Every day we are faced with making a lot of decisions, and most of these decisions are relatively inconsequential - meaning that if we don't make the optimum choice, we have opportunities to course correct, or the resulting negative outcome doesn't significantly alter our lives. However, there are some occasions where we have to make a major decision, and the potential outcomes are large and have obvious implications down the road. Such examples might be deciding which of two potential houses to purchase, what type of vehicle to purchase to replace an old one, or even something like whether to bother investing in putting solar panels on your roof.
A very common practice to help assist with making these decisions is to create a pros and cons list. By brainstorming a bunch of factors and writing them down, we are supposedly then in a better position to determine the best course of action.
There are certainly benefits to a pros and cons list, and they are a helpful tool - but like all analytical tools, they don't capture the entire story. So I wanted to take a few minutes to explore some of the detractors inherent in a pros and cons list, because if we can be cognitively aware of them, we can take steps to mitigate their effect.
- Lack of Magnitude
In my view, the primary downside to a pros/cons list is the lack of magnitude of each item. If we are faced with a decision and come up with five pros and three cons for option A, and four pros and three cons for option B, it's really easy to get caught up in the numbers and think that option A is best. Yet, if the cons for A are really concerning to us, we may be better off going with option B, which may have fewer pros, but also a different set of cons that we are not as concerned about.
I think that most people, by the time they reach general adulthood, have recognized, in some way, this particular issue of a pros and cons list. What I find interesting is that this one issue branches into a couple other more subtle issues, such as:
- Lack of Probability
A pro's and con's list tends to generate a list of factors that appear to be binary - they either happen, or they don't, and each outcome is essentially given equal probability. Yet life is generally not binary like that. If a list of con's has five items, some of those cons could be stretches, while others are almost guaranteed. The format of a pros and cons list makes it difficult to evaluate relative probabilities of the various potential outcomes.
- Amplification of Biases
This is probably the most subtle impact of a pros and cons list. When we are coming up with our list of factors, it's nearly impossible to eliminate the impact of our own bias. This can range from intentionally not including certain factors in the list because we don't want to consider them, to adding extra, almost trivial, items to the pros side because we have already made a gut decision and are looking to us a pros and cons list as an objective validation of what we want.
So, if a pros and cons list is still a useful tool, how do we go about making the best decision, when the tool has these negatives associated with it? Dampen the bias by game playing all the decisions out, and go with the option that yields the best probability of a favorable outcome. Note that this does not eliminate the possibility of a bad outcome, but it does minimize it.
Here's an example: if you are playing poker, and you are going into the river with a pocket Ace and 4 of hearts, the flop showed a 2, 3 and 5 of hearts - you have a straight flush, and chances are you are going to win that hand. Sure, an opponent may have a higher ranking straight flush, but the chances of that are extremely low. So 99 times out of 100, you are best off raising the pot by a large amount to capitalize on your strong hand.
In IT, I see this sort of thing play out a LOT. With virtually every engagement, there are knowns, unknowns, and risks. Each one affords the opportunity to say 'If we go this direction, this could happen; if we go that direction, that could happen'. After 20 years, I've learned that one cannot just simply list potential outcomes and go with the one that seems to have the largest number of benefits. Too many times, that has led to immediate progress, only to be stymied on the back-end by large amount of troubleshooting (at best), or unexpected downtime (at worst), because something wasn't fully thought through.
Disclaimer: Information in this post is derived partially from my own experience, and partially from information obtained from Annie Duke, about how to make better decisions.
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