Encertain: Decide Smarter

Achieve a flywheel effect in your business with an easy-to-use decision assistance tool.

Titlescreen4
Device frame

Making a Great Decision Quickly Is a Tough Call

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7

Decisions

There is a myth there are no problems with human decision making. People tend to rely on their gut feeling and biased cognitive patterns, which affects your business.
  • 1

    Just "Good Enough"

    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”.
    Herbert A. Simon
  • 2

    Thinking Fast and Slow

    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.
    Daniel Kahneman
  • 3

    The Psychology of Persuasion

    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.
    Robert Cialdini
  • 4

    Mental Errors

    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.
    Cognitive biases
  • 5

    Good and Great

    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.
    James C. Collins
  • 6

    The Way to the Best

    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.

Do You Have an Incentive to Make It Better?

Satisfactory Is the Enemy of Great And Great Can Be Also Quick

There's a common bias that great things are costly and time-consuming, therefore it's often decided to do something satisfactory. Whereas Pareto's principle isn't bad in some cases, the common problems with satisfactory decisions are: you prevent a flywheel effect of great decisions combined in a row, and you prevent elaborated greatness in a guaranteed way if you choose survival/satisfactory results. Survival strategy is usually incompatible with success strategy, so in order to have great business success strategy should dominate over survival strategy. Great things can be also quicker than good things, and not necessarily more effortful or time consuming.

Typical Decision Kinds:

Shortlisting projects/participants, selection

Prioritization

Multi-criteria evaluation

Resolving a debate

Gaining insights

Brainstorming

Externalizing many conflicting pros/cons

Problem

Slow, disadvantageous, or team-disengaging decisions.

  • Complexities with team consensus

    Debates, many emails and meetings.

  • Decision-making process being unstructured, non-estimable.

    Focus lost in meetings and emails or clicking through JIRA or spreadsheets.

  • Chaotic & long decision cycle

    Can take months, e. g. long procurement & selection cycle for an ERP system

  • Subjective view on decisions proposal

    Easy to miss hidden important factors or alternatives.

  • Not choosing first how do we want to decide

    The choice of methodology is spontaneous and unconscious

  • “Talking through” the decision leads to communication artifacts like prejudice and bias

    No traceability, hints or learnings

  • Not noticing important factors & alternatives to consider

    Also extends the time with adding up more rounds of communication

  • Not very traceable methodology of past decision-making

    Thus not learning from it; and thus not noticing wrong basis or assumptions.

  • Analysis Paralysis

    Decision-making is one of the most resource-intensive operations for the nervous system. It is easy to get confused when many factors are involved.

  • Not learning also from accumulated knowledge on other’s decisions or similar cases.

  • Unnoticeable and unavoidable cognitive bias with no metrics.

    E. g. comparing pros with cons in a non-measurable way, “decision matrices” approach
Photo 2023 04 05 09 26 13

How Ideally the Decision Making Should Be Done

Using a modern tool, same way as we use hammers for nails, mobiles for communication, calculators to calc, bicycles, cars, computers, etc:

  • Quick and Effective

    • Quick decision-making process
    • Real-time collaboration with input of all human decision-making peers
    • Automated instant mathematical analysis

  • Transparent

    • Transparent & traceable basis, traceability of past decisions
    • Structured and clear decision-making process

  • Learning

    • Learning from the past, from other similar decisions
    • Mutual learning with AI: AI learns from humans, humans learn from AI, considering important things we didn't think of

What Is Encertain

Decision-assistance tool targeted to strategic teams (like boards of directors & advisers) coming to the best decision possible by visualizing, instant mathematical scoring, and AI suggestions.
Image10

Decision-Assistance Tool Becomes Essential

Make every time only the best (and quick) decision possible with AI-assistance and instant decision-theory-mathematical modelling.

  • Decide

    • Externalize the factors that are important for a decision.
    • Estimate the relative weights of alternatives and factors.
    • Get analytical calculations as numerical values (how much weight gained each variant of the solution).

  • Arrange

    • Structure complex things, put them in nice order.
    • Measure the importance of competing objectives and alternatives.
    • Make your decisions traceable.

  • Visualize

    • Visualize the alternatives and factors of the question, making the vague things clear.
    • Get your data processed and represented as a visual result of the alternatives analysis.
    • Remain at the same decision board and see the scoring results instantly without much iterations or discussions.

Apart from that, in comparison to the competitors:

Fewer user actions required and modeling the same problem to make a decision on is way quicker.

Decision model is edited on the same screen with getting score calculated instantly as you move the cards.

In order to edit, customers don't need to go back several screens and start modeling from there all over again (like with all other DSSs).

No need to fill in several screens of forms or enter formulas.

No complex learning curve.

Comparison of encertain

No Learning Curve

No need to learn:

  • Decision Theory
  • Game Theory
  • Theory of Constraints
  • Optimization Methods
  • Mathematics
  • Programming
  • Machine learning
  • Consensus Algorithms

It's inbuilt in the software under the hood

Innovativeness

Enjoy new approach to representing the decision, adding modern AI assistance, combining instantly mathematical, visual, and linguistic aspects in one screen every decision-making team member connects to (instead of emailing or rounds of meetings etc).

Externalize & Visualize Problem

Enter your alternatives and the corresponding decision factors

Problem solving

Instant Scoring

Prioritize your factors and move cards getting an instant math scoring

Problem solving and decision making

Versatility

Encertain is adaptable and suitable to a high range of problems: strategic, financial, technical and many more.

Problemamegoldas es donteshozatal

Contributes to:

  • Established businesses

    Boards of Directors, top managers, and company executives

  • Startups

    Beginning entrepreneurs and small teams

  • Investors

    Business angels, venture capitalists, and project managers

  • Procurement departments

    Procurement professionals making decisions on providers

  • Government projects

    Managers of projects with government funding

Uses Cases

Encerta.in has been successfully used to improve both organizational decision-making and individual decision support.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Screenshot 2023 04 29 at 14.13.00
  • Nomad 1
  • Nomad 3
  • 8

Team

Expertise

Decision theory maths, psychology, consulting, coaching, and software.

Flexibility

We're early stage and thus we're open to have a call and get acquainted closer with you and your type of decision problems, get to know each other, with our Early Adopters program.

Let's Work Together

For just $1 we'll investigate your specific needs and decision problems.

The call will be arranged, you'll try out the software, together we'll plan the features you want and adapt the tool to your needs.

The Focus

Our focus is to help you reach a quantitive-driven decisions by taking emotion and bias out of the decision making equation.

The Process

We have identified general categories of decisions and have a path that we take a client through depending upon the ideal direction of the client and our assessment. By following this process, we are able to continuously add to our process and procedures that we are building into the application.