There’s a saying that simple decisions are best made with rational thought alone, but complex decisions benefit from a big dose of gut feeling as well.

I’ve been employing two methods for dealing with both types of decisions that I thought I’d share here.  I think of things like these as tools I can learn, practice with, get better at, and then deploy in my work.  I typically pick them up reading online, record them on my personal wiki page for reading notes, then transfer them monthly into a variable repetition mobile flashcard app where I review and learn them over time.

For simple, but hard, decisions, I’ve been using for several years a method I call “write it all down and pick 6.”  I learned it in a print edition of HBR that I picked up at an airport , I think it was Stanford’s Baba Shiv that suggested it but to be honest I didn’t write that part down!

The idea is: write down all the factors to take into consideration in your decision.  As many as you can possibly think of.  This feels great, like you’ve really given it a good thought.  Then, pick a very small number of those factors that are most important – at most 6.  Now look just at those 6 most important factors and honestly ask yourself what decision they support making.  This may be more powerful than it sounds.  It’s great.

Second, when you’ve got a complex decision, it can be helpful to break it down into simpler considerations first. “Simple is about relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths,” writes Adrienne Marie Brown in her wonderful recent book Emergent Strategy.  “Part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”  Brown credits  Rachel Plattus of Beautiful Solutions with that insight.

That’s a new model I’m going to try out. If it’s a simple decision, use Pick 6.  If it’s a complex decision, try to create some simplicity by thinking about constituent relationships, then pick 6, then add gut feeling.  Gut feeling is high-bandwidth, high-context, powerful stuff too.

Related: The Conscious Competence model. When you start learning a new skill you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competent with practice, until ultimately you can be unconsciously competent. Competent with far less effort.  That’s from Ed Batista’s blog post on Authenticity and Leadership.  Ed credits Martin Broadwell, a Bible teacher in Decatur, Georgia, who developed the Conscious Competence model in 1969.

Please share any related thoughts.  Thanks!