How I Make Decisions

I do not trust my gut as much as people assume.

Instinct has its place. After enough years, pattern recognition is real. But I have watched too many confident decisions go wrong to lean on instinct alone. So over time I built a process I trust more than my mood on a given day.

It starts with one question. What does the data actually say?

Not what I want it to say. Not what the most persuasive person in the room says. What is actually true, on the screen, in the numbers. A surprising amount of disagreement disappears the moment everyone is looking at the same facts instead of competing impressions.

The next question is about the problem itself. Am I solving the real problem or a symptom of it? Most rushed decisions treat symptoms. The number is down, so we push harder on the number. But the number is usually a readout of something deeper. If you fix the symptom, it comes back. If you find the root cause, it stays fixed. So I try to ask why a few more times than feels comfortable.

Then I look at reversibility. Some decisions are doors you can walk back through. Some are not. I move fast on the reversible ones, because the cost of being wrong is small and the cost of delay is real. I move slowly and carefully on the ones that are hard to undo. Treating both the same way is how people either freeze on small calls or rush the big ones.

I also try to separate the decision from the noise around it. Urgency is not the same as importance. A loud problem is not always the biggest problem. The person pushing hardest is not always right. Part of making good decisions is refusing to let volume set the priority.

And before anything final, I ask who actually owns this. A decision without a clear owner is a decision that will quietly not happen. Someone has to be accountable, by name, for the outcome.

None of this makes me right every time. Nothing does. But a process you trust does something instinct cannot. It makes your decisions consistent, explainable, and improvable. When one goes wrong, you can look back and see where the process failed, instead of just blaming luck.

Good decisions are rarely about being the smartest person in the room. They are about reality over opinion, root cause over symptom, and clear ownership over vague intent.

Get the process right, and the decisions get better on their own.