Book Notes and Main Takeaways: “Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish

Positioning

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder.

A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision. One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.

What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options.

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

There is always something you can do in the moment today to better your position tomorrow.

LM: idea -> add “What can I do today to improve my position?” reminder to weekly note

Crafting your environment and selection your role models

What may look like discipline often involves a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviors.

The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment. Sometimes it’s part of a deliberate strategy, and sometimes it’s just plain luck.

The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.

It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

LM: relates to “You are the average of the 5 people you most spend time with”

if you don’t curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice.

Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.

Personal board of directors

Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors”

Seneca captured the right approach when he said in On the Tranquility of the Mind, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.”

LM: Collect only the mental models that will serve you, you don’t need to buy into the whole package. (eg. Elon Musk )

Choosing the right exemplars helps create a repository of “good behavior.” As you read what people have written, as you talk to them, as you learn from their experiences, as you learn from your own experiences, you begin to build a database of situations and responses. Building this database is one of the most important things you’ll ever do because it helps create space for reason in your life. Instead of reacting, and simply copying those around you, you think, “Here’s what the outliers do.”

LM: repository of “good behavior” = selected/crafted mental models

“How would I pitch this idea to my personal board of directors? What kinds of factors would they care about? What kinds of factors would they dismiss as irrelevant?” If you imagine your exemplars watching you, you’d tend to do all the things you know they’d want you to do and avoid the things you know would get in the way. It’s important to engage in this thoughtful exercise often. You have to keep doing it until you acquire a new pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Keep practicing until the pattern becomes second nature: an element of who you are, rather than just who you want to be.

One strategy for building strength is to practice in a sandbox. As you may have guessed, the sandbox is metaphorical — a situation in which any mistakes you make are relatively inconsequential and easily reversed. A sandbox allows you to make and learn from mistakes while containing their cost. Practicing in a sandbox increases the likelihood that you’ll be successful when the stakes are higher and the outcomes more consequential and less reversible.

Defining the problem: Problem Space vs Solution Space

Defining the problem starts with identifying two things: (1) what you want to achieve, and (2) what obstacles stand in the way of getting it. Unfortunately, people too often end up solving the wrong problem.

LM: this is so real in big organizations where developers don’t have a product/value driven mindset

Once someone states a problem, the team shifts into “solution” mode without considering whether the problem has even been correctly defined.

The result: organizations and individuals waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems. It’s so much easier to treat the symptoms than find the underlying disease, to put out fires rather than prevent them, or to simply punt things into the future.

The best decision-makers know that the way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions.

SAFEGUARD: Build a problem-solution firewall. Separate the problem-defining phase of the decision-making process from the problem-solving phase.

When you spend time trying to understand the problem, you realize that you have a room full of people who have insight that you don’t have. One way to keep meetings short and avoid the signaling that comes from repeating information that everyone knows is simply asking everyone, “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?” That question makes people think. They stop filling the air with ideas everyone already knows and start explaining how they think about the problem.

TIP: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day.

LM: Relates to what I wrote in the post about debugging hard problems: list hypothesis first, and then go about validating them.

Short-term solutions might make sense in the moment, but they never win in the long term. You feel like you’re moving forward when you’re actually just going in circles. People gravitate toward them because finding a short-term fix signals to others that they’re doing something. That’s the social default at work. It fools people into mistaking action for progress, the loudest voice for the right one, and confidence for competence.

LM: Relates to the self confidence aspect of good professionals. They are not tempted to show progress for the sake of showing progress. They keep themselves accountable to creating real value.

Only by dealing with reality — the often-brutal truth of how the world really works — can we secure the outcomes we want.

Decision Making: options

When we start exploring a problem in detail, things become more complicated before we understand it well enough to see the alternatives. Problem-solving novices try to reduce a decision to just two options because it creates the false sense that they’ve gotten to the problem’s essence. In reality, they’ve just stopped thinking.

THE 3+ PRINCIPLE: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.

Doing the work to add a third option forces us to be creative and really dig into the problem. Even if we don’t choose the third option, forcing ourselves to develop it helps us understand the problem better. It gives us more opportunities to align our decisions with our goals, offers more optionality in the future,

False dualities prevent you from seeing alternative paths and other information that might change your mind. On the other hand, taking away one of two clear options forces you to reframe the problem and get unstuck.

SAFEGUARD: Come up with Both-And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

The key is learning to live with the uncomfortable tension between opposing ideas long enough to see that there’s a solution that combines the best elements of both. And that’s what integrative thinking is all about.

Decision Making: opportunity costs

The ability to size up hidden trade-offs is part of what separates great decision-makers from the rest. It’s also a core element of leadership. Charlie Munger put it this way: “Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs . . . it’s your alternatives that matter. That’s how we make all of our decisions.”

THE OPPORTUNITY-COST PRINCIPLE: Consider what opportunities you’re forgoing when you choose one option over another. The second principle is closely related: THE 3-LENS PRINCIPLE: View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?

Decision Making: defining and communicating what matters

ambiguous criteria rob decision-makers of their ability to distinguish who’s right from who’s wrong, and force debates about semantics instead of which potential solution is the best.

One common example is when leaders make decisions about hiring or promotion based not on someone’s qualifications but on their likable personality. Being nice is not the same as being good at your job. Using niceness as a criterion in personnel decisions frequently doesn’t promote the goals of the organization.

“The problem isn’t your team. It’s you. You don’t know what’s most important. Until you do, your team will never make decisions without you. It’s too risky for them to figure out the most important thing. Communicate that to your team, and they’ll be able to make decisions on their own.”

LM: Be sure to always communicate the goals clearly and often

There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own. This is true leadership. You need to be clear about what values people are to use when making decisions. If I tell you the most important thing is serving the customer, you know how to make decisions without me.

LM: Elon Musk excels at this. Eg. Space X: Getting to Mars.

Most of the time, making your criteria battle is about calibrating shades of gray. It’s a mental exercise that takes you out of reactive mode and moves you toward deliberative thinking. Assigning quantitative values to your criteria often helps at this point. When you start comparing things and thinking how much you’ll pay for them — and whether in a currency of time, money, collective brain power — you gain clarity about what matters most to you and what doesn’t. You’re forced to think in terms of benefits and risks

When you don’t know what’s important, you miss things that are relevant and spend a lot of time on things that are irrelevant.

Decision Making: gathering information

Most information is irrelevant. Knowing what to ignore — separating the signal from the noise — is the key to not wasting valuable time.

LM: Eg. Following everyday news.

Think, for example, of investment decisions. The best investors know which variables probabilistically govern the outcomes, and they pay attention to those. They don’t ignore everything else, but focusing primarily on those variables allows them to filter massive amounts of information very quickly.

Knowing what to ignore allows you to focus on what matters. Follow the example of the best investors and know the variables that matter for evaluating the options before you start sorting through information.

THE HIFI PRINCIPLE: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information — information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

LM: This is so true. News about Warren Buffet most often totally distorts what are actually his real values and mental models. When reading his annual letters to shareholders, you learn that no matter how the market was historically agitated, his letters always ignored that noise and focused on the things that mattered.

The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information.

A lot of the information we consume is in the form of highlights, summaries, or distillations. It’s the illusion of knowledge. We learn the answer but can’t show our work.

LM: possible actionable -> may keep using youtube for the first screening of a new topic but then I need to go deep.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind.

You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed.

Sometimes the best information is the least

SAFEGUARD: Run an experiment. Try something out to see what kinds of results it yields. An experiment is a low-risk way of gathering important information.

LM: if possible, always test before committing to something that will have an impact on you long term. Work for free with a new business partner for a week before committing to working for the next 5 years.

SAFEGUARD: Evaluate the motivations and incentives of your sources. Remember that everyone sees things from a limited perspective.

To get a clearer picture of the concrete reality, consider how each person stands to benefit from the information they give you, and weave those perspectives together.

When you’re getting information from other people, you need to keep an open mind. That means withholding your own judgment as long as possible. People often undermine the information-gathering process by subjecting others to their judgments, beliefs, and perspective. The point isn’t to argue or disagree, however. Judging people and telling them they’re wrong only shuts them down and prevents a free flow of information. When you’re gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people’s eyes. You’re trying to understand their experience and how they processed it. You can learn valuable information even when you don’t agree with their view of the world. Just ask questions, keep your thoughts to yourself, and remain curious about other perspectives.

Question 1: What are the variables you’d use to make this decision if you were in my shoes? How do those variables relate to one another? Question 2: What do you know about this problem that I (or other people) don’t? What can you see based on your experience that someone without your experience can’t? What do you know that most people miss? Question 3: What would be your process for deciding if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it? (Or: How would you tell your mother/friend to go about doing it?)

Notice how different these questions are from the typical, “Here’s my problem. What should I do?”

Remember: the questions you ask help to determine the quality of the information you get.

Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. Getting even one expert’s advice can cut through a lot of confusion and help you quickly formulate and/or eliminate options.

LM: actionable: use the help of experts more often

Get precise on your ask: Be very clear what you’re looking for. Are you looking for them to review your plan and provide feedback? Are you looking for them to introduce you to people who can solve the problem? Whatever it is that you want, just be clear.

Decision Making: Decision cost and analysis paralysis

Another big reason we find action hard is that we’re afraid of being wrong. In this case inertia holds us in place as we gather more and more information in the false hope that we can ultimately eliminate uncertainty.

When the stakes are low, inaction hurts you more than speed. Sometimes it’s better just to make a quick choice and not spend time deliberating. Why waste time evaluating if an action is inconsequential and its effects are easily reversed?

When a decision is highly consequential and irreversible, its effects ripple throughout your life, and there’s no way to stop them. Some people call these “lead dominoes.” When decisions are like lead dominoes, the cost of a mistake is high. Exactly the opposite is true of a decision that’s inconsequential and easily reversed. The cost of a mistake is low: if you don’t like the outcome, you can just reverse it. The biggest mistake in cases like these is wasting time and mental energy. If you can take something back, or it doesn’t really matter, continuing to gather information becomes a drain on resources.

When the cost of a mistake is low, move fast.

LM: Apply GTD (Get Things Done) when stakes are low

THE ASAP PRINCIPLE: If the cost to undo the decision is low, make it as soon as possible. In fact, if something is too inconsequential, then engaging in any decision-making might be a waste. Just choose. Decide quickly, and learn by doing. You’ll save time, energy, and resources that you can use for decisions that really matter.

LM: relates to the Paradox of Choice. This gets easier with time -> practice picking an option sticking with it.

If you’ve ever struggled with analysis paralysis, a third principle can help you know when to stop deliberating and start acting: THE STOP, FLOP, KNOW PRINCIPLE: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose. Let’s consider the Stop, FLOP, and Know conditions one at a time.

Confidence increases faster than accuracy. “The trouble with too much information,” Robinson told me, “is you can’t reason with it.” It only feeds confirmation bias. We ignore additional information that doesn’t agree with our assessment, and gain confidence from additional information that does.

the rationale behind the ALAP Principle is to preserve optionality. When options start diminishing, it’s time to act using whatever information you have.

Decision Making: Margin of safety

It’s much easier to plan for things that could go wrong in advance when you’re calm and open-minded than it is to respond when things are in the midst of going wrong. When failure is expensive, it’s worth investing in large margins of safety.

Building a margin of safety means giving yourself as much cushioning and coverage in the future as possible. It’s a way of preparing yourself for the widest range of possible future outcomes — and protecting yourself against the worst ones.

We can’t prepare for everything. Some horrific events defy imagination, and no amount of preparation can ever give you enough optionality to deal with them. Yet we know from history that there are certain unfortunate events that we’re guaranteed to experience and that we can in fact prepare for, even if we have no idea when they’ll arrive. On a personal level, these include:

• Grief from losing a loved one
• Health issues
• Relationship changes
• Financial pressures
• Challenges in meeting our career goals

On a more macro level, they include the following:

• War and political dissent
• Natural disasters
• Environmental and ecological changes
• Economic fluctuations: both collapse and growth
• Technological advances and resistance to them

TIP: The margin of safety is often sufficient when it can absorb double the worst-case scenario. So the baseline for a margin of safety is one that could withstand twice the amount of problems that would cause a crisis, or maintain twice the amount of resources needed to rebuild after a crisis.

Here’s the bottom line: Predicting the future is harder than it seems. Things are great until they’re not. If things are good, a margin of safety seems like a waste. When things go wrong, though, you can’t live without it. You need a margin of safety most at the very moment you start to think you don’t.

Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options — in other words, shooting bullets and calibrating — keeps your options open before you commit the bulk of your resources to shooting a cannonball. Thinking about medical school? Shadow a doctor or a resident for a day. Take the MCAT and see what you score, or apply to colleges and see where you’re accepted. Thinking about a new career? Try doing it freelance a few nights per week first. Thinking about launching a new product? See if people are willing to pay for it before you build it.

Decision Making: Optionality

Preserving options carries a cost and can make you feel like you’re missing out. It’s hard watching others take action sometimes, even when those actions don’t make sense for you. Don’t be fooled! This is the social default at work. It tempts you to feel like it’s okay to fail so long as you’re part of the crowd.

Living with a decision before announcing it allows you to look at it from a new perspective and verify your assumptions. Once you’ve made the decision — even if you haven’t communicated it — you start seeing things in a new light.

Decision Making: prevent unclear thinking while in the action phase

FAIL-SAFE: Set up trip wires to determine in advance what you’ll do when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance.

The path to success and failure is marked if you know where to look. The journey always contains the answers. Trip wires include both negative signs and the absence of positive signs. When the signs are positive, you know to stay the course. When things are murkier, however, that’s when it helps to set trip wires.

When you don’t see the positive signs you expected, it doesn’t necessarily mean things have gone wrong. It does mean this is a moment worth paying attention to. Many projects fail, and many decisions get challenging right at this point — when people see neither negative signs nor the positive ones they expected. When that happens, it’s time to re-evaluate. Ask yourself, “Is the most important thing still the most important thing? Was I wrong? What will it take to reach my goals now that I’ve moved further in time but not in progress?” By having clear trip wires in place before you start, you increase the odds of success. When the entire team understands clearly the markers of success and failure, they are empowered to act the minute things veer off course.

FAIL-SAFE: Use commander’s intent to empower others to act and make decisions without you. Great leaders know that things don’t always go according to plan. They also know they can’t be everywhere at once. Teams need to know how to adapt when circumstances change. And circumstances change all the time. Giving a team enough structure to carry out a mission but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is called commander’s intent — a military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon.

You must communicate the strategy, the rationale, and the operational limits to the team. Tell them not just what to do, but why to do it, how you arrived at your decision, so they understand the context, as well as the boundaries for effective action — what is completely off the table.

Good leaders determine what needs to get done and set the parameters for getting there. They don’t care whether something gets done differently from how they themselves would’ve done it. As long as it advances to the objective within the limits they’ve set, they’re satisfied. Poor leaders insist that everything must be done their way, which ultimately demoralizes their team and undermines both loyalty and creativity — exactly the opposite of commander’s intent.

FAIL-SAFE: Tie your hands to keep your execution on track.

Whatever decision you’re facing, ask yourself, “Is there a way to make sure I will stick to the path I’ve decided is best?” By thinking through your options, and precommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems.

Decision Making: Evaluating outcomes

Obviously, we all want good outcomes, but as we’ve seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can have good ones. Evaluating decisions — ours or others’ — based on the outcome (or how we feel about the outcome) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control. Because of that, engaging in resulting doesn’t help us get better. The result of resulting is instead stagnation.

SAFEGUARD: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision. Don’t rely on your memory after the fact. Trying to recall what you knew and thought at the time you made the decision is a fool’s game.

Wisdom

The worst regret is when we fail to live a life true to ourselves, when we fail to play by our own scoreboard.

Scrooge played by society’s scoreboard — the one that amplifies our biological instinct toward hierarchy and leads us to pursue money, status, and power at all costs.

Wisdom requires all the things we’ve talked about: the ability to keep the defaults in check, to create space for reason and reflection, to use the principles and safeguards that make for effective decisions. But being wise requires more. It’s more than knowing how to get what you want. It’s also knowing which things are worth wanting — which things really matter. It’s as much about saying no as saying yes.

Savor daily pleasures instead of waiting for “big-ticket items” to make you happy.

We regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. The pain of trying and failing may be intense but at least it tends to be over rather quickly. The pain of failing to try, on the other hand, is less intense but never really goes away.

You might think of the impact — or lack of it — that you had on your community, your city, your country, or the world.

Tiny delights over big bright lights.

When we’re not going in the direction in which we want to end up, we end up regretting where we end up. And avoiding regret is a key component to life satisfaction.

Wise people see life in all its breadth: work, health, family, friends, faith, and community. They don’t fixate on one part to the exclusion of others. They instead know how to harmonize life’s various parts, and pursue each in proportion to the whole. They know that achieving harmony in that way is what makes life meaningful, admirable, and beautiful.

The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.

Avoiding responsibility is a recipe for misery, and the opposite of what it takes to cultivate good judgment.

Improving your judgment, it turns out, is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance. It’s about designing systems when you’re at your best that work for you when you’re at your worst. Those systems don’t eliminate the defaults, but they do help you recognize when they are running the show. Managing your defaults requires more than willpower. Defaults operate at our subconscious level, so overriding them requires harnessing equally powerful forces that pull your subconscious in the right direction: habits, rules, and environment. Overriding your defaults requires implementing safeguards that render the invisible visible and that prevent you from acting too soon. And it requires cultivating habits of mind — accountability, knowledge, discipline, and confidence — that put you on the right track and keep you there.

Miscellaneous Highlights

Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.

LM: Allocate time to deep thinking. eg. 10 minutes every morning, a day every year, a sabbatical every 7 years.

Every successful task only further serves to deepen your trust in yourself, and that’s how confidence is earned.

When you can’t see a problem from multiple points of view, you have blind spots. And blind spots get you in trouble.

Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right. Outcome over ego.

LM: Self-confidence is necessary so you can comfortably say “I was wrong”

The best leaders expect more from people; they hold them to the same standards they hold themselves — a higher standard than most would otherwise know is possible.

From the start, Abrashoff knew you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a ship or running a manufacturing company. You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.

Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence.

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.” Talk about raising the bar! Many people have opinions, but very few have done the work required to hold them. Doing that work means you can argue against yourself better than your real opponents can. It forces you to challenge your beliefs because you have to argue from both sides. It’s only when you put in the work that you come to really understand an argument. You understand the reasons for and against it. Through that work you earn the confidence to endorse it.

LM: In order to have a strong opinion about something you should have paid the price beforehand by studying both arguments. Also when listening to others share their opinion on something, check if they actually paid the price (most people haven’t)

There is a gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way the world really works. It’s only when we change our perspective — when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people — that we realize what we’re missing. We begin to appreciate our own blind spots and see what we’ve been missing.

In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

LM: eg. People will accept if you never drink at a bar but will complain if you sometimes decide not to drink. as a leader, create the rules you want people to respect and state them clearly

The path to breaking bad habits is making your desired behavior the default behavior.

The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake. It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.

The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.

Seneca used premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils”) to prepare for the inevitable ups and downs of life. The point isn’t to worry about problems; it’s to fortify and prepare for them. The hardest setbacks to deal with are the ones we’re not prepared for and don’t expect. That’s why you need to anticipate them before they happen and act now in order to avoid them.

Imagining what could go wrong doesn’t make you pessimistic. It makes you prepared.

THE BAD OUTCOME PRINCIPLE: Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.

“Whom else can I include in my life to help with everything beyond what my partner does well?”

Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.

Understanding what you do and don’t know is the key to playing games you can win.

“When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it.”

LM: Relates to Winners/Losers game mental model. When playing a losers game (eg. amateurs tennis), focus on not making mistakes (eg. just return the ball and wait for the opponent to make a mistake). Another example would be in investments: if you don’t have an edge to winning at it via stock picking, average returns are good enough (ETFs).

Main takeaways

— Cleary differentiate the problem space from the solution space. Also, help people around you doing the same

— — “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”

— helps you understand the problem at a deeper level:

— — Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem

— — Try to find ways of combining the binary

— when gathering information

— — read/listen from the source

— — be aware of the source biases

— — prefer long format content (books/documentaries instead of youtube)

— — run low cost experiments

— — talk to experts and ask the right questions:

— — — What are the variables you’d use to make this decision if you were in my shoes? How do those variables relate to one another?

— — — What do you know about this problem that I (or other people) don’t? What can you see based on your experience that someone without your experience can’t? What do you know that most people miss?

— — — What would be your process for deciding if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it? (Or: How would you tell your mother/friend to go about doing it?)

— differentiate low risk/impact decisions from high risk/impact decisions

— — low risk/impact -> GTD

— — high risk/impact -> Define problem -> gather info -> decide -> act

— commander’s intent

— — communicate the strategy, the rationale, and the operational limits to the team

— People question decisions, but they respect rules.