decision making – Reimagine. Strategy.

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025

Strategy Sightings, Episode Four

Many of you will know that I am on a mission to avoid oblivious facilitation (or coaching, or leading or…). I have not found a word that means precisely the opposite of “oblivious” — I’d always rather be for something than against it — but for now, I’m anti-obliviousness.

I therefore can’t ignore that I am writing this post during an incredibly uncertain and destabilizing time in global affairs, and it seems oblivious of me not to acknowledge it. So, for this final installment of “Strategy Sightings” (for now), with some reluctance, I’m diving right in.

March 10, 2025

Sharpening your Razor

It’s Book Club week (join us here if you’re curious—no reading required, and this week’s theme is True Riches) and in preparation I was reading The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.

One of his core ideas is this: “Everything comes from what you put first.” He recommends developing a “life razor”, explaining a razor as a principle that allows you to quickly remove unlikely explanations or avoid unnecessary steps to simplify decision making. (He provides a few examples, such as Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”)

September 16, 2024September 16, 2024

Small Reasons for Big Decisions

It’s widely understood that people make decisions primarily based on emotion, then justify them retrospectively with logic and go on to explain the decision as if it had been made logically in the first place.

June 12, 2023June 12, 2023

Draw on all your senses

You know what it feels like to have been sitting in one position for too long — the muscles that have been bent strangely and stuck in one spot are basically useless for a bit until you get them moving again.

Can this metaphor also apply to our senses, or to other ways we process information? I suspect so.

May 22, 2023May 22, 2023

My Go-To Tool

Continuing our short series on quick facilitation hacks I use all the time:

If you notice a group is getting a bit mired in binary thinking (i.e. “We have to choose this or that,” or “The world looks like this or that”), I find it helpful to draw a line on a whiteboard, with their two options at either end. Then I ask them: