This piece of advice is taken from a 1997 Jim Barlow column in the Houston Chronicle. It is an excellent discussion of how we make decisions and why so often they fail to achieve the desired result. The book he mentions, The Logic of Failure, is well worth the read.  Barlow's writing here has important implications for Simplespreading.

1) Think (and plan) about the implications of the outcome.
2) Make more decisions. (Practice makes perfect.)
3) Constantly monitor your situation. Adjust if necessary.
4) Have sufficient information on hand prior to making the decision.
5) Remember that since you can't control the final outcome, be ready for any possibility. 

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8:06 PM 9/29/1997

JIM BARLOW

Success is a series of good decisions

MURPHY'S LAW tells us whatever can go wrong will. Murphy was an optimist.

What do we call people who say they never make mistakes? Liars.

I make no such claim. I hold the record for the longest correction I've ever seen in this or any other newspaper. The article, about the effects of inflation on the middle class, had a simple math mistake throughout.

My only defense is I was consistent.

Journalists, unfortunately, publish our mistakes. Others can decently bury them. The results might come out. But the details are tucked away, unless the courts get involved.

Which is unfortunate. We learn more by studying failure than success. If you can get someone to talk about it.

In a prior life I was helping to plot strategy for a bond election for the Houston Independent School District. Then, as now, the HISD was not all that popular with the voters. Another effort a few years prior had failed.

I called up the guy who had my job during that last election and talked to his secretary. My message, at least to me, seemed reasonable. What mistakes had been made which I could avoid? Not only was that call not returned, but through the grapevine the word came he was mortally offended.

The study of failure

Still, if failure has few acknowledged authors, there are still ways to study it.

One of the more intriguing methods is used by Dietrich Donner, a professor of psychology at the University of Bamberg in Germany. He specializes in logic and the theory of action.

Last year his book on his experiments, The Logic of Failure, was published in this country. It's now out in paperback (Addison Wesley, $15, translated by Rita and Robert Kimber.)

Donner set out to see if he could find how people made decisions and which methods were more likely to end in success then failure.

He used some real-life examples -- for instance the nuclear reactor failure at Chernobyl. Why did it melt down?

Because the operators took shortcuts.

Technologically challenging operations have elaborate safety features, which are a pain. Shortcuts are handy. Since these same machines have many levels of safety, you get away with shortcuts -- until you take one too many.

But since getting such details of real failures was difficult, if not impossible, Donner established a world of his own. Using highly sophisticated computer models, he set up some mythical worlds that were made to obey the laws of science and nature. They were super versions of the kinds of games people play on their personal computers.

They include a country in Africa, a nomadic tribe of herders and a small city in England where the principal factory is owned by the municipal government.

Smart people were then invited to come in and play God -- with the kind of results you might expect from people lacking omnipotence.

Thinking things through

Not every game was a disaster. Some people made good decisions.

The ones who did well basically did what your mother told you -- or your drill sergeant.

Before they acted, they spent as much time as possible thinking through the ultimate outcome of their actions.

They thought long-term, not assuming that since a particular action had a good effect now that it would continue to do so in the future. They frequently revisited their decisions. Those who "won" the game made twice as many decisions as those who didn't, coming back and checking prior decisions for current and future circumstances.

They didn't let individual projects blind them to emerging needs as circumstances changed.

One lesson from the game itself was its very nature -- giving individuals unlimited power. That doesn't happen in political democracies, but it's often seen in corporate life. One of the things we can learn from the study of dictatorships -- public and private -- is how inefficient they are.

Those who possess absolute power find themselves atop a pyramid where those below are afraid to tell them the truth. The dictator's actions then become based on what he believes, not what is really happening.

Those who wield power must realize they too often have to make decisions without adequate information.

Success comes to those who gather as much information as they can before making decisions, remembering long-term goals while sweating the details, and knowing they don't know everything.

The link to the original published piece: www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story.mpl/content/chronicle/business/barlow/barlow97/barlow0930.html