Following on the previous post ‘How We Should Differentiate Decision and Outcome‘, Annie Duke (professional poker player turned business speaker and author) in her excellent book ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts‘ affirms that actually most decisions are bets. This was quite striking for me at first, but after some thoughts I now see the rationale.
Most of the decisions we take in life are fraught with uncertainty. We almost never have full information, and we are at the mercy of wildly unexpected events (also called ‘luck’). Of course the degree of uncertainty differs from decision to decision, but for most of our life-changing decisions, uncertainty is quite high.
“World – class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is : a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets , I discovered , helped me avoid common decision traps , learn from results in a more rational way , and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.”
“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.”
Looking at business or life decisions as bets gives quite an interesting edge to the process, which I find very worthwhile.
