = 0.0625 — well calibrated. Example 2 — Guided path: You cannot decide whether to renovate or move house. You start a session, describing the situation. The Cynefin classifier suggests "complicated" (analyzable but requires expertise). The system recommends the weighted matrix path. You define criteria (cost, commute, space, neighborhood), weight them, and score each option. The matrix shows renovation scores 72 vs. moving 68 — close enough that the values check path might also help. Example 3 — Heuristic extraction: After reviewing five decisions in the "hiring" domain, you notice you consistently overestimate candidates who interview well but have gaps in references. You create a heuristic: "Always check references before forming a hiring opinion" with boundary condition "Does not apply to internal transfers where track record is directly observable."
Tips for Better Decisions
• Write your decision reasoning when context is fresh — even 24 hours later, memory starts editing itself. • Use the "What would change your mind?" field seriously. If nothing could change your mind, you have not made a decision — you have made a commitment. • Check reversibility early. Easily reversible decisions deserve less agonizing; irreversible ones deserve more structured thinking. • Review decisions on schedule, not when you feel like it. The point of the review date is to override recency bias. • Pay attention to your Brier score trends, not individual scores. A single decision is noise; fifty decisions reveal your calibration patterns.
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