What I've Learned So Far Using Convictional
We have been using our own product internally to run our other business and make decisions about what to build. The product has evolved materially from the time we started to work on it and use it internally and today. It wasn’t easy and didn’t feel natural at first to be processing decisions within software rather than informal contexts like email and meetings. This essay covers what we have learned from our own internal usage so far and what that might mean for the future of decision making in business as this becomes widespread.
The most interesting thing to me that we’ve learned so far is how low we used to be at decision awareness. We have always been a culture that leans towards being decision nerds. A decision nerd is someone who is intentionally aware of and optimizes the process of making decisions. We used to have ‘decision docs’ that we would start, which were documents where we would lay out the decision we are making, the goal, who is involved, the options, and analyze those options. The product we built is born of those decision docs. As we have used the product more internally, our awareness of the quantity of decisions and their nature has increased meaningfully. This alone has actually been valuable as we’ve understood who is making which types of decisions, how often and more importantly how well.
As CEO the effect of decision awareness has been a few things. One is that I noticed that I used to make snap judgment (Kahneman system one fast decisions) decisions often, as in several times a day. And yet the importance of the decisions would vary a lot, some would be relatively simple things and others would be much more complex things. And I had a similar process for them. I found that I didn’t really start thinking about why I made the decision the way I did until after I made it. I was rationalizing why I made the decision in order to communicate it to the team. In that sense, all decisions are temporarily one way doors, and that is when you communicate about them. Until you communicate about them to the stakeholders who are affected, a decision is not really decided and can be reversed.
Another thing I noticed is that I intentionally span multiple days in my decision making in order to optimize them. I noticed that I rarely came up with the most optimal combination of options by making a snap judgment decision within the same day. So now I start a decision process in the app, take it as far as I can, and then put it down for the day and come back to it the next day. Most of the time, I’ve evolved my understanding of the options, the criteria to use, the goal, who to involve meaningfully. There is something to be said for sleeping on decisions, our brain doesn’t stop working on them when we go to sleep, if anything it continues working on them intentionally.
Finally, I noticed that as I used the software and in particular used the ability we have to identify biases, that I was consistently making biased decisions. Some of those decisions turned out the exact way that I expected them to, as in my hunch turned out to be the right option after further consideration. But at least half the time, my hunch changed into something else, and it was because of bias. This has had the effect of reducing my ‘confidence’ when making decisions. I trust the collaborative process and sources of context outside of my mind when it comes to matters of business trajectory more. I also trust myself more on matters of design and taste, because as we’ve worked on it we’ve come to realize how little decisions like that rely on context that exists outside of your own mind and emotions.
What’s clear to me is that the quality of decisions I was making, and the speed at which I was making them, could be improved meaningfully. And yet if someone approached me off the street a few years ago and asked if I wanted assistive technology for making decisions, I probably would have said no. I’ve historically left one of the most important things to optimize in a business, which is the judgements of the CEO, as a relatively unoptimized thing. I’ve come to depend on and use our product daily for decision making now. And interestingly I’m making big decisions faster, and small decisions slower, which is what seems optimal for quality. A lot of people have anxiety about how reversible decisions are, which is justified in rare cases, but most of the time you want to get it right the first time. Overall, being able to make decisions at the right pace, make the big ones faster, and make the right decision almost all the time seems like what the purpose of technology like this should be, and how we will bias and focus our R&D on it as we continue.
If you want to try our free research preview product, you can access it here. As far as we are aware, this is the first software product focused explicitly on business decisions, rather than operations or other forms of ‘doing’ something. We are still in the early stages of understanding what effect it has on teams that make decisions in businesses, let alone whether those are good effects and how much. I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who experiments with it like we are on the effect it has on your decision making.