Review Thinking in Bets

With the book Thinking on Bets – Making smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts, former world Series of Poker champion Annie Duke gives us the tools to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.

The book is pleasantly written, consists of six chapters and offers both theory and practice with frequent analogies being sought to her experience as a poker player.

The author defines decisions as bets on our beliefs. So how sure are you about your beliefs? Bets are decisions about an uncertain future. The approach of thinking in bets moves you towards objectivity, accuracy, and open mindedness. You have to reconnaissance your outcomes or futures and puts probability percentages and desirability’s to your futures. 

If you start to view the world through the lens of “Wanna bet”, you are more likely to recognize that there is always a degree of uncertainty (less sure), nothing is black and white, 0% or 100%. Even if the outcome has a negative quality for you this doesn’t mean that quality of the decision-making is bad too. The other way around is also possible. A bad decision resulting in a qualitative good outcome is just luck.

To support your own decision-making and overcome your own blind-spot bias and confirmation bias it will help if you can get support from others. Several examples are given. You can set up a buddy system but don’t make it an echo chamber just repeating your own beliefs. What you need are dissent channels or read teams to hear the other side as well. A reasonable diversity in the group will help to make productive group decisions. You need at least three people in your group. Two to disagree with you and one to be the referee.

When you build your scenario’s or set of possible futures/outcomes you can user many instruments to get more realistic futures:

• Backcasting (positive visualization of futures)
• Premortem (negative visualization of futures)
• Prospective hindsight (imagining that an event has already occurred)
• Likelihood of pos. and neg. futures must add up 100%
• 10-10-10 (consequences in ten minutes, ten months, ten years).

If you acknowledge that decisions are bets based on jour own beliefs and you get comfortable with uncertainty, and you want to improve the quality of your decisions then this book is absolutely worth reading.

To buy: managementboek.nl, bol.com, amazon.com