The Art of Manliness - How to Make Life’s Big Decisions

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast now there are

00:00:11.040 little decisions to make in life like what to wear to work and what to eat for lunch then there are

00:00:15.020 potentially life-changing decisions like whether to move take a new job break up with someone or

00:00:19.720 get married with these big decisions you may never face the choice before have to sacrifice one path

00:00:25.020 to choose another and have a hard time figuring out the right way to go as a result of the high

00:00:29.220 stakes and high uncertainty we often flounder this kind of decision making sometimes failing to make

00:00:33.380 any decision at all my guests have studied those who have to make these kinds of critical choices

00:00:37.420 more often first responders and members of the military to figure out how civilians can make

00:00:41.380 better decisions in their everyday lives their names are lawrence allison and neil shortland and

00:00:45.360 they're the authors of decision time how to make the choices your life depends on today on the show

00:00:49.580 lawrence and neil explain the mistakes people commonly fall into when making big decisions

00:00:52.940 including getting stuck in a cycle of redundant deliberation where you forever circle around the

00:00:57.040 options without ever pulling the trigger on one they then unpack their model for more effective

00:01:00.980 decision making including why it should follow a foxtrot pattern and how to know when it's time to

00:01:05.520 stop ruminating and finally make a choice along the way we discuss the importance of self-awareness

00:01:09.980 in the process and what it is you need to know about yourself to make better decisions after the show's

00:01:14.260 over check out our show notes at aom.is slash decision time

00:01:17.420 all right well lawrence allison welcome back to the show neil shortland welcome to the show

00:01:35.840 thank you for having me having us again so lawrence we've had you on the podcast in the past to discuss

00:01:40.460 two very different topics the first time we had you on we discussed what you've learned about

00:01:45.040 building social rapport from being an expert in criminal interrogation and then the second time

00:01:50.840 we talked about what we can learn about life from the mythical labors of hercules you got a new book

00:01:55.880 out that you've co-authored with neil it's called decision time it's all about decision making so let's

00:02:00.600 start off with a bit of your respective backgrounds let's start with you lawrence some listeners may already

00:02:05.000 be familiar with you but can you give us a little bit of review on your background and then neil

00:02:09.620 what's your background and how did you two wind up working together on this book yeah so i'm a

00:02:14.620 psychologist broadly speaking a forensic but also do a lot of organizational psychology as you said

00:02:20.180 brett you very kindly had us on before to talk about rapport and my other area of interest is

00:02:25.900 decision making so i mean in brief i deal with things that include difficult communication and

00:02:31.760 difficult decisions i've been doing that for the last 30 years and that's me neil uh yeah well thank

00:02:37.340 you so um so not to age lawrence but i was actually a student of his in uh 2011 on the master's program

00:02:43.400 in liverpool in which you know i was briefly introduced to some of the the research and the

00:02:47.740 ideas around how i think real people make decisions in the real world and then for me i actually ended up

00:02:54.200 moving off and working with the uk armed forces and then moving to america and studying kind of

00:02:59.700 security psychology but throughout all of it i kind of kept this real interest in a paper lawrence

00:03:04.840 wrote in 2012 about kind of what police decision making looked like in these kind of you know fast

00:03:10.320 moving counter-terrorism operations and so i went back to lawrence a couple years later and kind of

00:03:15.120 had this idea of well you know what if we look at this this extreme decision making psychology but but

00:03:20.640 let's add in this kind of military interest and angle that i've kind of picked up along the way

00:03:25.760 so for the next you know five or i think five or six years you know we we kind of worked with the

00:03:30.400 army over here and the army in the uk and lots of different agencies studying the the real human

00:03:36.000 process of making you know really difficult high uncertainty decisions and then i think kind of

00:03:42.060 you know seeing the positive outputs of kind of lawrence writing rapport and a book really aimed at the

00:03:47.080 general population and and translating our kind of psychology for the for a much larger audience we

00:03:53.060 kind of had a thought that a really nice idea would be to do the same thing with decision making

00:03:57.260 because the more you talk about studying decision making with with everyone in your life the more

00:04:01.680 they tell you they they really need help making decisions and they wish they understood their own

00:04:06.280 decisions and so that kind of brought us i think to the point of writing decision time which was you

00:04:10.200 know this this translational piece of all of these soldiers and police and fire and all these

00:04:15.540 difficult decisions we'd studied and trying to use that to help you know people in their in their

00:04:20.420 everyday lives with the with the decisions that they kind of focus on and struggle with

00:04:24.740 okay so the the type of decisions you're focusing on this book are not everyday decisions they're

00:04:29.780 not like what am i gonna have for lunch as you said neil these are extreme decisions like one

00:04:33.960 percent of decisions people have to make in the military and the police i can see the type of

00:04:38.180 things that people have to make a decision whether to engage with an enemy shoot not shoot for an

00:04:44.220 average person what kind of decisions extreme decisions does a regular person have to face

00:04:49.340 the book is there's lots of books about decision making you know and how to improve your life but

00:04:54.660 as neil said we've been dealing in my case the last 30 years with people that make life-changing

00:05:01.420 decisions and although that is within military security services law enforcement so on nonetheless we

00:05:08.120 often find ourselves at a crossroads where we're making a really difficult life-changing decision

00:05:12.140 and it could be something as benign as what house will i buy but that said sometimes these decisions

00:05:18.940 are really really important and are really difficult that might be to do with whether to have cancer

00:05:25.020 treatment or an end-of-life decision or something that is heavier that is consequential that is not

00:05:31.400 reversible that is high stakes that does carry uncertainty and does carry risk so they're the i guess less than

00:05:39.200 one percent of decisions that we might face but that are going to change our lives and that's why

00:05:45.580 you wrote the book yeah so okay so there uh the stakes are high a lot of uncertainty and other

00:05:50.700 characteristics of these decisions oftentimes you just have to make that decision once in your entire

00:05:54.360 life and so you don't have any patterns to look back on on how to make the decision because

00:06:00.060 you haven't faced it before you probably never will again i think one of the things that i'd add is is so

00:06:05.960 from when we were doing the original work with the soldiers i remember talking to a kind of a

00:06:10.200 like a va clinician about the kind of decisions that we were specifically focusing on and and and the way

00:06:16.180 she phrased them which i always really liked was she called them kind of you know shoulda woulda

00:06:20.160 coulda decisions and and what made these decisions that we studied so tricky was that when the people

00:06:25.900 made the decision you could realistically see that both options could be good and both options could be

00:06:32.800 bad and and very few decisions actually truly present in that way and it makes them very difficult

00:06:37.280 to make because even if you choose you know path a it's very easy to convince yourself that path b

00:06:43.480 also you know could have been as good and i think when we look at our everyday decision making and the

00:06:48.780 decisions we make in our life you know it's not every decision that presents itself that way but

00:06:53.320 there are as lawrence said you know these these life-changing path-changing decisions we all face maybe

00:06:58.500 around taking a job maybe around ending a relationship maybe around moving country for love

00:07:03.840 or career or whatever it may be and if it's those decisions that both options could be really good or

00:07:09.920 could be really bad you've never had to make that calculation or that decision before and there is

00:07:15.400 that high uncertainty you know we've all experienced that but as lawrence said it's a rarer form of

00:07:20.900 decision but the impact and and potential of these decisions is so so much higher and then the other

00:07:27.020 thing that makes choice so difficult and from a psychological standpoint is in order to choose

00:07:33.440 one course of action you necessarily have to sacrifice what the other course of action is offering you

00:07:39.920 and very few forms of decisions make you have to do that and it's a specific form of decision making but

00:07:45.680 it is psychologically i think the most difficult because you have to sacrifice you have to argue to

00:07:51.300 yourself and you're starting from a place of really not knowing whether a or b is the right choice or

00:07:58.160 the right outcome for you you know just to follow up on neil's thing just by way of giving an example

00:08:03.520 we talk about in the book we compare which might be a weird comparison but we talk about the thai cave

00:08:08.980 rescue where what neil was saying is if you take one course of action and you send a seal in to go and

00:08:14.880 save the kids once you've committed to that course of action it could go wrong but you're not going to

00:08:19.760 know whether that goes wrong until you commit and in the same way it might seem a ridiculous comparison

00:08:24.120 but you know if you've been in a relationship for many many years and you decide to end that

00:08:29.200 relationship you can't then not end it you can't have both pathways you can't have your cake and eat

00:08:34.960 it once you've made that commitment those decisions that are irreversible are particularly difficult

00:08:40.560 because you can't play out that parallel universe version of that decision that you didn't make or that

00:08:45.780 choice that you didn't take and see whether it would have been better or worse and that is what

00:08:50.140 often causes hesitation so one of the other things i want to emphasize is this that often it's important

00:08:57.380 to commit to what it is that you're going to do because a lot of people spend their lives waiting

00:09:02.000 and thinking but not acting so the other thing that this book touches on quite a lot is this thorny

00:09:08.200 problem that we've seen a lot in emergency services law enforcement and so on that they're not actually

00:09:13.840 making erroneous decisions they are failing to commit to a course of action and you know you see

00:09:19.300 this time and time again whether it's a terrorist event or a disaster management thing organizations

00:09:24.260 are often criticized for being slow to act or not acting at all rather than making a really

00:09:29.760 catastrophically bad decision it's about pace timing and accuracy yeah i want to dig more into

00:09:35.600 decision hesitation does it decision inertia because you i thought that was really interesting

00:09:39.860 but before we do in your experience when you've looked at the research literature and also just

00:09:46.180 in your own experience when an organization or an individual faces one of these extreme decisions

00:09:51.500 where it's super uncertain you only have to make it once the out the stakes are high what's the typical

00:09:57.420 decision pattern or method that people fall back onto and why do they fall short well we've i mean we've done

00:10:05.280 quite a lot of work on the difference between novices and elite performers in this regard there are

00:10:10.040 basically four mistakes that novices make that elite performers don't the first and actually all of these

00:10:16.020 things are about proportionality and moderation i mean it's a bit like the report book where we're

00:10:19.940 talking about anything that's extreme is usually bad it's the same kind of principle here and what we

00:10:25.340 know that our elite performers do are first of all when they're trying to weigh up what it is they are

00:10:29.740 dealing with and diagnose the actual problem itself they will develop two or three plausible

00:10:36.080 explanations for what's going on novices either develop one and stick to it and confirm everything

00:10:42.160 in that one direction or they develop a huge proliferation of possibilities and they can't juggle

00:10:47.440 them in their mind so proportionate development of three or four options to explain what's going on

00:10:52.600 and then digging into them to decide which you know which best accounts for the situation that's the first

00:10:58.440 thing the second thing is time management our elite performers are neither too slow nor too quick they

00:11:05.700 know they need to ask about time or consider time as a factor that they need to consider and if they

00:11:13.460 think that the window of opportunity is collapsing quickly they will go with the best option that they

00:11:19.440 can given that time constraint they also are able to calculate if they do have more time and if you do

00:11:26.240 you should use it if you've got more time to firm up a situation you should use it novices either act

00:11:31.800 too too quickly or too slowly and often don't ask about time at all the third thing is that our experts

00:11:38.080 are able to adapt so novices suffer from what we call entrainment they will develop an idea they will

00:11:43.860 stick with that idea and even in the face of compelling evidence to suggest they should change tack

00:11:48.760 they don't our experts are able to recognize and respond to those cues rapidly and change accordingly

00:11:55.020 and then the fourth thing is the ability to revise the plan the ability to throw out throw out the plan that

00:12:02.600 was developed that was right for then but isn't right for now so those are the four sort of mistakes

00:12:07.600 people make too much faffing around trying to figure it out not considering time at all or just pondering

00:12:14.000 forever failing to adapt to to the new circumstances and being unprepared to revise our elite performers

00:12:20.720 don't do that but i've got to say our elite performers are rare why because not often you know if this is

00:12:27.940 one percent of the times that you have to make a decision as neil said you don't have that lexicon

00:12:32.800 of experience behind you to be used to be to dealing with these novel or unique events yeah and i think

00:12:39.300 most people what they do when they face a tough decision at least there's my my method is i'll go

00:12:43.940 online and see what did someone else have this problem and see how they made the decision but

00:12:49.880 like i mean it's i mean it's kind of useful but in the end it's not i usually find it not very useful

00:12:54.420 because that person's situation is so unique that it's like well okay this this doesn't apply to me

00:12:59.720 like i don't i can't do anything with this well i think that's a it's a really good point it's an

00:13:05.200 interesting method brett and i think it links to kind of i think one of the points that we'll hopefully

00:13:09.260 talk about throughout the interview but one of the big things we we emphasize about these forms of

00:13:13.520 decisions is that they are they are often deeply personal as in as in what the right decision is

00:13:19.960 varies based on who the decision maker is so so to give you an example you know when we were writing

00:13:24.420 the book it was you know kind of at the start of the of the of the covid 19 pandemic and one of the

00:13:29.560 things that a lot of people were talking about was how you know young couples were handling the

00:13:33.940 decision to get married or not get married or delay or do it by zoom and all of these kind of things

00:13:38.420 and and and looking at that decision i think you know you could always you could look at what other

00:13:42.420 people were doing you could look at were they doing it via zoom you could look at whether they were

00:13:45.660 delaying three years five years ten years whatever it was but to make that decision correctly really

00:13:51.340 it's just what matters is what is right for you in that moment and that's one of the things i think

00:13:56.640 the book really emphasizes on is that it is it is always good to to look at other people and think about

00:14:02.840 maybe what other people have done but at the end of the day you know what we preach is kind of this

00:14:06.440 idea of you know know thyself and so it really comes down to i think what what makes you be able

00:14:11.980 to make that decision is being able to look inside of yourself and know what truly matters to you because

00:14:18.300 it may be different to what these other people have done and how other people in the past have kind of

00:14:23.700 made that decision in that moment well let's circle back to this idea of decision inertia why is it when

00:14:30.440 we face these big decisions with high stakes lots of uncertainty that we typically don't do anything

00:14:36.020 like what's going on cognitively to cause that well what people tend to do is they they go through a

00:14:42.760 process that we call redundant deliberation it's really weird actually because it's using a lot of

00:14:47.820 cognitive effort for no gain they will think about option b and think about all the permutations for

00:14:52.640 option b they will think about option a and all the permutations for option a and they will just not

00:14:57.400 be able to decide between the two because they don't want to commit you know they don't want to end that

00:15:01.880 relationship they don't want to have that cancer treatment because not having it could be better or

00:15:05.640 staying with the same person could be better so they sort of in perpetuity just keep circling around

00:15:11.560 and around these these plausible options so i mean my view that i use myself two things that i ask

00:15:18.860 myself that i think are useful when you're faced with these are one do i have to decide now you know

00:15:26.000 you need to understand whether that decision is fast paced or slow paced and if it is fast paced maybe

00:15:34.760 you need to make a decision now but most decisions aren't super fast and so therefore you do need to

00:15:39.600 slow things down and seek more information but you can't put an infinite timeline on it you have to put

00:15:44.480 something that's proportionate the second thing i always ask myself is this what is the goal what do

00:15:50.400 i want this to end up looking like and you know we found it with police before or even just everyday

00:15:55.440 decisions people get fixated on the decision but not the end point not the goal what is it ultimately that

00:16:01.360 you want out of this and neil i don't know if you want to talk about your own person experience with

00:16:04.860 your wedding because i know we went through it ourselves but you know there was a lot of debate

00:16:10.320 but when you articulated what the goal was the decision presented itself easily so i don't know

00:16:15.240 if you want to give that example well i mean i i can because i think it's interesting so when you

00:16:19.460 when we think about indecision and i think one of the really interesting things about about i mean

00:16:24.540 lawrence's work historically on this and some of the things that we brought into the book is you know

00:16:29.040 psychology is is kind of the emphasis on on stimulus response and all of most of psychological

00:16:34.320 research is set up to force the person to choose something and assess the choice that they made so

00:16:40.760 the idea of i guess studying the absence of a choice is actually quite psychologically odd but one of the

00:16:46.960 things that we see is it's really really pervasive and you see it you know in in your in your in everyday

00:16:52.200 life and there are there are different ways that people try and avoid decisions from you know avoiding it

00:16:56.680 completely to you know knowing what they want but never you know as lawrence mentioned earlier never

00:17:01.040 actually behaviorally committing to it and it's it's a really easy pattern to fall into and when i

00:17:07.200 think about your question brett you know what how do we kind of overcome it and what does it what what

00:17:12.540 kind of causes it i think the the thing that i always come back to i think is is fear and courage

00:17:17.360 being you know being essential here because when you look at a true a true difficult decision so you know

00:17:23.900 what we would call a least worst decision that we kind of talk about in the book so you know that

00:17:27.760 they're all the examples we gave earlier leaving relationships changing jobs moving countries

00:17:32.020 you know divorces how to have a marriage all this kind of stuff you know choosing something and

00:17:38.840 committing to a course of action requires great courage because you know that in doing so you're

00:17:44.560 actively losing something by choosing the choice that you've made and so i will give the you know

00:17:50.380 the the example that lawrence gave that i think a lot of young couples faced in in 2020 you know

00:17:54.820 so i was i was with my my now wife spoiler i guess to the decision we made but we had that you know that

00:18:01.000 that horrible decision in may of 2020 of do we get married you know via zoom or some form of kind of

00:18:07.320 stripped down you know covid wedding or or do we delay and have you know the big 100 person 150 person

00:18:13.640 wedding that we'd spent you know two years planning and we ended up choosing to to get married via zoom

00:18:19.240 and and why i say that courage is so important is that when we made that choice and so you know we

00:18:24.240 we knew that we were going to do it you know on the original day just just a few people completely

00:18:30.720 socially distanced with no family coming no friends flying over you know we knew that we were we were

00:18:36.140 it was going to hurt and you know that it is a difficult decision and even though you know that

00:18:41.920 you've chosen the right thing you still have to have courage because you know that you've sacrificed

00:18:46.680 things that are really really important to you and i think that's what really difficult choices

00:18:51.940 require of you they really require courage because you know that even if you think or know you're

00:18:57.360 choosing something that's right you're still losing something that mattered to you and that's why these

00:19:01.940 decisions are so difficult and so i think when it comes to this idea of overcoming inertia of committing

00:19:07.260 to decisions and making them in the real world you know one of the things that lawrence and i talk about a

00:19:12.080 lot in the book is just the value of courage and that's because you know fear of loss is such an

00:19:17.660 innate human thing we are designed to protect our resources we hate the idea of loss but a choice

00:19:25.280 requires you to embrace loss and stare loss in the face because whatever you do whatever you choose

00:19:32.160 you will have to lose something you will have to sacrifice something and so it's this real balance i think

00:19:37.940 of being brave enough to tolerate the loss in the knowledge that you are embracing the the greater

00:19:45.460 good or embracing the right choice for the right reasons no i i've my own experience the thing that

00:19:50.440 causes me to put off decisions is that rumination trap that lawrence was talking about and like you said

00:19:56.860 it's it's really sneaky because it feels like you're doing something it's like i'm really thinking about

00:20:01.900 this but you just you're just going in circles over and just over and over again you have to decide i

00:20:08.140 got to make a decision this is not doing anything you have to catch yourself doing it and then just

00:20:12.260 make the decision and move forward there's this kind of almost this this curve of diminishing returns

00:20:17.460 right and so we we've done we've planned this study recently where we kind of you know we we we get

00:20:22.140 people to make a series of decisions and you can give we ask them if they want more information

00:20:26.780 right there are about five different information injects and what's really interesting is some people

00:20:31.540 say they want no information whatsoever and they just dive right in and that's that's not that's

00:20:36.060 not good and then some people want all of the information and eventually you have to kind of say

00:20:40.460 there's no more information just you know come on come on and do the decision and and the goldilocks

00:20:45.360 in this is someone kind of in the middle who who takes some early information and really helps

00:20:50.300 themselves understand the situation invests a little bit of time you know early on but then knows

00:20:56.500 that anything more that they're getting now isn't really helping them and now is the time to just

00:21:01.880 kind of get out of that redundant deliberation and just move on to the kind of the making of the

00:21:07.400 decision and it's kind of something interesting i think lawrence if you might be uh might want to

00:21:11.340 talk about this from some of the work that we've done together but we we kind of identified this

00:21:14.480 interesting kind of foxtrot pattern that kind of you know some of our better decision makers engaged

00:21:19.640 in which is where they kind of were i think what is it like slow slow quick quick my dancing knowledge

00:21:24.720 might be a little off that's yes slow slow quick quick slow slow quick quick slow actually okay

00:21:30.760 so so what this was is we were doing a study with military and or police i think it was and looking at

00:21:37.700 the different patterns that people use to make decisions and what we found was there was this one

00:21:42.060 pattern that that people engaged in which was kind of fast fast slow slow which was that they moved

00:21:47.420 through the the information gathering stage really really quickly but then they got really stuck on

00:21:54.120 the actual process of having to choose between the options and then there was this kind of more i think

00:21:59.500 it was the more senior officers who actually demonstrated this pattern which was kind of this

00:22:03.160 idea of this slow slow quick quick which was that they took more time to gather the information they

00:22:07.920 took a bit more time to comprehend the situation and then when it came to making the decision they

00:22:12.220 were much faster to be able to choose what the right option to them was we're gonna take a quick

00:22:17.280 break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show you devote a chapter and you mentioned

00:22:24.980 it early on about if you want to make better decisions you have to know thyself how does greater

00:22:30.580 self-awareness improve decision making like what what are we trying what do we need to know about

00:22:34.600 ourself in order to make better decisions well we're certainly one of the things that we're repeatedly

00:22:39.340 finding is that there's this this attribute called maximization or minimization which in

00:22:45.200 really simple terms is if you tend to be a maximizer you're the sort of person that wants

00:22:50.980 everything to work out really well so you find it very hard to tolerate a poor outcome or even an

00:22:56.440 outcome where there's two options both of them look bad and you're not really prepared to even pick

00:23:01.960 the least bad one so there's there's really bad and bad but you just don't want the bad one

00:23:06.460 and and people that are maximizers we tend to find suffer more from this kind of redundant

00:23:11.860 deliberation or constant rumination because they're thinking you know basically feeling

00:23:16.760 regretful about a future scenario that they they find intolerable whereas minimizers which is the

00:23:22.400 kind of alternative sort of thinking approach is okay this is not ideal but i'd rather have this

00:23:29.240 least bad option than the really bad one so so part of this is knowing whether you're a minimizer

00:23:33.640 or maximizer they're not certainly one better than the other but if you score very high on maximization

00:23:38.660 you tend to be the sort of person that will ruminate in perpetuity so that's one function

00:23:43.980 the other thing that we know quite a lot about is the thing called need for closure

00:23:47.960 and in simple terms the idea of that is if you are the sort of person that requires a lot of

00:23:53.900 predictability certainty order decisiveness you know you want to know exactly what time you're going

00:23:58.940 to meet at the restaurant how many people are going to be there what's going to be on the menu

00:24:01.900 that type of thing can slow people down as well so people that can tolerate ambiguity

00:24:07.460 which is the opposite of need for closure tend to be faster time decision makers so i mean but the

00:24:14.240 broad concept about knowing yourself i think neil spoke about this earlier is is knowing what your

00:24:18.780 value system is you know where you want to stack your tokens what matters to you most and having good

00:24:24.960 insight into that and being able to articulate that and face yourself in the mirror and think about it

00:24:29.120 will help you identify the absolute critical function of decision making which is what is my goal

00:24:34.860 where do i want to end up what am i prepared to sacrifice and what i'm not and neil you know did

00:24:39.960 a lot of work on what we call sacred and secular values so just a little segue on that where you

00:24:45.700 have a sacred value it's something which is non-negotiable so if we talk about military sacred

00:24:50.180 values you might have a sacred value of leave no man behind a secular value is something that you'd

00:24:55.420 like to retain but isn't critical and might be negotiable but where you have a problem is where two

00:25:00.480 sacred values collide so in military ops we found that if you've got the sacred value of leave no man

00:25:05.440 behind and complete the mission and we design a scenario which has both of those colliding that's where

00:25:11.640 you find it difficult to tease those two things apart so sacred values are the ones that are really

00:25:17.260 tricky to negotiate one other thing i just want to add about the foxtrot thinking which i think is

00:25:21.900 interesting and to just reinforce this point for listeners stacking your tokens at the front end of the

00:25:28.900 thinking is a good idea to think about what it is that you are dealing with carefully and diagnose

00:25:34.100 what you're what you're dealing with is really important that then enables you to speed up well

00:25:39.760 yeah lawrence we talked about this the sacred secular problem uh in our conversation about hercules

00:25:46.460 hercules facing decisions we had sacred uh values in conflict with each other and it made decisions tough

00:25:52.620 yeah yeah so i think without segwaying into the hercules thing we had that exact situation didn't we

00:25:58.820 where you know he left one of his compadres behind after a scrap and that was a difficult thing to do

00:26:04.640 it kind of ruined him and and created a degree of moral injury and that's not uncommon in in soldier

00:26:10.740 scenarios but uh neil may have something to say about this as well well no i think it's all tethered

00:26:15.620 to the idea of kind of of knowing thyself and so the one thing that i've heard most of the the feedback

00:26:20.540 i've had from the from the book from family member and friends is is they call me and they say oh you

00:26:25.440 wouldn't believe it you know i'm a maximizer and i'm like well yes objectively i probably could have

00:26:30.540 told you that um and you know they always say well it's a bad thing and i was it's not a bad thing

00:26:35.240 being a maximizer or or isn't a bad thing but knowing yourself means that you know what your miss

00:26:41.660 is going to be and so what we talk about in the decision making is that you know there are times to

00:26:45.480 be a maximizer and there are times when you really can't maximize and what you want to avoid is the

00:26:50.860 attempt to maximize in a non or unmaximizable situation right and i think it's really kind of

00:26:56.700 one of the important things that the knowing thyself means is you kind of you know the pattern you're

00:27:01.160 going to fall into you know what your personality trait is and what you're going to want from a

00:27:06.300 decision and sometimes it's about knowing that the decision that you're facing just isn't going to let

00:27:10.720 you have everything and accepting that and being able to to move on and i think that that links to

00:27:16.220 what lawrence was just saying there's kind of the second part of knowing thyself which is

00:27:19.960 literally about you know knowing thy values and one of the one of the formative books as we were

00:27:25.560 writing the original uh book we were a book called conflict how soldiers make impossible decisions

00:27:30.360 which kind of was our our platform for writing decision time was mark monson's book you know the

00:27:35.200 subtle art the basically the art to a happy life or the art to you know to happy living is knowing the

00:27:41.100 one thing that you care about so much that you're willing to sacrifice everything else and and that i think

00:27:46.860 has always been our kind of framework of knowing thyself and this discussion of of sacred values is

00:27:52.060 is looking at a decision and knowing the one value if you can the one value that absolutely matters

00:28:00.040 more to you than anything else and it's really difficult to do and you know we give examples in the book

00:28:04.800 from from people that we've met and people that we've worked with and you know we have we have

00:28:08.360 friends who we've watched face these kind of decisions you know you're given this brand new

00:28:12.860 promotion or this brand new job opportunity and it's really important to you that you know you you

00:28:18.000 chase your career and you you have value in your work and you achieve everything you can but but

00:28:22.160 that's running directly against something else that might be you know investment in the family and

00:28:26.600 spending time with your young children and your wife as they grow up and they do these foundational

00:28:30.760 moments of taking their first steps saying their first words and what a good decision maker has to be

00:28:36.760 able to do is to sit there and work out i have two values going against each other and

00:28:41.660 whatever choice i make i'm going to run over one of those values so which ones which one can i

00:28:46.940 absolutely not sacrifice in any way is it you know myself my career my confidence and my identity or is

00:28:53.880 it me as a family member me as a father me as a you know contributing to the household and and if

00:28:59.120 people aren't able to to know thyself and and know that value then and and links back to the you know

00:29:04.780 the heracles you know example that lawrence gave in your prior podcast of you know you actually risk this

00:29:09.800 idea of moral injury you know when you make a decision that sacrifices something that's truly

00:29:15.200 truly important to you that's a that's a specific form of trauma that you can have you know from

00:29:19.780 making the wrong decision in a in a crucial moment and so all of our our model of decision making it's

00:29:26.320 all based on first and foremost knowing who you are knowing your patterns and your tendencies and

00:29:30.980 your psychology and then knowing really being able to work out what what actually matters to you when

00:29:36.600 it comes to making this decision you know whether it's the goals or the values well let's move on

00:29:41.240 and talk about your uh decision making model it's called star it's an acronym and the s in star

00:29:47.100 stands for situational awareness or storytelling what's involved in developing good situational

00:29:53.080 awareness i mean any questions people should be asking when they're face a decision they're trying

00:29:56.840 to get their bearings on the situation so so when it comes to situational awareness i guess there are

00:30:01.400 kind of uh you know the original model is that there are kind of three stages of situational

00:30:05.420 awareness right which is kind of identifying you know the patterns in the environment or cues in the

00:30:10.840 environment that matter webbing them together to kind of get an understanding of what's going on

00:30:16.300 and then this third layer is kind of using that to project you know what will happen if you do action a

00:30:22.240 or do action b and as laurence kind of mentioned earlier the thing about situational awareness is it's

00:30:28.320 about not just going all in originally just going all in on this one assessment of the situation

00:30:34.300 having adaptability and the flexibility to think about what are the other factors that could be

00:30:40.540 going on what are the different interpretations of this situation and we we talk about in in the book

00:30:45.280 one of these early trainings that laurence gave and i think at the time i was kind of helping

00:30:49.560 alongside but we gave this early training to to police officers kind of you know policing the tube

00:30:55.320 during the i think it was the 2012 or 2014 uh olympics in london and what we talked to them about was

00:31:01.640 this idea of you know when you're stressed when you're tired when you're hot when you've got all

00:31:05.480 of these things going on you know you're running out of resources and the natural pattern is to

00:31:10.020 think you know what's going on to not test it to not think of alternatives and just to basically just go

00:31:16.240 all in on this you know this one assessment of the situation and i think kind of in the in the s

00:31:22.240 model of our of our star what we really preach about is being open and flexible to thinking

00:31:27.260 or holding in your mind are there two or three potential explanations for this situation potential

00:31:34.900 interpretations of of what i'm seeing in front of me and what this means and and you know the

00:31:40.380 extreme of that is something that you know laurence and i have talked about and we we recently put a

00:31:44.740 paper out about you know the the best decision makers are you know when they have to be they're kind

00:31:50.100 of grim storytellers they have imagination you know they're really able to think critically about

00:31:56.620 what their situation is and so with the s stage of the model it's it's it's finding a calibration

00:32:02.360 between these two extremes that laurence mentioned earlier right the first is just the first extreme

00:32:07.940 is just seeing something thinking you know exactly what's going on and diving right in with this kind of

00:32:13.180 singular interpretation of the situation this has happened and i think it's going to be this

00:32:18.060 on the very very other end is not really knowing or committing to any kind of interpretation

00:32:24.200 and just thinking that well there are a hundred things that could explain this and i can't really

00:32:27.920 move forward because i don't really know possibly what anything that's going on in this situation

00:32:32.920 and in the middle there's this kind of sweet spot of being able to identify a few plausible

00:32:38.760 explanations and taking the time to kind of game those explanations against each other to really get

00:32:44.640 the best understanding of the situation that you can because everything about a decision

00:32:49.820 stems from what you actually think is going on and how you're interpreting interpreting kind of the

00:32:56.480 information that's in front of you the key takeaways from that i think are don't over ruminate about

00:33:03.440 every possibility you know conjure in your heads two or three possibilities and make sure that one of

00:33:09.540 them which i know is a bit unpleasant but one of them should be what's the worst case scenario here

00:33:15.120 what is the you know if i think this this this is going on okay i don't really want to go there and

00:33:21.160 think it's maybe this bad but you know what perhaps i do need to think it's maybe this bad because then

00:33:26.280 the shock of it being that reality is less damning and you are prepared to deal with it so simple

00:33:33.020 takeaways think about what it is you're dealing with have no more than three i mean that's a bit of

00:33:38.120 a rule of thumb but it's hard to have in your mind more than kind of three possible situational

00:33:43.400 models about what you're dealing with make sure one of them is the worst possible scenario okay and

00:33:48.820 what's interesting that all this like you don't you're admitting that you don't know what the

00:33:53.580 situation is exactly because you have three different options yeah so so you are alive to the possibility

00:34:00.240 that there are three ways to explain what it is that you're seeing so say you want to end a relationship

00:34:05.960 or you you know you're i think we we talk about a mastectomy there you know whether you're going to

00:34:10.980 have your breasts removed in relation to cancer you want to sort of think about what does this look

00:34:15.820 like what's the worst case scenario what do i value maybe this could happen this could happen and this

00:34:21.400 could happen three options best case scenario worst case scenario somewhere in between but don't ruminate

00:34:26.740 on that forever at that point it gives you some kind of idea about how much you know what work you need

00:34:33.040 to do to disentangle whether it's more likely to be one two or three in the same way that perhaps

00:34:38.160 someone that's dealing with an illness is going to be looking at it you know someone comes to the

00:34:42.340 doctor and they present with various symptoms that doctor should be thinking well this could be this

00:34:46.500 bad it could be cancer and and therefore what do we need to do to firm up whether it is what tests do

00:34:51.840 we need to do that however it could be something benign and that's a plausible scenario as well and it's

00:34:57.380 at that stage that you should seek to interrogate information that will help you push forward one of those

00:35:03.040 three scenarios more than the other but like i say you know when you're considering these

00:35:07.860 existential pathways you do have to contemplate the worst case scenario it gives you much more stretch

00:35:14.480 in your imagination to be able to deal deal with what is is going to eventually be coming at you

00:35:20.540 all right so the next part in the star model t stands for time mastery why is when we make a decision

00:35:26.600 important and then what happens if your timing is off because if it's imminent and the decisions move

00:35:32.420 past you you're knackered basically i mean it is it does surprise me how often people don't even

00:35:37.680 consider time i mean our really poor decision makers don't even ask about it they don't think what do i

00:35:42.700 have to decide now how much time have i got they just think they've got all the time in the world

00:35:46.420 and you know for most of us most of the time happily we do have a bit of time to think about a decision

00:35:52.660 i mean you know in military situations that isn't always the case but sometimes even in our own

00:35:56.920 lives there is there is a there is a time limit on which we should really i mean i've spoken to

00:36:02.180 countless people police officers that have stayed in the same job for years and for you know every

00:36:07.180 year they're saying oh you know i kind of feel a bit burnt out with this job and maybe i should change

00:36:11.680 and i'm not giving enough time to my family what do you think and then we'll go through all the

00:36:15.600 possible scenarios that they could do and maybe they could change this or they could change to another

00:36:20.040 unit and then they'll come back a month later same thing and again and again and again and if you

00:36:25.080 don't have that externally imposed time pressure on you with a shoot no shoot decision you can just

00:36:31.560 keep extending that deadline forever so ask do i have to decide now more often than not you don't

00:36:38.480 have to decide imminently but if you don't have to decide imminently then you need to start thinking

00:36:44.040 about what is a reasonable amount of time to allocate to this decision and a pretty good tip to tell you

00:36:50.880 that you have now run out of time is if you keep asking the same questions and you keep getting the

00:36:57.080 same information then you really don't want to be waiting a lot longer because there is no new

00:37:02.660 information and you do now need to decide what happens if you have to make a decision now is there

00:37:08.460 a heuristic that people can use to know like what's the right thing to do or the best thing to do in

00:37:13.540 that situation very simple terms least worst first this is bad this is awful let's go with bad

00:37:19.560 if there's a huge time pressure and you absolutely have to make a decision right now and you honestly

00:37:25.740 are staring at two or three horrible or bad options the only thing to be able to do is really say to

00:37:32.420 yourself what is the one option that i or the one miss that i cannot tolerate and that's that kind of

00:37:39.220 that if you can do it that's that kind of sacred value and under time pressure that may be the only

00:37:43.560 thing you have time to to try and reflect on or calculate okay so the next part of star is a and

00:37:50.100 that's adaptation uh what do you guys mean by that well i think adaptations are a really critical stage

00:37:56.520 because i think when we if we it kind of links a little bit to the first stage which is situational

00:38:00.480 awareness but there's um there's some old psychology in kind of the 1990s on on nasa i think it's nasa

00:38:06.540 errors and it found that most of the bad decisions or error based decisions in these kind of these this

00:38:12.420 pilot sample was not because they didn't understand what was going on it's because they understood what

00:38:19.020 was going on then the environment changed and they were unable to update or re-evaluate what was going

00:38:26.020 on when new information was coming in and so i think one of the things about kind of the when we look

00:38:31.260 these decisions in the real world and these kind of you know these complicated decisions that people

00:38:35.820 are facing you know they're iterative they're moving moments in time and so sometimes the scene

00:38:41.440 does change and sometimes the situation does change and what we often see is that people fail to adapt and

00:38:47.480 update their their way of thinking and there's a lot of you know i think this links probably the

00:38:52.980 point of the book that i think links to a lot of the you know the core psychology around decision

00:38:58.520 makers is driven by heuristics and biases and cognitive closure and the fact that the you know

00:39:04.340 we are we are we are cognitive misers in the sense that we're always trying to confirm what we currently

00:39:10.600 think is correct anyway because it's easier than having to re-update and re-evaluate and reconsider

00:39:16.100 what we think we're staring at and so the adaptation phase is encouraging people that even if you've made

00:39:22.860 the best assessment of the situation you can and even if you have you know understood your relationship

00:39:28.160 with time and when a decision needs to be made and and assuming that you haven't you know missed the

00:39:33.420 decision window you know be open to updating your assessment of what's going on be open to new

00:39:39.580 information you know be willing to to ask if things on the ground have changed if your current

00:39:45.860 understanding is no longer in date and needs to be updated and it's just an exercise in almost good

00:39:52.180 cognition you know good cognitive healthy behavior to re-evaluate re-update reintegrate and just to

00:39:59.100 check that what you think is going on and assessed is going on is still there and it's really difficult

00:40:06.060 so you know one of the examples we have in the book is is this interesting case of this guy jack who

00:40:10.660 you know he's offered this job out of the blue and it's kind of a shiny new job with a shiny new

00:40:15.020 promotion and and if anyone's ever been offered a job or offered you know an opportunity suddenly the way

00:40:20.980 you evaluate the current job you know you're almost looking for the negatives now you know you've been

00:40:25.080 offered this shiny new thing and you know it changes the way you look at everything around you right and

00:40:29.440 that's the brain that's the mind trying to make the decision easier by stripping away uncertainty and

00:40:35.360 just closing itself off to you know any alternative way of thinking so so when we make decisions our

00:40:41.960 cognitive structure is sometimes working against us to make things simpler and so adaptation in dynamic and

00:40:49.000 difficult decisions is absolutely essential because people need to keep checking that their

00:40:54.260 assumptions are correct keep checking the situation is what they think it is is there anything new is

00:40:58.920 there anything different is there a bit of information that really needs me to think differently that

00:41:04.580 something else is actually going on here that something has changed since i started trying to work

00:41:10.040 through this decision and you know it's just one of those critical stages that you know we often we often

00:41:15.080 don't see in that that old researchers found it our own researchers found it that yeah you know people

00:41:19.840 really need to focus on being adaptive and making sure that their assessment is always in time with

00:41:26.940 kind of you know what they're facing so the final part of star is r and that stands for revision and

00:41:33.160 resilience and this can be a really hard part because often our tendency is after we've made a decision

00:41:38.540 we've taken action and we're going we're doing it even though we get new information we see like oh we

00:41:45.940 should probably adapt it's really hard to go back on your decision you're like well i made the decision

00:41:51.520 i gotta stick with it so how do you figure out whether or not you should stick with a decision or

00:41:57.880 you should bail and change your mind and do something else i mean well the way so it's a really

00:42:04.200 interesting conundrum and again i think it speaks to just the way just the ethos of of the kind of

00:42:10.460 psychology we talk about in the book and lawrence mentioned it earlier i think you know nothing is

00:42:14.140 is good in extremes and so in the in the resilience chapter in revision you know we really talk about

00:42:19.640 this idea of you know of change in its extremes right and so and so one extreme of changes is someone

00:42:26.720 who the minute they face a difficulty the minute they face a hardship abandons course and immediately you

00:42:33.560 know goes to goes to find a new course of action and and decides that their plan is a failure and

00:42:38.320 and you know in psychology there's a lot of you know theories and research on you know things like

00:42:42.500 grit so angela duckworth you know her idea of grit is this kind of this this golden trait that predicts

00:42:48.380 success is people's ability to be gritty and work through things and you know we talk about you know

00:42:53.020 desirable difficulties as you know being able to work through difficult moments and and difficult

00:42:58.920 decisions often require difficult moments you know so so the the wedding example i gave earlier you

00:43:05.380 know after making the decision there were difficulties you know in telling people what your choice is you

00:43:11.860 know there's difficulties and if you change a job it's not immediately amazing sometimes and in the

00:43:16.600 first six to twelve months there's difficulties you know if you leave a relationship there's

00:43:21.000 difficulties right and so there's this psychological idea that you know you have to work through those and

00:43:25.300 that's you know that that's critical to success and it is and then on the other side there's a another

00:43:30.980 organizational psychologist who kind of studied this idea of persistence and identified this really

00:43:35.640 interesting part of persistence called inappropriate persistence which is kind of this idea of just

00:43:41.180 persisting for the sake of persisting because you just want to persist right which is almost like the

00:43:46.320 complete opposite end of the spectrum and you're not persisting for a reason you're not persisting for a

00:43:52.080 purpose you're merely persisting because you don't want to not persist at something and again that

00:43:57.260 extreme of non-revision is equally detrimental and equally harmful you know if you change jobs and you

00:44:03.980 move countries and two years in you hate it and you still are unhappy and still nothing is going correct

00:44:10.540 maybe there's a point to re-evaluating and coming home and so it comes down to the question that you

00:44:16.080 asked brett was you know how do you juggle and how do you know what the right balance of those two polar

00:44:22.100 ends of the scale are and i think it comes back to in the way that we kind of talked about it in the

00:44:26.440 book is knowing why you're persisting right so so when you're experiencing a difficulty a desirable

00:44:32.220 difficulty or otherwise why are you being gritty what are you being what are you persisting in purpose

00:44:38.300 of or in in in in the quest for and i think it comes back to that idea of are you persisting for

00:44:44.780 something that is sacred that is important that means something to you are you persisting in line

00:44:50.660 with your values and your goals and if you're not and you just find yourself persisting because of a

00:44:56.100 fear of non-persisting well then you may be in that state that you're no longer being driven by the

00:45:01.500 right motives and by the right motivations so it all goes back to knowing thyself i think it really does

00:45:07.520 and i think you know i think the more that we we talk about the book and the more that we you know the

00:45:11.500 more that we we hear from you know the readers that the the have you know been very kind to you

00:45:16.560 know share their thoughts on it with us that's what i think it comes down to from from one of

00:45:20.980 the big parts i think when we wrote it and what people are reading from it is the value of knowing

00:45:25.360 thyself and and it's difficult because i think especially if you're young and you know you're

00:45:30.360 thinking about your values you know values change you know knowing yourself the personality may be

00:45:35.780 slightly more more rigid but things that are sacred to you that matter to you that are really

00:45:40.200 important to you they change and it's almost like working out it's something that you you do need

00:45:45.000 to consciously often think about think about what matters to you reflect on it update what is actually

00:45:52.300 sacred and important to me and lawrence and i we had a long walk on the beach a few weeks ago

00:45:56.520 where we talked about our values and our goals and it's interesting that i have kind of you know as

00:46:01.280 i've grown up i'm experiencing you know sacred value shifts in real time and you can't make a good

00:46:07.900 decision unless you know what the most important thing to you is because you know the real risk here

00:46:14.380 i think you know that the one of the risks is not making a decision but the other risk is making a

00:46:18.680 decision driven by a value that you think is the sacred one and finding out after you've made the

00:46:23.880 decision that it really isn't and that's not a that's not a state i think we'd wish on anyone

00:46:28.360 and something that you know really this book is aimed at trying to help people avoid so while i think the

00:46:33.780 star model is critical because i think it it really talks about what i think real life difficult

00:46:38.740 decisions look like we can't take away from just the importance of knowing who you are and what

00:46:44.660 really matters to you when you're kind of looking at making these kind of you know fork in the road

00:46:50.360 you know life-changing decisions well lawrence neil it's been a great conversation where can people go

00:46:55.040 to learn more about the book and your work i would uh the book is currently available on amazon.co.uk

00:47:00.780 and on audible and uh for any american listeners i believe in about a few months it will be out for

00:47:06.300 the uh for the stateside audience and any of our work on kind of the the operational side of things

00:47:11.780 so training with police military law enforcement we have our ground truth website which lawrence can

00:47:17.480 correct me if i get it wrong it's ground hyphen truth.co.uk but that's where we kind of you know work

00:47:22.820 with all of the practitioners on our decision making trainings and our rapport trainings and any of that

00:47:29.040 or our twitter feeds if you i guess want to see our opinions on uh well current events

00:47:33.800 fantastic well lawrence and neil thanks for your time it's been a pleasure

00:47:37.020 thank you very much great great to speak to you my guests today were lawrence allison and neil

00:47:41.900 shortland they're the authors of the book decision time it's available on amazon.com make sure to check

00:47:46.000 out our show notes at aom.is slash decision time where you find links to resources where you delve deeper

00:47:50.240 into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast make sure to check out our website

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00:48:47.800 you

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

How to Make Life’s Big Decisions

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