Do you equate a good decision with a good outcome? Let me rephrase it – do you think that a decision was bad if the outcome wasn’t necessarily the one you were aiming for?

It seems that poker has a lot to teach us on this topic. As professional poker player Annie Duke explains – “we can make the smartest, most careful decision and still have it blow up in your face”. That doesn’t mean the decision was wrong, just that there is always incomplete information and we can never fully control the outcome.

A quote to keep in mind

“Why are we so bad at separating luck and skill? Why are we so uncomfortable knowing that results can be beyond our control? Why do we create such a strong connection between results and the quality of the decisions preceding them?”

– Annie Duke, ‘Thinking in Bets’

How to be confident in your decision-making

If we can never fully control the outcome, organisational psychologist Adam Grant encourages us to instead focus on our decision-making process. Doing that consistently means that we can improve it over time and increase our odds of achieving a better outcome:

Source: 'Think Again', Adam Grant

But what does a ‘deep’ decision process look like? It may simply mean taking time to reflect out loud with a peer on a regular basis, in order to question our instinctive inclinations and to broaden our perspective.