I’m impressed when coachees attend to both process and content of decision making. Intuition versus rationality is a common theme en route to resolution.
‘Random’ - both a low-key diss and a real-world edge if understood. Contrasting both meanings distils applicable understandings.
Nassim Taleb foregrounds the analytical - the insights derived from probability. A core application: don’t be swayed by any individual outcome, and if the downside is small, just keep swinging ⚾️.
While numerical analysis drives the point home, we can still intuit why it’s worth applying for another job after being turned down at interview. Meanwhile, the numbers have nothing on the vibe at an interview, nor the tenacity of the applicant.
‘Just tell me how to make decisions!’ I hear you scream. The Sophists, like Machiavelli, would agree, but for all their toughness and coldness, does their approach achieve the best outcome? Possibly, if it’s tough and cold you’re after. Most people I speak to value connection and meaning.
Values!?! What do they have to do with decision making? As it happens, quite a bit. But values are one group in a fractal of categories - cultures, stories, identities, feelings… all present a new angle from which to view any given dilemma.
Given the complexity of what’s at stake, relational professions inevitably resort to aesthetics to get at what’s happening within and between people. Our thinking tools orient us towards your needs. This helps filter babies from bathwater.
In the same way Socrates would resort to metaphor when logic was lacking, good relational work dives into the tacit with no guarantee of emerging with something useful, but a faith that, at least most of the time, the process helps.
Discern helpful from random decisions on vibes and empirical observation. Only you’ll know how.