The Best Decision Making Tool (and it is 100% free)
Each of us goes through life and finds ourselves coming to cross roads. “Which direction should I go? What choice should I make here? What if I make the wrong decision?”
It can range from deciding whether to get that minor health annoyance checked out to making major life decisions like purchasing a home or marriage.
Most people just go with gut feelings or do what they think sounds acceptable to their peers. They take a crap shoot, hope for the best, and manage (or run from) whatever fallout happens.
Peter Drucker, arguably the best business consultant of the 20th century, wrote a seminal paper titled “Managing Oneself” published in the Harvard Business Review. In it, he gave his best advice after decades of experience on what he believed were the best practices people can take to improve and guide their own lives to success.
Drucker says it is crucially important to have a better understanding of your own strengths and values, but how do you do that? It can be hard to read the bottle from the inside, in other words, we may not be able to articulate what we think our best strengths and values are.
The best way, Drucker says, is to start the habit of personal feedback analysis as he explains in his paper:
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. I have been practicing this method for 15 to 20 years now, and every time I do it, I am surprised. The feedback analysis showed me, for instance—and to my great surprise—that I have an intuitive understanding of technical people, whether they are engineers or accountants or market researchers. It also showed me that I don’t really resonate with generalists.
Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lie—and this is the most important thing to know. The method will show you what you are doing or failing to do that deprives you of the full benefits of your strengths. It will show you where you are not particularly competent. And finally, it will show you where you have no strengths and cannot perform.
The name might sound fancy, but the actual practice is straightforward. Basically you make a document for yourself that includes these elements:
What decision am I making here?
Why am I making this decision?
What do I expect to happen because of this decision? What do I expect if I had not made this decision?
Then come back to the document nine to twelve months later and review it with new notes.
How did things play out?
How do you feel about the decision you made?
What lessons did you learn?
It can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour to produce the document, but there are many benefits to this.
Firstly, it makes you mentally chew on the decision. You have to produce reasons and face the pros and cons. Just getting things down on text can have an amazing way of clarifying things.
Secondly, it gives you a record of the major decisions you had to make in the past and how you handled them. Like I mentioned in a previous edition, regular journaling is the #1 tool for self-development.
Thirdly, as Drucker points out, when you revisit these documents later you realize how things played out and to what degree your decision making made a difference. You start to connect the dots on your own strengths and what worked well for you.
Sometimes things happen that are just dumb luck. You were at the right place at the right time. Sometimes you made a critical decision that made all the difference in the success of the outcome, otherwise it would have failed. Sometimes you did everything you could and things pivoted or changed so much it later became a moot point. It can be fascinating to reflect back and see how things played out versus your expectations beforehand.
Personally I keep a folder on my PC titled “feedback analysis”. Each time I make an important decision I create the document and save it titled with the date and and the decision. Like “2025-01-25 - Decision on X”.
At the start of each month, I will check the folder to see if I have any ready to review at least 10 months or so in the past. I open the document and write additional notes reflecting on outcomes and how I felt about my decision. I then save and move the document into a subfolder titled “reviewed”.
I occasionally will look at the reviewed folder again out of curiosity to see how my past looked. Of course, your feedback analysis need not be electronic and could easily work as pen and paper as long as you can keep it somewhere safe and accessible.
I have read and tried many, many self-help and productivity things over the years and I say Feedback Analysis is definitely one of the top things anyone should do if they are serious about their personal growth and well-being. So, friend, what decision are you going to make?