The Deciding Mindset: Movement through Discovery
The Deciding Mindset focuses on taking actions to clearly understand yourself and the world. Applying the Deciding Mindset to yourself enables you to clearly define your goals and preferences for a decision outcome. Applying the Deciding Mindset to the world helps you understand the possible options available to you as well as their features and tradeoffs.
The Deciding Mindset’s is fueled by discovery, which is an approach that learns about the necessary components of a decision. Take for example your preferences for decision criteria. It is often the case that when you start a new decision you will not completely know what all those preferences are nor will you know which one matters to you the most. You may have ideas about your preferences but they are far from being finalized. This is completely normal because preferences are developed and evolve over time and vary from situation to situation.
The main focus of discovery is to set up tests to discover your true preferences and then to refine those through iterations. This refinement process can make the Deciding Mindset feel recursive because as truth about yourself or the world is discovered it can force you to take a step back in the Decision Lifecycle.
Do not view repeating a step with new information as redoing that step because the new information you discovered is what makes the step different (even if it means taking a step back) and gets you closer to either more clearly understanding yourself or the world. In this way, the Deciding Mindset is characterized by “movement through discovery” and that movement along the Decision Lifecycle brings you closer to a positive outcome by learning about your preferences and their priority, by removing a decision option that leads to a negative outcome, by creating a decision option that leads to a positive outcome and in many other ways.
Summed up, the Deciding Mindset is characterized by:
Focus on progress towards a desired outcome, even if it means taking an informed step back
Belief that action can have a positive impact in increasing the probability of a positive outcome
Using discovery as a mechanism to better understand the truth about yourself or the world
Learn more about the Deciding Mindset
To learn more about the Deciding Mindset and discovery check out the Decision Guides.