This is the biggest decision-making mistake | Barnaby Marsh | Big Think

Great decisions often come from great information. You need information to work with to make good decisions. So, it's said that information is more important than knowledge; information is more important than money. Information is probably one of the most important elements that you can have in making your luck and being successful.

Often in decision-making, people come to the decision with imperfect information, and there's a lot of uncertainty. So, the first thing a decision-maker does, who's skilled when they're taking risks, is to find out more about the context of the decision they're making and what sorts of results will give them the best outcome in that context. What might work well in one context or what might have worked before might not work well now.

So, having sensitivity to the current context of the environment and the information that is relevant are really two of the key ingredients of making a good choice. There's no one who should be insensitive to what others are doing around you. If you know nothing about the environment, sometimes one of the best heuristics you can use is to emulate what's successful. The very worst that you'll do is probably mediocre relative to the field. It will almost never be catastrophic.

However, if you really want to be ahead of the game, you need to go beyond imitating what successful people are doing. You need to figure out ways of being bold and taking things in a new direction that can capture people's attention, capture people's imagination, and help people shift to that new reality that's emerging.

The opportunities in the environments are constantly shifting, so we have to be constantly aware of how the environment is changing and how that change is affecting people in the environment. Amongst experts, one of the biggest mistakes we sometimes see is the fallacy of excessive expertise. Sometimes, when there's a shift in the environment, the knowledge that worked before won't necessarily work as well anymore.

So, the people who are best at decision-making are the best at moving forward and innovating, or those who are humble. Those who are able to see that what worked in the past might not necessarily work in the future or where their information might not be sufficient to solve the type of problem that they're currently trying to address.

Great decisions, in some ways, are always evolving. You make a choice, and then it's critical to follow up that choice with another choice that's the right choice, and so on. So, our great choices are not a single point in time. But a great choice is a commitment to take a path in a series of decisions along that path to keep things going in the right direction.