Decision-making is not just a cognitive exercise; there are benefits to approaching it as a whole person. 

To talk more about this, I invited Amy Day, decision educator and executive director of the nonprofit Clarity for Action, to my podcast. Amy likes to say that she grew up in a decision laboratory, surrounded by giants from the field of decision science. She's certified as a decision educator, coach and advisor through Stanford, continuing studies.

Over the past 20 years, she has combined her native background in decision quality, with insights, from social emotional learning, in order to teach emerging adults and parents to integrate whole person decision making into their lives in order to get clarity and take purposeful action.

Today, Amy explains how to check one's decision fitness with a simple acronym, the four components of whole person decision making, and what parents and adults can do to cultivate decision skills and the young people they support.

Topics Covered

2:49 Whole person decision making

4:27 Growing up in a decision laboratory

7:24 Working the emotions that arise in decision making

8:34 Decision fitness and my internal operating system

14:10 Four areas of whole-person decision making

14:20 Values: Who am I

16:02 Internal Operating System: How am I, decision fitness, and HALT

18:36 The importance of putting on your own oxygen mask first

19:37 Decision Process: What could I

26:53 Action: What are my action steps

27:55 Quality of decisions, quality of outcomes

32:11 Decision aftercare

36:00 Decision classroom

About Amy Day’s nonprofit, Clarity4Action

Our goal at Clarity4Action.org is to support people in moving from feeling confused and stuck to calm clarity and effective action in their choices. We teach and coach whole-person decision making to young people as they emerge into adulthood and the people who support them.

Resources 

• Clarity4Action website Clarity4Action.org
• The Four Outcomes Guide
• Sign up to receive our weekly email for integrating better decision making into your life. https://clarity4action.org/thoughtful-thursday-blog/

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

How can you know you've made a good decision, even before you know how things turn out? It’s all about understanding decision quality.

To talk about that, I invited award-winning decision quality expert, Carl Spetzler onto today's show. Carl is the co-founder and chairman of Strategic Decisions group, a leading strategy consulting firm, renowned for its expertise in strategic decision making for greater value creation. He also literally wrote the book on decision quality along with his colleagues, Hannah Winter and Jennifer Meyer.

Today, we talk about how the concept of decision quality has helped companies make better decisions when millions and billions of dollars are on the line, how you can employ the six links of decision quality to be confident you are making a good decision, as well as other tips for making better decisions.

Topics Covered

2:49 The early days of decision analysis and engineering economics

6:17 Applications of decision quality in the corporate world

7:55 Applications of decision quality in everyday life

11:28 How to have a good decision at the time you make it

11:35 Appropriate frame

14:08 Creative alternatives

14:45 Values

16:14 Information

17:12 Sound reasoning

17:53 Commitment to action

21:05 Your decision is only as good as the weakest link

22:06 How to use the six links when you need to make decisions quickly

23:58 Having the right decision agenda

25:34 Pay attention to how you relate to clarity and action

Guest Bio

Carl Spetzler is the co-founder and chairman of Strategic Decisions Group, a leading strategy consulting firm renowned for its expertise in strategic decision-making for greater value creation. He is also the lead author of Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions (Wiley, 2016) with coauthors Hannah Winter and Jennifer Meyer. 

He serves on the board of the Decision Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the decision-making skills of youth. In 2004, Dr. Spetzler received The Ramsey Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS for lifetime contributions to the field.

Resources mentioned

• Strategic Decisions Group
• Society of Decision Professionals
• Decision Education Foundation
• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

Making decisions as an individual has its challenges, but having to make decisions as a group adds many other layers of complexity. To talk about that, I brought my friend, Alexis Gonzales-Black onto today's show. 

Alexis is a Partner and the org design lead at August Public. Before August, she led the implementation of Holacracy at Zappos and helped shape an emerging org design practice for world-class clients at IDEO. She is an expert in organization design and is driven by a desire to make workplaces more inclusive, agile, and fun.

In this episode, we talk about what she's noticing about the future of work in a hybrid environment, why consensus is not the right approach 90% of the time, what truly inclusive decision processes look like, and a quick reframe that enables you to make group decisions faster.

Topics covered

03:02 Moving from remote to hybrid

06:16 Decision making as a persistent challenge

09:04 We love consensus

09:47 Decision making as a spectrum

10:46 Two other approaches to try

16:22 Stakeholder mapping

18:26 Inclusion in decision-making processes

21:05 What's possible when you reframe decision making as a skill learned over time

22:25 What happens when you push decision making down to the levels closest to the 

work

23:29 Leading the roll out of Holocracy at Zappos

25:09 A tangent on releasing ourselves from the idea that we can achieve certainty

26:01 Back to Holocracy at Zappos

29:13 Human centered org design at IDEO

31:28 What has been most fascinating about the work at August Public

35:23 Decision making as a perfect proxy for understanding what's going on in an 

organization

37:30 Key things to remember or try

Guest Bio

Alexis is a Partner and the Org Design lead at August Public. She is an expert in organization design, change activation, and the future of work. Over the past 15 years, she's worked with some of the world's most respected companies to design innovative organizational practices and implement large, complex change programs. Before August, she led the implementation of Holacracy at Zappos and helped shape an emerging org design practice for world-class clients at IDEO. She is driven by a desire to make workplaces more inclusive, agile, and fun.

Resources

• Learn from the experts at August Public: https://www.aug.co/learning

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

When making a decision, we should seek out the "best" option, right? Turns out, seeking to maximize your outcomes is likely to leave you less happy and more stressed. On the show today I bring you one of my mentors, Barry Schwartz, who wrote the game-changing book The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less.

Barry shares why maximizing is a bad goal, talks about the benefits of constraints, and shows how practical wisdom is what will enable us to succeed in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Topics covered

03:01 What prompted him to get into this field

06:48 What makes a decision bad? And people making decisions inconsistent with their 

goals.

09:07 Maximizing is a bad goal

11:07 Culture's influence on maximizing and unhappiness

12:14 Why constraints are good

22:37 Support Barry's grandkids' education!

23:13 Practical wisdom

28:02 What is needed is judgment, not rules

31:24 The need to learn how to live with uncertainty and ambiguity

34:56 Why you should learn to be a chefs vs. a cook

37:59 Analytical tools can help…

40:11 Key things to remember

Guest Bio

Barry Schwartz is an emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. He has spent fifty years thinking and writing about the interaction between economics, psychology, and morality.  He has written several books that address aspects of this interaction, including The Battle for Human Nature, The Costs of Living, The Paradox of Choice, Practical Wisdom, and most recently, Why We Work. Schwartz has written for sources as diverse as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, the Harvard Business Review, and the Guardian. He has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including NPR’s Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation, and has been interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), the PBS News Hour, The Colbert Report, and CBS Sunday Morning. Schwartz has spoken four times at the TED conference, and his TED talks have been viewed by more than 20 million people.

Resources

• The Paradox of Choice book
   

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

Decisions about what you want to do next in life feel big- they can literally change your life. That's why so many people feel stuck in the process. Today I'm speaking with my friend, Kathy Davies, the Managing Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. She is also the co-founder of Designing Your Life for Women and a Master Trainer of the Designing Your Life process. 

In today's episode, Kathy provides an overview of what it looks like to apply design thinking to life decisions, talks about the value of sitting with emotions and feelings, explains why community helps us get unstuck, and invites employers to help co-create new options that work for both companies and employees. 

Topics Covered

03:23 What is life design?

05:05 The human centered design thinking process

05:36 Empathy

05:43 Define

06:27 Ideate

07:33 Prototype

08:42 Prototyping as a mindset shift

9:30 Start small

10:54 Prototyping careers through conversation

12:26 Test: incorporate your learnings

14:08 The importance of recognizing when it's time to engage in the process, and when 

it may not be time

16:12 The value of recognizing what we need

18:10 The value of sitting with emotions and feelings

19:48 We are all in process, especially at the time of transition

21:10 It helps to do this in community

22:39 The feelings that keep people stuck

25:29 The opportunity companies have in co-creating options that work

30:38 Four-step process for getting started with life design

35:38 The key mindset shift

Guest Bio

Kathy Davies is the Managing Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, where she teaches Product Design, Mechanical Engineering, and “Designing Your Life”. She is also the co-founder of Designing Your Life for Women and a Master Trainer of the Designing Your Life process. She has 15 years of experience developing electromechanical and software products, and proudly holds five patents. Kathy consults with Silicon Valley companies, teaches design thinking, conducts ethnographic research, and develops product strategies and concepts. She believes design thinking and life design are powerful mechanisms for getting unstuck, and is a passionate advocate for use of design thinking to empower social change, especially around equity for women.

Resources

• The Designing Your Life website
• The Stanford Life Design Lab
• Upcoming Designing Your Life for Women and Designing Your Life for Everyone workshops
• Designing Your Life for corporate teams
• Season 3 of Ask A Decision Engineer - All the feels

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

In this fourth season of the podcast, I'm bringing folks on the show who have influenced my work on decision-making. And who better to start with than Seth Godin, without whom this podcast would not exist.

Seth is an entrepreneur, an author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, writer of one of the most popular blogs in the world and a dear teacher of mine when it comes to dancing with the emotions that come up in decision-making. Today, we talk about making decisions with intent, the difference between intent and purpose, why fear is not a bad thing, and how to dance with fear when making decisions.

Topics covered

02:20 Why is learning to make good decisions important?

03:39 Mindful decision making: intent vs instinct

04:56 The useful practice of meta-cognition

06:04 The difference between purpose and intent

07:51 Being on the hook is the best place to be

08:24 How to grapple with the fear of being on the hook

09:59 Staring down fear is a good signal

13:46 What's the payoff of dancing with fear?

16:01 Quality of decisions is distinct from quality of the outcome

16:36 How to dance with the fear of regret

16:36 Dancing with the fear of what others may think

21:52 Decision making as a posture

24:01 The freedom that comes with understanding sunk costs

Guest Bio

Seth is an author, entrepreneur, and most of all, a teacher.. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 20 best-selling books, including The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What To Do When It's Your Turn (And It's Always Your Turn). His book, This is Marketing, was an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The latest book is The Practice, and creatives everywhere have made it a bestseller. Though renowned for his writing and speaking, Seth also founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne (acquired by Yahoo!). By focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership, to the spread of ideas and changing everything, Seth has been able to motivate and inspire countless people around the world.

Resources

• The altMBA
• Akimbo, home of The Podcasting Workshop and others
• Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

When facing big decisions, even the smartest people can get tied into knots. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Hi, I'm Michelle Florendo.

I studied decision engineering at Stanford and over the past 15 years, I've helped hundreds of people navigate complex decisions in their professional and personal lives.

In season four of my podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer, I'll be interviewing guests on the show who will share insights, strategies, and tools to help you work through your decision-making challenges.

You'll hear from authors, professors and practitioners spanning the fields of decision science, psychology, organizational behavior, and human centered design.

New episodes drop in June. Subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts.

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

In this Ask Me Anything (AMA) episode, I answer a question from a listener about how to tell whether the decisions he has made were the best ones. Listen in as I discuss how to reduce doubt after making a decision.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• 1:55 - what this listener is really asking
• 4:02 - the short answer to the question
• 5:23 - what would be more helpful when facing this question
• 6:13 - the feeling that prompts this question and why you feel it
• 7:58 - the surprising truth about wanting to maximize your outcomes
• 9:25 - the first step in feeling better about your decisions
• 10:23 - the power of choosing contentment over conditioning
• 11:33 - how to get clear with your objectives
• 12:47 - the importance of committing to staying present

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

In this Ask Me Anything (AMA) episode, I answer a question from a listener about how to approach decisions so that she can move past overwhelm and feel more confident in her decision making. Listen in as I discuss four key steps for her to tackle decisions with more ease.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• 1:23 - Process orientation vs. outcome orientation
• 2:32 - Improving confidence by discarding unrealistic bars for decision quality
• 5:32 - Knowing where to focus by using the Covey's Circles tool
• 8:39 - Breaking decisions down into bite-sized pieces using the 3 Components framework
• 10:41 - Key questions to ask to drive toward clarity in each component
• 17:44 - Other ways you can use the 3 Components framework
• 19:19 - The critical last step in any decision making process

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.

Sometimes there are decisions that are so overwhelming and emotionally draining that what we decide to do to stay mentally and emotionally fit enough to make the decision is as important as the decision process itself. In today's episode, you'll hear from a guest client facing a difficult decision regarding care for her aging mother with a mental health condition. Learn strategies for working through tough decisions involving others.

Key topics we cover:

• 1:58 - What's key to consider in emotionally difficult decisions
• 2:30 - Constraints in decision making
• 8:31 - How Covey's Circle of Influence is a tool that can be used to identify where to focus your efforts
• 15:11 - The importance of identifying where you have control and where you don't have as much
• 17:22 - Divergent vs Convergent thinking in exploring options
• 22:05 - How constraints can sometimes be helpful
• 26:04 - How to deal with feelings that seem like an obstacle
• 29:45 - The importance of identifying what it will take to resource yourself

Resources if you are impacted by mental illness:

• NAMI.org - National Alliance on Mental Illness
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1 (800) 273-8255

To learn more from Michelle about decision making, check out

• The Ask A Decision Engineer website
• Her Stanford Continuing Studies course
• Her self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Her Decision Toolkit for Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop on Maven

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has coached and taught hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, in organizations ranging from pre-IPO startups to major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. 

She's been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, helps train coaches as a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford and her MBA from UC Berkeley.

For those interested in exploring Michelle's coaching and speaking services further, additional information can be found on her professional website at poweredbydecisions.com.