Encertain: Decide Smarter

Herbert A. Simon, an American economist and political scientist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 (also the Alan Turing math award), said that the limited information processing capabilities of the human mind means that people look for answers that are satisfactory or ones that are "good enough". Whatever the mind hits upon first that seems to meet the criteria, is what it goes with. Simon came up with this term “satisficing” to describe the process, which stands for a combination of the words "satisfy" and "suffice". There's a need to add some science to the equation, helping people to make an optimal decision. Practice says that there is a big difference between “satisfactory” and “optimal”.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, wrote about fast and slow types of thinking. In general, people automatically use fast thinking, which has both pluses and significant disadvantages: distortions, systematic errors, which it tends to commit in certain circumstances. At times it does not answer the questions asked, but the easier questions, and is poor at logic and statistics. And slow thinking is energy-consuming and needs to be specifically turned on to solve complex problems and make counterintuitive correct conclusions instead of intuitive erroneous ones. Slow thinking gets too much energy and it is really slow, so it is hard to use it constantly without some support.

Robert Beno Chaldini, the American psychologist and scientist best known for his 1984 book on persuasion and marketing, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, found that influence is based on key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, sympathy, and a sense of unity. All of these discovered effects are based on provoking automated-spontaneous decisions in a number of situations. Minds are deliberately overwhelmed by external cues, and it becomes very difficult to make deliberate and correct decisions. Simple and quick auxiliary tools can help protect against the pressure of "dirty tricks.

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from the norm and/or rationality of judgments. Cognitive distortions affect people's behavior and decisions, it is difficult to be immune to such mental errors. For stable making effective decisions people need to cultivate rationality of thinking in oneself for a long time and hard. Or use an external assistant, like a AI-based virtual assistant, which will help not to fall into the traps of mental design.

James C. Collins, American researcher, writer, speaker and consultant, bestselling author of "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't" shows that there is a huge difference between "good" and "great" companies — they have radically different impact on the fate of companies and the world around them. The difference between good decisions and the best ones is the same.

That's why you need a decision-assistance tool that will help you to come to the best decision possible, a tool that combines visualizing, instant mathematical scoring, and AI assistance.