Decisions Over Decimals

Epilogue

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

— Jonas Salk

As we are at the end of the book, it is helpful to go back to the beginning. What is a decision? At the core a decision represents “change”—a point in time when you are asked to consider doing something differently. As individuals we are not wired for change. We resist change. Your role is to bring along your clients, colleagues, or stakeholders to become comfortable with change.

You may be asking yourself where do I begin? Some aspects of the book seem obvious ex‐post, but ask yourself if have you been using techniques like IWIKs™, backward thinking, or the Fermi method? If you want to be a better decision‐maker start with building two skills—interrogation + intuition—or as discussed in Chapters 1, 4, and 5, “surprise” and “context.” The combination will enable you to bring others along to drive action.

The next time an analyst comes to you ready to go through the 30 pages of tables and text‐filled slides they produced over the last three weeks of analyses, you should taking a detour. While you are interested in seeing what they have to share—and they are certainly excited to show their work—we recommend asking a simple question, “What surprised you?” “What are one or two things that surprised you as you have been working on the data?” There are often two typical outcomes to this question. Either you find the mistakes in the analysis as their surprise may be easily ...