A few years back, when I was a young whippersnapper eager to make moves and climb the ladder at work, I asked a colleague for some career advice.

I had a job offer and I wasn’t sure whether to take it.

This colleague sat me down.  And he sketched out a decision matrix so detailed and complex it would’ve bamboozled the boffins running the Manhattan Project.

The matrix covered nine aspects of taking and not taking the job offer.

It considered the pros and cons for each.

And each aspect was weighted by a scaling factor based on its importance.

As we talked, he mentioned phrases like “achievement motivation”, “diagnostic instrument” and “horizontal repositioning”.

These were big words and I had no idea what they meant.  

So naturally, I was impressed. 

But despite the rigour of this career-related decision-making tool, it still felt like something was missing.  

I couldn't put my finger on what this was until, a couple of years later, I came across a curious snippet in the book Wild Problems.

A decision-making expert is considering moving to a new university:

I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford.  I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion.

Finally one of them said, “You’re a leading decision theorist.  Make a list of the costs and benefits and try to calculate your expected utility.”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy.  This is serious.”

The book goes on to say that a cost/benefit analysis can be useful, but not for the outcome it spits out.

Instead, for the way an outcome makes you feel.

Does one outcome give you an ache in the pit of your stomach and another give you butterflies?

If so, that’s the clue you’re looking for.  Not the outcome itself.

And I think this is what was missing from my career advice chat.   

Perhaps I should've expected this.

Banking, in particular, is a world of models and tables.  The numbers go in one end, the handle is cranked, and the answer comes out the other end.

This is how decisions get made (unless your boss doesn’t like the decision, in which case you fudge the inputs until she does) and why an office chat about career options was based on logic and thought, with not even a tip of the cap to instinct, knowing and feeling.   

But I've come to see how instinct, knowing and feeling are a critical piece of the jigsaw.  They're like an internal compass which snazzy tools and frameworks will never be able to replicate.

All of which brings me to the nub:  

On Wednesday 19th June at 10am PST/1pm EST/6pm UK Time, I'm hosting a free Zoom webinar called Decisions on Demand.

During the webinar, I'll be laying out my approach for making decisions.  An approach which is, in many ways, an antidote to the decision matrices, cost/benefit analyses and pros & cons lists which do nothing more than muddy the waters and steer you away from your own inclinations.  

It's an approach so simple that the biggest challenge is not to overcomplicate it.  

And in a world which loves to complexify, this isn't a challenge to be taken lightly.

If you’d like to join the webinar, hit reply and I’ll send the Zoom details straight over.

And if you’ve got any questions, feel free to hit reply too.

That’s all for today.

 - Tom