Making decisions

How to make good decisions

How to Stop Endless Discussions

The RFC process uses a document written by someone about their proposal on a topic. It has a specific timeframe and everyone can give feedback on it. The RFC and feedbacks are posted publicly. Everyone can join the discussion. The goal is to include as many people as possible to access more points of view and spread the knowledge simultaneously. The good thing is that people focus on the proposed idea and give their feedback based on facts instead of only beliefs. On the other hand, it has a way bigger effect.

6 Lessons I learned while implementing technical RFCs as a decision making tool

Giving team members, present, and future, the context into why and how decisions have been made has allowed me to run happier and more effective distributed engineering organizations. Now, instead of trying to inadequately respond when I’m asked “what were these people thinking?”, I point to files that may be able to resolve all doubts and allow members of my team to wear the software historian hat.

The Senior Engineer’s Guide to Helping Others Make Decisions

Engineers, whether junior of senior, should be provided guidance and suggestions to help them form stronger ideas and improve their ability to reason, rather than being given solutions to implement or being out-right shot down.

A Framework for Making Smarter Decisions and Fewer Errors

A helpful guide on decision making outlining the mental tools you can use with any decision and the most common ways we go wrong.

Make Great Decisions Quickly with TOMASP

We’re naturally bad at making complex decisions. I’ll show you how you can consistently make great decisions using a simple framework called TOMASP.

How we make decisions at Coinbase

A decision making framework is only needed when there is lack of clarity about a decision that is higher risk. Higher risk can mean that the decision has long term implications or that it can be costly to unwind if the wrong decision is made.

The process can be fairly light weight (I’ve seen it run from start to finish in under 15 minutes, live during a meeting), but it can also be used over multiple weeks for bigger decisions.

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Expla

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions variety matters.

Some heuristics to make decisions

Some advice from twitter.