Decision-making skills: 6 techniques to decide better

Decision-making skills come down to a few learnable habits. People who decide well tend to do three things: they know which decisions deserve their time, they compare options against clear criteria and they look for the holes in their plan before reality finds them. Each of those habits has simple techniques you can start using today.

Here are six well-established decision-making techniques, when to use each one, how long they take and their pros and cons, compared side by side in a table.

6 techniques to build your decision-making skills

1. One-way vs. two-way door decisions

Jeff Bezos popularized this distinction in Amazon's 2015 letter to shareholders. Some decisions are one-way doors: nearly irreversible, like signing a five-year lease or shutting down a product line. They deserve time, data and several opinions.

Most decisions are two-way doors: if you get it wrong, you walk back through and try again. For those, deciding slowly costs more than being wrong. Trying a new tool for a month is a two-way door; moving all of your company's data into it, much less so.

2. Pros and cons list

Benjamin Franklin described it in a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, calling it "moral or prudential algebra": two columns, one for each side, filled in over several days. His version already asked you to weigh things up, striking out reasons of similar weight on both sides to see where the balance tips.

It works well for yes-or-no calls, like taking on an extra project or switching shifts. The trap: ten small cons can bury one huge pro if all you do is count lines.

3. Weighted decision matrix

Use it to choose among several options with several criteria. There are five steps: list the options, define the criteria, give each criterion a weight based on how much it matters, score each option on each criterion, then multiply and add up.

Here's an example with two job offers, weights from 1 to 5 and scores from 1 to 5:

If the result disappoints you, that's useful information too: there's probably a criterion you didn't write down.

4. The 10/10/10 rule

Journalist and author Suzy Welch lays it out in her book 10-10-10: how will you feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years? It helps when emotions are involved and short-term discomfort carries too much weight, like saying no to a client, having a tough conversation or turning down a promotion you don't want.

5. The premortem

Psychologist Gary Klein proposed this exercise: before you launch a project, imagine it's a year from now and the project has failed. Everyone writes down why, silently, and then the group shares the causes. It works because it gives people permission to say what nobody dares to raise at the kickoff meeting.

Say you're about to open an online store, and your premortem turns up "nobody was in charge of answering customers." Now you can assign it before you start.

6. Six thinking hats

Edward de Bono proposed looking at a decision from six angles, one at a time: white (facts), red (emotions and gut feeling), black (risks), yellow (benefits), green (new ideas) and blue (managing the process). It's especially handy in meetings where the same people always talk or everything turns into a clash of opinions, because the whole group looks from the same angle at once.

Which technique to use, compared

How to combine them on a real decision

These techniques work best together. Imagine you're offered a role leading a team:

1. Sort the door. Could you go back to your current role if it doesn't work out? If so, you don't need weeks to decide.
2. Build the matrix. Salary, learning, hours, how much you enjoy hands-on technical work.
3. Apply 10/10/10 to the emotional side: the jitters of the first few weeks versus where you want to be in a few years.
4. Finish with a personal premortem. If you regret it a year from now, what would the reason be? Whatever comes up becomes your prevention plan.

Tip: set a deadline for every important decision. Without one, more analysis becomes an elegant way of not deciding.

No technique protects you from misread data. Before you score options, review the biases and exercises in our guide to critical thinking examples. And if you tend to make big decisions at the end of an overloaded day, start with these time management techniques.

Where Game Strategies fits in

Deciding is a skill you train by deciding. Serious games put you in situations with pressure and consequences, without the cost of getting it wrong for real.

Ariana (2 hours), in our productivity category, is the decision-making game: an inherited hotel, an heir who wants out and a hurricane about to make landfall. You learn to analyze information, tell intuitive from rational decisions, recognize biases, risk aversion and binary thinking, and prioritize under uncertainty.

The Hudson (1 hour), also in productivity, covers accountability: owning your role, answering for your actions and leaving excuses at the door, which every decision asks of you once it's made. And Idea (3 hours), under teamwork, helps you generate more options before you choose, with creative problem-solving techniques.

All three are included in the annual catalog license: €299 per person (VAT included), with one year of access to all 71 games and a certificate of completion for each course that you can add to LinkedIn. One honest note: the game gives you practice and feedback, but your judgment sharpens when you apply these techniques to real decisions. To see which other soft skills are worth training, check out our guide.