Life: Our Uncertain Experiment
A practical guide to risk, uncertainty, and decision-making - for anyone facing a real choice.
Your life is an experiment. You are running it now.
The job offer you are not sure about needs a decision. The house you can almost afford needs a decision. So does the treatment you are weighing up, the move abroad, or the relationship you avoid ending. Every one carries risk. Every one is decided under uncertainty. We make them all the time, and mostly we are guessing.
As Madonna said, "I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art."
You are the experiment, and this book shows you how to run it better:
- How to really see what you are deciding
- How to find the risks you have not thought about
- How to test an assumption before it costs you something
- How to choose when there is no right answer
- How to act, learn, and go again
We are taught almost nothing about how to decide well. We pick it up from other people, from habit, and from our own mistakes. We fall back on instinct, on someone with the strongest opinion, on assumptions we have never examined, and on evidence we have not really looked at. We are surprised when it goes wrong.
Risk and decision-making are usually treated as separate subjects. Separate books, separate courses, separate careers. In real life they are inseparable. Every decision carries risks, and many of our decisions are about risk. Life: Our Uncertain Experiment puts them back together, on the understanding that nothing is certain, and you only get one chance at most choices.
It's written for anyone facing a real decision, not for specialists. You don't need a background in statistics, and nothing in it is too elaborate to use on a Tuesday evening at the kitchen table.
It begins by explaining what risk and uncertainty really are, in plain language. How likely is likely. Why our sense of probability misleads us. How framing, assumptions and bias can influence our choices before we have consciously made them. The part our values play. What resilience is, and how to build more of it.
Uncertainty runs through all of it. You cannot get rid of it, and the book does not try. It argues for something different: accepting uncertainty as the medium of life rather than an obstacle to it. People who are comfortable not knowing tend to decide better and report better outcomes. People who need certainty tend to decide worse and to suffer more.
The Decision Cycle helps you to make better decisions. It's nine practical steps, in five phases - think, check, choose, act and grow - for working through any decision, from the everyday to the hardest choice you will ever face.
John Bornholt trained as an electrical engineer, where a missed risk or a bad choice gives you fast and sometimes lethal feedback. In the more than forty years since, he has worked across a dozen industries as employee, business founder, consultant and board member - advising clients on uncertainty and risk, designing solutions, and building the tools to help them decide better.
There is rarely a right answer, but there is usually a better one.