Make better decisions with scenario planning
Too often, you limit yourself to too small a set of outcomes. The worse is that you can only imagine one. Mostly you think of two because you tend to think in binary terms: A or B, yes or no, this or that.
The reality is that there are multitudes of outcomes, more than you can imagine, because you live in a complex, multivariate world, and the answer is rarely a set of binary results.
In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke says strategic thinkers consider a broader set of possible outcomes:
"the best strategists are considering a fuller range of possible scenarios, anticipating and considering the strategic responses to each”
You don't have to consider every outcome, but you should consider more than two.
Duke calls this scenario planning (a.k.a, reconnaissance mapping, future mapping). It's when you take a belief, place your bet, and consider the probability of each outcome occurring. The concept can be summarized as follows:
You have a belief.
You place a bet on the belief.
There will be a set of outcomes.
The outcomes will have different probabilities of occurring.
You have to assign a probability of each outcome occurring. Giving a number makes you realize how strenuous this exercise can be. Back in your binary thinking, it's 0% or 100%; not very taxing, mentally. If you give yourself three potential outcomes, you may default to 33% each. Increasing the number of possibilities to five, it becomes harder to convince yourself that the probability of each occurring is equal, or 20%. You probably wouldn't place that bet.
Considering every possibility can be overwhelming, but you don't have to worry about doing that because it is an impossible task. Five possible outcomes for any scenario seem like a good place to start. If you can't think of five different results, then maybe you're not thinking hard enough because you'll already have at least two when you start: yes or no, 0%, or 100%. You only have to come up with 3 more somewhere in between.
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It’s the loneliest number since the number one”