Quotes About Strategy

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure.

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn't a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.

Making better decisions starts with understanding this: uncertainty can work a lot of mischief.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to know not just the things that might reasonably happen and what could be gained or lost, but also the likelihood of each possibility unfolding. That means, to become a better decision-maker, you need to be willing to estimate those probabilities.

We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: "resulting." When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn't turn out well in the short run.

I developed an exercise to practice and reinforce universalism. When I had the impulse to dismiss someone as a bad player, I made myself find something that they did well. It was an exercise I could do for myself, and I could get help from my group in analyzing the strategies I thought those players might be executing well. That commitment led to many benefits.

Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?

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We treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.

And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time.

To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.

Poker teaches that lesson. A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play. That's a whole lot of wrong. And it's not just confined to poker.

The lesson here is that we shouldn't wait to be forced to find a Plan B. We should always be doing some exploration, especially because sometimes Plan B can turn out to be better than the thing you're already pursuing.

Even though the importance of making quality decisions seems obvious, it's surprising how few people can actually articulate what a good decision process looks like.

to come up with ways a decision or plan can go bad, so the team can anticipate and account for them.

Every time we can force our opponents into a bad decision, we win.

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

To make these unlesses most effective, we need to create strong precommitment contracts that set out how we're going to follow through on those kill criteria. Then, to make sure that we're picking the unlesses that are going to get us to the fastest answer about whether the thing we're doing is worth pursuing, we need to do the work of identifying monkeys and pedestals.

Unlesses can get us out from under the forces that will keep us playing in the short run, chasing a win, and align our behavior more closely with our long-term best interests.