Make better decisions with scenario planning

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It’s the loneliest number since the number one”

— "One" by Three Dog Night

Too often, you limit yourself to too small a set of outcomes. The worse is that you can only imagine one. Mostly you think of two because you tend to think in binary terms: A or B, yes or no, this or that.

The reality is that there are multitudes of outcomes, more than you can imagine, because you live in a complex, multivariate world, and the answer is rarely a set of binary results.

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke says strategic thinkers consider a broader set of possible outcomes:

"the best strategists are considering a fuller range of possible scenarios, anticipating and considering the strategic responses to each”

You don't have to consider every outcome, but you should consider more than two.

Duke calls this scenario planning (a.k.a, reconnaissance mapping, future mapping). It's when you take a belief, place your bet, and consider the probability of each outcome occurring. The concept can be summarized as follows:

1. You have a belief.

2. You place a bet on the belief.

3. There will be a set of outcomes.

4. The outcomes will have different probabilities of occurring.

You have to assign a probability of each outcome occurring. Giving a number makes you realize how strenuous this exercise can be. Back in your binary thinking, it's 0% or 100%; not very taxing, mentally. If you give yourself three potential outcomes, you may default to 33% each. Increasing the number of possibilities to five, it becomes harder to convince yourself that the probability of each occurring is equal, or 20%. You probably wouldn't place that bet.

Considering every possibility can be overwhelming, but you don't have to worry about doing that because it is an impossible task. Five possible outcomes for any scenario seem like a good place to start. If you can't think of five different results, then maybe you're not thinking hard enough because you'll already have at least two when you start: yes or no, 0%, or 100%. You only have to come up with 3 more somewhere in between.

Make Your Bed

The most straightforward lessons are sometimes the hardest to execute consistently.

Nothing in Make Your Bed, by retired Admiral William H. McRaven, is groundbreaking, but they are backed by McRaven’s stories from his military career, mainly from when he was with the SEALs. They are simple lessons you need to often hear so you can one day apply them when the situation presents itself.

Here are some of my favorite lessons:

Start your day with a task completed. McRaven suggests that you make your bed because this gives you a win for the day early in the day. One task accomplished has a domino effect, and soon another task will be knocked down. Long before I read this book, I saw McRaven’s University of Texas at Austin 2014 Commencement Address and implemented the daily bed-making routine.

“Who Dares Wins“ is the British Special Air Service’s motto and is a good reminder that accomplishments come from struggle and discomfort. McRaven writes:

“Life is a struggle, and the potential for failure is ever present, but those who live in fear of failure, or hardship, or embarrassment will never achieve their potential.”

Never, ever quit. During Hell Week, Navy SEAL candidates are put through a training program that is designed to make them quit. To end the pain and misery, all they have to do is to ring a bell three times, and they’re out of the program. McRaven tells you, “don’t ever, ever ring the bell”:

“Life is full of difficult times. But someone out there always has it worse than you do. If you fill your days with pity, sorrowful for the way you have been treated, bemoaning your lot in life, blaming your circumstances on someone or something else, then life will be long and hard. If, on the other hand, you refuse to give up on your dreams, stand tall and strong against the odds—then lie will be what you make of it—and you can make it great. Never, ever, ring the bell!”

Don’t ever quit reading this book. It’s a book you can get through in one or two readings (only 125 pages). It’s the type of book you read at the beginning of the year to ground yourself and realign your mindset. I plan to add it to my regular rotation.