The Alchemy
How do decisions get made? There’s lots of behaviors around decision making that we can point at. Some mixture of conversations happen, documents are written, feelings are felt. When and how the decision decides to precipitate is less obvious. It hides between the lines and it slips through time; sometimes the decision is made long before you realize and sometimes history retroactively accepts the decision as always having been. I’m sure there are exceptions, fields that institutionalize the process and keep the decision front and center, codified and visible, but I won’t lie and claim expertise. I assert they’re not the norm.
This common inscrutability is inevitable because we neither formalize nor observe the inner workings of the Human mind. That limitation is universally applied because the Human mind is the only tool that can synthesize vast amounts of information across wildly varied domains and somehow compel a coherent and sometimes even logical conclusion. That’s it; there’s no competition in town; there’s no choice or tradeoff to be made. You get one tool that already comes in a huge variety of slightly different shapes. Make it work.
The funny thing about the Human mind is we’re pretty big on tool use. We like to make ourselves better by re-shaping our environment. Admittedly our environment is a little interesting at the moment. We’re trying to stay afloat on this torrent of transformative tools flooding our workspace. Unfortunately nobody gets to call time-out so we can all orient ourselves and clean up.
What do we even want from decisions? Every now and then you’ve sat through the right meetings and talked to the right people. The API team is building a new set of tables for partners, a product team is pushing hard on an app marketplace, some folks have gotten roped into a billing migration; they’re building three copies of the same thing. You see the threads at the right moment and you pull everything together. You’re presented with the exceptionally rare obviously correct choice we’re all constantly searching for. Honestly I usually end up suspicious, surely I’m missing something. For one glorious moment everyone is pulling in the same direction, and it’s even the right direction. The impact is tangible and gratifying.
Someone is building augmented decision making at scale. The conservative forecast is that eventually every decision is engineered with immediate relevant actionable context; these “lucky” moments become the norm. The decision itself still eludes us, buried in our mysterious biological circuits, but the framework and consistency and outcomes of these augmented choices will manifest at the organizational scale like agents have utterly changed the individual. Some of us will have access to engineered luck.
We already know you’re not going to dump everything into a context lake and get luck; that’s how you build a context swamp and make bad decisions at scale. The whole reason we’re at a critical moment is how old and new tools are combining to catalyze something bigger than anything they can do individually. We need all the parts and we need them put together in some semblance of correct. Some of us even have a few of these tools lying around our org; we invoke them when it occurs to us or when our rituals require it to promise some future fortune. Honestly any lack of rigor just wasn’t that harmful because, until now, the picture couldn’t be completed.
Now it can. The new system will exist whether we learn the principles or not. A philosopher’s stone doesn’t do much good when everyone else has advanced to Chemistry.