Clear Thinking

The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones.

the hifi principle: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

The best decision-makers know that the way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions. The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

safeguard: Come up with Both-And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can

Knowing what to ignore allows you to focus on what matters. Follow the example of the best investors and know the variables that matter for evaluating the options before you start sorting through information.

The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.

Our goal in decision-making is not just to gather information, but to gather information relevant to our decision. That requires more than building an inventory of data points; it requires understanding the why and how behind those data points—the principles that good decision-makers use in this area. Getting at those principles requires asking the

asked, “If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?” “That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.” The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds.