7 Decision-Making Techniques That Work
Seven practical techniques for deciding faster and with less regret under uncertainty: two-way doors, pre-mortems, first-principles thinking, decision trees, the 70% rule, devil's advocate, and regret minimization.
By Nuglet · · 7 min read
Most bad decisions are not caused by bad information. They are caused by treating every decision with the same weight, the same speed, and the same process, when different decisions call for different approaches. Below are seven techniques, each suited to a different kind of decision.
1. The two-way door framework
Amazon popularized this distinction: a "two-way door" decision is reversible, so it is safe to decide quickly and correct course later. A "one-way door" decision is hard or impossible to undo, so it deserves more analysis time. Most people spend the same deliberation time on both, which wastes time on reversible calls and rushes the irreversible ones.
2. Pre-mortem analysis
Before committing, imagine that the decision has already failed one year from now, and write down why. This flips the psychology of the review: people are more willing to voice a doubt about "why did this fail" than "why might this fail," because the first framing makes skepticism feel like insight rather than negativity.
3. First-principles thinking
Instead of reasoning by analogy ("this worked for a similar situation before"), break the problem down to the facts you are certain are true, then rebuild a solution from those facts alone. It is slower than pattern-matching, but it avoids inheriting assumptions that do not actually apply to your situation.
4. Decision trees
For decisions with a few clear branches and different possible outcomes at each one, sketching a simple tree, even three boxes and two arrows on paper, forces the options and their consequences into view at once, instead of comparing them one at a time from memory.
5. The 70% rule
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has described making most decisions with about 70% of the information you wish you had, because waiting for 90% usually means you decided too slowly. The rule is a deliberate trade: for reversible decisions, speed beats certainty.
6. Devil's advocate
Deliberately assign someone (or yourself) the job of arguing against the decision you are leaning toward. This surfaces objections that groupthink or personal attachment to an idea would otherwise suppress.
7. Regret minimization
Bezos also used this one to decide to leave a stable job and found Amazon: project yourself forward to age 80 and ask which choice you would regret not making. It works best for decisions where long-term identity matters more than short-term risk.
None of these techniques replace judgment, they structure it. Pick the one that matches whether your decision is reversible, high-stakes, analogous to something you have seen before, or mostly about avoiding long-term regret.