Ask a Decision Engineer

In all my years of teaching about decision making, no topic generates more angst than the need to know. But how do you know what you know? How do you know when you know what you know? And how do you integrate this knowing into some of the most important decisions of your life?

In this episode, I invited Dave Evans onto the show to talk all about these topics of knowing and discernment. Dave is the co-author of Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life. He co-founded the Stanford Life Design lab and holds the title of discernment lead for a social impact accelerator.

He shares a number of things he's learned from sitting with thousands of lives via the Designing Your Life programs, including how to go beyond cognitive knowing, the important distinction between certainty and faith, how to approach when things go wrong, and exercises for honing your discernment.

Topics Covered

1:01 A story of how Dave ran smack up against this discernment topic

2:27 It's ok to not have it all figured out

4:40 Defining discernment

5:58 You're not just a brain on a transport system

7:36 Overcoming resistance to tapping into the emotional center of knowing

10:11 The peak-knowing and trough-knowing exercise

10:59 Your brain announced it, but your brain didn't do it

12:21 The importance of articulating and reflecting on what's happening

12:54 Surrogation vs. analysis

14:47 We are humans, not robots

15:26 There is no knowing. Simply give it your best possible shot.

17:40 But what about when things go wrong?

21:16 Where the bias toward causality gets us in trouble

22:46 The falsehood of knowing and distinction between certainty and faith

24:55 The philosophical underpinnings of human-centered design

26:05 Faith and acceptance

28:41 How growth and collaboration factors into this

30:50 Most big decisions are a bet on your future self

33:48 Improve decision making by using multiple ways of knowing

34:10 The Odyssey plan as a tool for tapping into how various futures feel

36:01 In hard decision making, it's not about deciding the right thing

38:19 There's no elimination of risk, just reduction of risk. Know your threshold.

41:14 How to tune into other ways of knowing

42:51 Three levels of discernment: transaction, practice, and formation

45:08 The be-do-become cycle

Guest Bio

From saving the seals to solving the energy crisis, from imagining mice to redefining software — Dave’s been on a mission, including helping others to find theirs.

Starting at Stanford in the 70’s with dreams of following Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist, Dave realized (a bit late) that he was lousy at it and shifted to mechanical engineering with an eye on the energy problem. After four years in alternative energy, it was clear that this idea’s time hadn’t come yet. So while en route to biomedical engineering, Dave accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led the mouse team and introduced laser printing to the masses. When Dave’s boss at Apple left to start Electronic Arts, Dave joined as the company’s first VP of Talent, dedicated to making “software worthy of the minds that use it.”

Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. So he went out on his own working with start-up teams, large corporate executives, non-profit leaders, and countless young adults. They were all asking the same question. “What should I do with my life?” Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave first to Cal and then Stanford, where Dave is co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab in the Stanford Design Program.

Dave and his partner Bill Burnett made their popular Stanford course Designing Your Life into a New York Times #1 Bestselling book of the same name, released in September 2016, followed by Designing Your Work Life in February 2020 and Designing Your New Work Life in October 2021.

Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in Contemplative Spirituality from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Resources

• Designing Your Life website
• Designing Your Life book
• Designing Your *New Work Life 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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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.

Risk. For some people, the very thought sends chills down their spines, yet for others, the topic prompts a sense of thrill. Why is that the case? And what does that mean for how we think about risk in decision making?

To answer those questions and more, I turned to Michele Wucker, author of the books, The Gray Rhino, and You Are What You Risk. We chat about how the way we define risk matters, the layers of factors that make up our risk fingerprint, and things to keep in mind about risk when making group decisions. 

Topics Covered

03:11 What brought Michele to studying risk

08:12 The way you define risk, matters

12:26 Awareness is the first step in adjusting your natural tendency

13:14 Risk and group dynamics

16:06 Getting the right kind of diversity in the room to promote better decision making

18:02 The risk fingerprint concept

21:36 Optimizing your risk fingerprint given your personality and experiences

23:59 What feels risky depends on your values

25:13 How to build your risk muscle

25:31 Practice

26:32 Self-awareness

27:47 Surrounding yourself with the right people

28:56 Little hacks

30:14 How risk empathy can improve group decision making

31:25 Questions you can ask to better understand someone else's risk fingerprint

35:48 Thinking about risk in decisions that have broader impact

39:39 Me-here-now vs. Us-everywhere-forever

41:00 Final words of wisdom

Guest Bio

Strategist, speaker, and best-selling author Michele Wucker coined the term “gray rhino” as a call to take a fresh look at how we respond to obvious, probable, impactful risks. She founded the Chicago-based advisory firm Gray Rhino & Company and is a former media and think tank executive. Her four books include the influential global bestseller THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore and the recently released sequel, YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World.

Resources

• THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore
• YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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.

Confidence is a critical part of decision making and being an effective leader. Not enough confidence and you won't move a decision to the action or be able to cultivate the support needed to move it forward. 

Too much confidence and you could make decisions that unnecessarily put you and others at risk. So how do you walk the line of having just the right amount of confidence? 

Today, I speak with Don Moore: confidence expert, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor and author of the book, Perfectly Confident. We discuss the different types of overconfidence we should be aware of as well as ways that decision makers can better calibrate their confidence. He'll also share insights from his latest book Decision Leadership, which helps leaders think about how to empower people within their organizations to make better choices.

Topics Covered

03:02 What is at stake when confidence is not well calibrated?

04:52 Defining confidence

06:31 Confidence, reality, and the downsides of overconfidence

08:56 Calibrating confidence among startup founders

10:32 The 3 types of overconfidence

11:05 How to better calibrate your confidence

14:01 The importance of probabilistic thinking

15:52 Making decisions by calculating expected value

18:11 Beware of hindsight bias + Importance of documenting

19:44 What role should intuition play in decision making?

22:54 Some ways in which intuition is predictably biased

23:32 What decision makers should keep in mind - think beyond yourself

25:05 Leader as decision architect

28:03 Other ways leaders can positively influence the quality of decisions in their org

29:23 What to track

31:02 Choosing when to stop gathering information

32:49 Don't fall into the trap of focusing solely on what's easy to quantify

34:03 The downsides of underconfidence

Guest Bio

Don Moore is a professor of management of organizations at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He is the author of Perfectly Confident and a co-author of the books Judgement in Managerial Decision Making and Decision Leadership. His expertise and research interests include overconfidence, ethical choice, decision-making, and negotiation. He is only occasionally overconfident.

Resources

• Perfectly Confident
• Decision Leadership
• LearnMoore.org

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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. They are the way we can steer our lives forward, yet how much thought do people give to how they are making them? And more importantly, what are the small things we can do to improve them?

In this episode, I go back to basics with global decision making expert, Ralph Keeney. Ralph is a Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at Duke University and a Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He has written multiple books on decision making, including Value-Focused Thinking, Smart Choices, and Give Yourself A Nudge.

We talk about why it's worth putting thought into how you make decisions, the impact of shifting focus from decision problems, to decision opportunities, the importance of defining your values in a decision and some quick things you can do to improve your decision making.

Topics Covered

3:25 Why is it worth it to take time to think about decision making?

4:57 Learning the skill of decision making through practice

6:52 Which decisions are worthy of thought

7:46 How much time and effort to put into decisions

10:58 Shifting from alternatives-focused to value-focused thinking

14:46 Decision problems vs. decision opportunities

19:04 Decision opportunities as a way to reduce bad outcomes

21:03 Where you should focus your efforts to improve a decision

22:19 The three keys

24:40 The three keys: an example

27:41 How to nudge yourself to make better decisions

28:43 A nudge for those obsessed with finding the best option

31:29 Little nudges > Learning decision analysis

32:52 Practice on your personal decisions

34:45 Advice for those uncomfortable with decision making in the face of uncertainty

36:17 The upside of uncertainty

38:27 Parting words of wisdom

Guest Bio

Ralph L. Keeney is an expert on decision making. His passion is to help individuals and organizations improve their decision making skills. He has written extensively on the foundational ideas and concepts for making quality decisions and on practical procedures to routinely use, and applications of, those ideas and concepts on important decisions. Dr. Keeney has consulted on a wide range of decisions including corporate management problems, public policy, and significant personal decisions.

Professor Keeney’s books, which have been translated into numerous languages, include Decisions with Multiple Objectives with Howard Raiffa (1976, 1993), Value- Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking (1992), Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, with John S. Hammond and Howard Raiffa (1999), and Give Yourself a Nudge: Helping Smart People Make Smarter Personal and Business Decisions (2020).

Keeney received a Ph.D. in engineering and operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Research Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at Duke University and a Research Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in Canada and has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the U.S. since 1995.

Resources

• Give Yourself a Nudge: Helping Smart People Make Smarter Personal and Business Decisions (2020) 
• Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, with John S. Hammond and Howard Raiffa (1999)
• Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking (1992)
• Oji Decide

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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.

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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

• Check out Michelle’s self-paced course Decision Toolkit for Personal Decisions
• Michelle’s Decision Fluency for Professionals Course
• Her Decision Toolkit Coaches and Counselors virtual workshop

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.