Last week I listened to an interview with Annie Duke. She’s a former professional poker player who wrote two books on decision-making that I enjoyed (see here and here). During the interview, she explained why moving from implicit intuition to explicit decision-making, including expected-value calculations, leads to better outcomes in high-stakes situations. The gist of it was that instead of making decisions in our heads, we should write down our thinking and share the written document. The exercise of writing down your decision logic will help you spot errors (and avoid or fix them) and make it easier for others to spot flaws in your thinking.

I believe this to be true, but I don’t do it consistently enough with high-stakes decisions. I wanted to test it. Last week, I wrote, with the help of AI, an investment thesis for a publicly traded company. I then shared that thesis with two friends and asked them to discuss it with me after they’d reviewed it. Here are a few observations from the exercise:

• Writing down my logic and reading back through it helped me identify two points that contradicted a timeline that I’d proposed. When I did more digging to get more context around each point, I realized that my thesis was weaker than I’d thought, partly because of an update to my timeline.
• AI helped me create parts of this report, so going back and reading through it helped me catch errors in AI’s logic, too. AI made some irrational assumptions. When I pointed them out, it agreed and fixed them.
• Giving my decision logic to someone in writing, having them read it, and then discussing it afterward was a game changer. When we talked, they were totally up to speed on my thinking and were able to go straight to the areas where they thought my argument was strongest and weakest. The conversation was much deeper than if I’d tried to explain it to them orally.

This experiment showed me that Duke is spot on. When I’m making high-stakes decisions, it’s worth the effort to be explicit in my decision-making process by writing it down, reviewing it, and sharing it with others. The act of writing forces me to face holes in my thinking and allows others to easily see holes and point them out. All of this should reduce the chances of my making a bad decision.

If you want to listen to the section of the interview where Duke talks about explicit decision-making and calculating expected value, take a listen here.