Darwin, particularly during the late 30s, when he was developing the theory of natural selection, where Darwin Interrupts his ruminations, on the nature of life and evolution to debate another pressing issue, the slightly more personal in nature, which is whether or not he should get married.

And Darwin basically creates a pros and cons list.

He's debating whether he should marry Emma Wedgwood at this point is like which he eventually ends up doing on the side of not getting married.

He said freedom to go where one liked choice of society and little of it may be my favorite conversation of clever men at clubs.

I like to think that he was thinking about the R.

S.

A.

On the on the side of to marry.

Uh there's Children if it pleased God, which is interesting.

He writes out as someone who famously became an agnostic later in life, constant companion and friend and old age object to be beloved and played with better than a dog anyhow.

Is the line there.

So the pros and cons list is the one technique that most of us have learned at some point in our lives for making a complex decision franklin is doing this in the 17 seventies star wins doing it in the 18 thirties.

And the fact that we're still doing it suggested to me that the science of making complex decisions was somewhat stagnant that surely there were better techniques out there.

There were better ways to think about these kinds of choices.

A lot of the research that I had read up until this point about decision making brain had been focused on gut decisions, um blink decisions in the, in the kind of Malcolm Gladwell phrase, the kind of fast system, one brain decisions.

And it occurred to me while that research is incredibly interesting.

There's a lot to be said about it and we've learned a lot about how we make rapid fire decisions.

That the decisions that really matter the most in our lives should not be instinctive, decisions should not be gut decisions.

They require deliberation, they require mulling.

Um, they require time and meditation and When I stumbled across this pros and cons list from Darwin, I was in the middle of my own kind of equivalent decision of trying to decide whether we should move after many years, 20 years living in New York City.

I as a kind of mid life crisis decided that I must live in California in thinking about that choice and thinking about all the different levels of experience and kind of scales of experience that are implicated in a decision like that because you think about moving, say from the city to the suburbs, you think about all the different values that are at stake and a choice like that, right?

There is your own personal happiness, there's the personal happiness of your spouse or your Children, there's your relationship towards the city towards nature.

Do you want to live in a sidewalk centric culture or a car centric culture, there's, you know, the schools that your kids are moving to moving into, there's the real estate values are all these, there's economics are all implicated in a choice like that.

So how do you go about making those kinds of decisions?

There's a great quote from the nobel laureate, thomas Schelling that gets to this, which is one thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.

And in some sense, when we're making these choices, we have to force ourselves to start to imagine things that don't necessarily come to our mind instinctively.

One of the key things that comes out of the science and scholarship on this is to divide up these decisions into different phases.

Sometimes those phases are known as a divergent and then convergent phase where you're trying to come up with lots of alternatives, lots of different factors, not try and narrow down to a fine choice and then you eventually get to a stage where you finally make the decision.

I call that initial stage, the mapping stage.

You're trying to understand all the different variables that are working the decision and try and also explore other alternatives, other potential paths that might not have occurred to you Originally, there's a wonderful scholar on the business side of this and paul nut who spent many, many years analyzing real world corporate decisions and looking at the techniques that people used or more often than not the lack of techniques that people used to make these decisions and then looking at the outcomes like were people happy in the end with the decision that they've made?

And he looked at hundreds and hundreds of decisions, you know, should we launch this new product?

Should we shut down this factory here?

You know, should we open up this new branch in this new city?

All these, all these kind of long term decisions in the corporate world.

And what he found was that uh most people making decisions did not have a phase in the kind of mapping phase, in the early stage of the decision where they actively sought out other alternatives.

Most people actually did what not called whether or not decisions basically should we do this or not?

And they kind of debated this one choice and either pull the trigger on it or decided not to.

And those decisions in general over, you know, overall tended to be unsuccessful.

Ones.

What not found was that there was a small subset of decisions made by folks who took time at the beginning to explore other alternatives and to think about whether there wasn't another path on the table potentially that they could they could explore.

And folks who took that extra step basically took what not described as a whether or not decision and turned it into a which one decision, those decisions were much more likely to end up successful.

So that early mapping stage, in a sense, create a list of things that would never occur to you.

Uncover these other paths is really important to the process.

So, great example, in the in the domain of urban planning, there's a lot of discussion and farsighted about urban planning, kind of collective decisions.

With all of this research, I think there is a significant case to be made that we should be teaching decision making.

There's a great body of of research now and tools and strategies to be used whatever you end up doing with your life, whatever field you go into, you will use that skill.

Even if you have no career, you will need skills in making complex decisions in your life.

If you think of all the things in grade school and high school and college that you learn that you never use again after you take that final exam decision making, complex decision making is a skill that everyone has a need for.

And I don't mean this in a purely kind of utilitarian vocational kind of sense of school.

But if you think about what that class would look like, it would be wonderfully multidisciplinary, incredibly diverse in terms of the perspectives that would be brought to the classroom, right?

You would learn from behavioral economics, you would learn from the utilitarian philosophers, you would read great novels, you would read about military history, you would you would read about cognitive science and neuroscience.

It would be an incredible mix of different perspectives, but it would all be in the service of a skill that everyone would use one way or another in their lives, personal and public.