In last week’s newsletter, I introduced the Five Forces of Decisions. Today, we’ll start with the first two: Direction and Emotion.
Force 1: Direction
The first aspect of every decision is to consider what direction it points you toward.
In many high-stakes decisions, there is a necessary tradeoff: you cannot do everything you want. Saying yes to one option means that you will have fewer resources to say yes to another.
So, the first thing you must decide is which direction you want to go.
The answer? Align to your North Star, the long-term direction that defines what success looks like for you.
At The Meet Group, we set an intention for the year, usually broadcast loud and clear at the holiday party. Sometimes it was focused on launching new features and gaining users – other times on increasing monetization.
We didn’t focus on both at the same time, which meant we had to say no to projects that didn’t align with the company’s needs at that moment. When we transitioned to mobile, we knew that the transition came at the cost of revenue on the web, but we knew the direction we needed to go; the future was mobile, so it didn’t make sense for us to focus on web revenue, even if that was at the time our most profitable platform.
Similarly, if you’re a fractional leader, your direction might not be maximizing the number of clients. Your goal might be to reduce lower-impact work so you can focus on more strategic engagements.
The first force of the Five Forces of Decisions is really about being reflective. Where do you want your life, your business, or your commitments to lead?
Many ambitious people forget to consider the most basic question: “What do I want to do?”
Including “align to your North Star” as the first step to your Five Forces Decision framework will keep you moving forward.
Force 1: Direction takeaway
If you don’t define your direction, every option looks equally appealing. Your North Star helps you say no.
Once you know where you’re going, the next challenge is emotional: not letting fear steer the wheel.
Force 2: Emotion
The second force in the five forces is Emotion.
Our emotions often get involved in our decisions, and it can be easy to be swayed by fear, joy, or anger.
At this step, it’s important to lower the emotional intensity.
The first step is identifying which emotions are driving. For many people, the major emotion driving is a fear of failure, so I’m going to focus on that, but you should also be clear when anger or happiness is driving.
The best countermeasure in our framework to keep the fear of failure from messing with our decision is to lower the emotional weight of being wrong.
We intentionally lowered the stakes where we could. When Dave and I first launched the business, we were teenagers. We didn’t have a mortage or payroll. If we failed, we would be sad, but it wouldn’t ruin us. Later, the stakes got higher with investors, millions of users, and a team to think about. To lower the stakes, we created structural mechanisms to manage risk through staged rollouts, KPI-driven decision-making, and a team culture that expected iteration.
When we were building our apps, we reframed launches as experiments to lower the stakes wherever we could.
You expect experiments to fail, which makes failure less personal and more informative. We rolled out features gradually, tested their impact on our core metrics, and adjusted accordingly.
We didn’t focus on a rigid five-year plan. Instead, we focused on iterative changes. We tried not to get ahead of ourselves. So many of our features failed. Others worked really well for a short time but ran their course.
The reframe helped us keep moving and focusing on learning, even if we had to sunset our favorite products (RIP Battles).
Lowering the stakes doesn’t mean aiming low. It means giving yourself the freedom to act.
Better decisions come from reducing stakes, not increasing pressure. Just like creativity suffers when you feel threatened, decision-making also degrades when the stakes feel fatal.
So instead, design for decisions that aren’t fatal by taking an iterative approach, and you can recover from them.
This step in the framework isn’t about certainty. It’s about giving yourself the space to keep moving forward.
Force 2: Emotion takeaway
The goal isn’t to eliminate emotion from decisions. It’s to design situations where being wrong isn’t fatal.
Today’s focus was on the first two of the Five Forces. The next is repetition.
Office Hours
This month, my schedule is a bit different, so Office Hours will be split into two 30-minute chunks:
3/24 at 9:30 am ET
3/25 at 9 pm ET
Hope to see you there! Email me to be added to the invite.
