Here are a few ideas on who you might want to ask and why they'd be particularly helpful. There can often be pretty sharply diminishing returns to sharing with too many people, and having a clear idea in mind for what people are adding can help prevent this. 'Smart, kind people I know' is a perfectly reasonable start, but after that it might help to ask yourself what specifically you expect people to help with. Put some thought into who to ask for comments. Consider putting clear instructions for commenters early in the document to help with this. It might be the case that you don't have a clear view for what you're uncertain about, and roughly just want an overall 'sense check', but it also might be that there's a particular part of the decision you're hoping for feedback on, and everything else is just context which seems relevant but is already fixed. Often it can be difficult to know how honest to be when giving feedback to a friend, especially if you're not super close and/or haven't already established norms for how much honesty/criticism to expect. Let people know what you're hoping to get from them Unless you put a ton of detail in comments on different cells (which then makes the document a nightmare to read), you're probably missing a lot of reasoning/detail if this is the format you go with. In one case I ended up finding a fairly severe mistake in their model, which was helpful, but overall I think this is a bad strategy. I've had a few people share Excel models with me. I think a reasonable method to try first is brain-dumping everything into the document, then editing for clarity before you share it. People are more likely to read shorter documents, and it will take them less time to do so, but leaving out a consideration or piece of information that is an important factor to you will cost people more time and/or make their advice worse in the long run. If you're facing a decision and haven't done this, I would much rather you just went and followed the steps at the start before reading further. Also, they often say thank you, or that you helped, and that's nice too! What does doing this well look like? I find it really interesting, and fairly easy, to comment on decision documents for people I know well, and I know many people feel the same. I'm listing it here mostly to highlight that this clearly is a big source of value, though it's not clear that it's bigger than the previous two. To some extent this is the obvious reason to go through this process. Responding to these will often cause you to better understand your own thought process, and might identify blindspots in your current thinking. You may even get some big wins for free, for example realising that two options might not be mutually exclusive, or that one of the things you're trying to achieve is because of a preference that you don't, on reflection, endorse.Įven when you're doing the above well, other people trying to understand your reasoning will ask clarifying questions. Trying to write out how you're weighing the various factors that are going into your decision is a good way of helping you work out which ones actually matter to you, and how much. My job involves helping people through difficult decisions, and I often find that a lot of the value I provide comes from asking people questions which make considerations and tradeoffs salient to them. Writing out your reasoning is often helpful. Share it with some people you think might have useful input, asking for comments.Write out your current thinking in a google doc. There are a lot of things about this community that I really love, but possibly my favourite is a thing people often do when they're trying to make a difficult and/or important decision:
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