How to make decisions for the future

We don’t spend much time considering how we make decisions. Particularly about our own future (or that of your company). 95% of our decisions are made for us by our subconscious and our programming from our youth.

Move away from instinct

Particular hard choices demand that we train the mind to override the snap judgments of System 1 thinking, that we keep our mind open to new possibilities, starting with the possibility that our instinctive response to a situation is quite likely the wrong one.

Forward-thinking

For all the biases and intuitive leaps of System 1, one of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the long-term decision-making of System 2: our ability to make short-term sacrifices in the service of more distant goals, the planning and forward-thinking of Homo prospectus. To make the right decision, you have to figure out how to structure the decision properly, which is itself an important skill. However; “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”