361: On Decision Engineering and Evaluating Quality instead of Outcomes with Michelle Florendo

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I like to think about how it's still such a gift that we get to choose into what we want to be. One of the reasons why I'm so passionate about decision making is because ultimately, decision making is an empowering thing. It's an act of free will. It's an act of not just, like, taking the possibilities in front of us for what they are and just kind of stepping into fate and something predetermined. But, like, at any given point in time, we can say, like, oh, yes, this is something I chose and this says something about who I am.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back, Pivoters. I am so delighted to be here today with Michelle Florendo. Shout out to skp, who originally connected us through her programs and community@startupparent.com Michelle is a decision engineer and executive coach who's passionate about teaching people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. From the small, consistent micro decisions over time that govern how you show up day to day to the big macro decisions about what direction to take next in business and life. You're going to see exactly why I want to dab her here on the Pivot pod, because decision making is inherent in the Pivot process. Michelle, welcome to the show.

I'm so excited to be here.

Jenny, we should say you also host a podcast called Ask a Decision Engineer. So if listeners want more after this, there's a place to go.

Yes.

Can you give us a brief overview? Did you make up this term decision engineer? And how do you describe what that is?

Yeah, it's funny because when people ask me this, they're like, wow, decision engineer, is that a real thing? And I would say yes. So the backstory is, I studied at Stanford University under the Management Science and Engineering department, and when I was choosing my tracks, there was one called Finance and Decision Engineering. And I will Be the first to say, like the finance piece, I was not as interested in, but I was fascinated about this decision engineering discipline, which is kind of a mashup of decision analysis and probabilistic analysis and engineering economic systems and all these mouthful of things. But in a nutshell, when you think about the discipline of engineering, it's often building solutions in some sort of structured way using process. And so that's essentially what decision engineering is like. How is it that you move through these decision problems and decision challenges in a structured way?

So one of the big decisions involved with any pivot is often when to say no to something good. So whether it's a job, a project, a certain part of the business, usually it's not a dumpster fire. I mean, sometimes it is, but in a way, the dumpster fire lets you know, yes, it is urgent. You need to change right now. And I feel like where people have the most decision fatigue is around these kind of more optional risks, really about when do you say no to something good? Or even, as I say in the book, perfect on paper to say yes to something uncertain, but that you have a guess might be more fulfilling for the next stage of a career. So could you walk us through something like as vast as a career change and what you tend to see as patterns in these types of massive decisions.

It's so interesting that you talk about this piece around saying no to something good and you can't see me, but I'm putting good in air quotes because I would ask what makes it good? So where I got my start, even integrating all of this decision engineering discipline into coaching was as a career coach, like 10 years ago. And people had that exact struggle. Like, oh, man, I don't want to say no to this thing, but, like, there's part of me that thinks there's something else out there. And we would dig into the. Well, what is it that you really want? So I have a bag full of frameworks. Can I bring one framework?

Oh, my gosh, we want all the frameworks. We love a good framework here at the pivot Bot. Yes, please.

Like I said, I studied decision analysis, decision engineering at Stanford. And there is a professor there, Ron Howard, who would talk about how every single decision has three components. The first component is objectives. That's all about what is it that you care about in a decision. The second component is options. Those are the actual things you're choosing among. And then the third one is information. To what degree do you have information on how your options will deliver against those objectives? And I think this piece around, like, oh, how do I say no to something that seems good on paper? You said, that's really interesting because there's usually an undercurrent of like, okay, I feel like this should be good. And so again, the question is, what makes this good? Like, how is it actually delivering on the things that you want and are they things that you actually want? I've had some clients who say, this looks good on paper. And if you follow the rest of the sentence that has been unsaid, it's like, this looks good on paper to my peers or to people in society or to my family, but it doesn't actually feel right for me. So I think that first question is all about clarifying, what are your objectives? What is it that matters to you? Because that becomes the compass for how to navigate going forward in terms of.

Information about the different options. One thing that sometimes holds me back, and I've seen this with others too, but I'll just pick a certain moment in my path right now is, well, I don't know if it's feasible. Like, I have this voice. It's usually my inner CFO saying, oh, you want to double down on writing? What a stupid choice. You know, what a dumb decision. Because writers are notoriously struggling to earn enough and you just can't earn a living writing anymore. And so I have all those voices and there is data to back all that up.

Yeah.

And so sometimes I feel like there's a sense of what's realistic or not or even it's not always clear. Maybe something that we think we want doesn't pan out. You know, I think that's part of the nerves of teasing out a decision. And these three components are super helpful place to start as well.

Like you said, you're digging into the information piece. And so what do we do when we don't have information on whether this will work out? That's kind of like what I'm hearing. One thing that comes to mind is, and I'm going to draw on the work of my friends at Stanford's Life Design lab. They're the ones who run the designing your life course. And they had brought me in a number of years ago to revamp their decision making module. And one of the things that's really useful to remember is that, well, one decisions aren't one and done. Okay, at this point in time, we may not have the full information we may necessarily need, but how can we create the conditions so that we might get more of that information and then make A decision sometime in the future. And so they talk a lot about prototyping. Like, if we're talking about. If I want to double down on a writer, there's the little voice that says, is this really feasible? Well, what are the prototypes or experiments that you might run to get a little bit more of the information you might need? Because this is not feasible. Again, I'm putting that in air quotes. Is a hypothesis like, what is it that you would need to do or try? How might you prototype that little path in a way so that you can get more data and test that hypothesis a little bit?

You also talk about something I feel passionately about, which is learning to use multiple sources of data. So head, heart and body. And I feel like a lot of times the shoulds are in our mind, but that we have these other intelligences. So do you have a favorite exercise or framework, as it were, for pulling in wisdom from the heart and body?

Actually, I do. And that's something I call the attractive concerning table. It's basically an alternative to the pro con list. Because what I find is that, well, one, for those of you out there, if you are using a pro con list, I'm still applauding you because you are getting your thoughts on paper. And I think that's a very, very powerful first step. But I find that pro con list tends to activate just our rational thinking, and anything that seems too fuzzy or doesn't seem clearly good or bad doesn't make it onto the page. So as an alternative, I'd encourage people to use an attractive concerning table because even by nature of those words, attractive, what is it that makes you lean into something? And concerning, like very much, is an emotion. It provides more breadth as to what you can put on the page. And so you draw a line horizontally across your piece of paper, label above the line, attractive, below the line, concerning, and then create a column for each option you're considering and just write down, you know, what do I find is attractive about this option? What is concerning? And then when you do that for each option that you're considering, you can start to see these themes bubble up around, like, oh, okay, yes, I feel inspired by the prospect of doing this, but I'm also concerned about financial sustainability and security and all those things. And I think through that you can start surfacing. Those objectives that I said earlier are so important for clarifying as your compass going forward.

Do you have decisions that you've made where it was purely intuitive? And the reason I ask is that I drive a lot of my Career in business this way, where it's pure download pure intuition. And there's almost nothing on paper that would make it look like it makes sense. I mean, maybe if I were to actually tease it out, but I just trust it, or I learned to trust it, and I follow that. I'm wondering if you have examples like that where even if you were to get things down on paper, it might not make as much sense. And yet some intuitive voice in you is saying, just trust me on this one. Have faith in the process.

Well, let me frame it this way. Like, I think about intuition as the sum of our internal wisdom. And so I don't see it as being kind of separate from rational processes. I see it as just like the quick synthesis of what are all of the inputs. And I think part of the work that I do in providing people with frameworks and ways they can get things on paper is to bridge that gap. And so, for example, like, one of the tools I talk about is a decision matrix. And there have been times where I will have a strong intuitive sense of. I know that I want to find a different option for how I can mother in the way that I mother. I have two small children. And through doing the decision matrix, it's an iterative process. Like, I can put things on paper, and if it doesn't seem like it matches, it begs the question, well, what is not on paper yet? Oh, I'm not factoring in that. I know, like, I want to definitely have flexibility or blah, blah, blah. And I also want to ensure that, like, I'm in a location where I can take care of my parents later on.

I don't know.

I'm just, like, making this up, going through that iterative process and just like, recognizing that this kind of disconnect between, oh, this makes sense on paper, but I have this intuition that says something else. It usually isn't kind of like a permanent break. It's like, oh, I just haven't found the bridge yet. Let me keep kind of pulling the thread to see if I can externalize what's there.

I love that reminder. I just haven't found the bridge yet. And also that you see intuition as the sum of our internal wisdom that's coming from all sides, that it's not this separate thing off by itself. And actually, even as I asked you the question, I was thinking to myself, but I bet if somebody said, reverse engineer your intuitive hit, I bet I could get it down on a decision matrix. Yeah. But I could point to actual data that led to what I thought was just a download from the universe, you.

Know, because that's the thing. Like one of my friends said, our intuition is seeing possibly all of the same things or even more than our prefrontal cortex rational mind. It's just not very verbal, it's not very skilled at articulating. So it takes a little bit of work to understand like, okay, what is it that it's seeing and synthesizing here?

What are some of the most common decisions that come through your podcast?

Let's see. So there's a lot of career decisions, family planning decisions, relocation. I think something that's been coming up more recently too is with the sandwich generation, parents aging, and what do I do about that decisions? Some friends have asked me like, why don't you have more relationship decisions on the podcast? And like, well, because those are the calls that I field privately, right? Sometimes just big, big financial decisions. I will say I am not a financial planner, but just helping people sift through what's already there after they've done their research. The podcast is a fun place for me to play because my work is primarily in the corporate and executive coaching space. But I let the podcast be a place where I can still have these conversations about many different types of decisions for the sake of helping others think through how they might sift through similar decisions.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I'm reminded of Cheryl Strayed's column for Dear Sugar on Ghost Ships and she essentially says that there are some decisions we make in life where we will never know the other self that could have been. So you mentioned family planning. If somebody decides to have kids, they will never know the self of theirs that grew old without kids, that was traveling the world or doing whatever fantasy things they imagine. Similarly, somebody who chooses not to have kids will never know their ghost self who might have gone down that path. And so it seems like there's some decisions where there is grief involved or even a decision that feels really positive. And any of us would be happy to say, we've made it, we're still leaving a part of ourselves behind, or we're still having to grieve the former self before this crucial pivotal point in our life. Any takes on that in terms of just grieving what could have been, even if we're happy with the choice one.

I want to say that it's very real. It's very real to grieve the loss of possibility. I think it's very real, it's very common. But I also think it comes from a framing of being in a society where we are told that we can do anything and everything. And I think that's part of where the grief comes from. I wonder whether that sense of loss would be as pronounced if we accept it as reality. As my colleague Dave Evans, one of the authors of Deciding youg Life, says, there's infinite me's in me right now. I mean, yes, we can grieve the loss of like, oh, but I only get to live one of these lives. But I like to think about how it's still such a gift that we get to choose into what we want to be. One of the reasons why I'm so passionate about decision making is because ultimately decision making is an empowering thing. It's an act of free will. It's an act of not just like, taking the possibilities in front of us for what they are and just kind of stepping into fate and something predetermined. But like, at any given point in time we can say like, oh, yes, this is something I chose and this says something about who I am.

And you say that decision making is harder than ever before and that's not your fault. You mentioned just the way that society is now that we see so many possibilities. Like, one hour on TikTok could just show you all kinds of potential for where you could live, who you could be, what you could do, how you could spend your time, hobbies to start dance moves to rehearsals. How does that compare and despair play in? I mean, I call it compare and despair, but it seems like decision making might also Trigger those feelings of what I would call looking at someone else's paper.

One, I want to validate that compare and despair is real. And it's probably part of the reason why I don't spend a lot of time on social media, because I'm paying attention to. To what degree is this inspiring me versus to what degree is this making me feel bad? Because I think that's also, like, part of the internal compass that I like to tease out with folks. Like, how is it that you can stay in the space where you feel inspired and empowered? Because ultimately when you're doing that, you're being more real about, like, where is it that you can make decisions here? I'm going to frame it this way because, like, I'm looking at my paper on my desk that says weekly to do, and I cross it out and I put weekly menu. Again, I want to name that the compare and despair. And like, all this stuff, it's a function of this ecosystem and society that we live in where we are told you should want to do all of these things. I mean, we live in a consumerist society and which ultimately functions on making us feel like we don't have enough. And it takes a lot of internal work to be able to see that. Maybe that's the framing that's making us feel bad.

But.

Okay, let me go back to my weekly menu. I once realized, because I'm like an achiever, my to do list is infinite. Kind of like possibilities. There are infinite possibilities. And the more that I feel like I need to do everything on my to do list, even though I don't actually have capacity to do it, the worse I feel. And at one point in time I realized, you know what? What if I called this my weekly menu? Because when you think about menus versus to do lists, when you walk into a restaurant and you look at the menu, never do you go in thinking like, I must eat everything on this menu. You kind of go in with an acceptance of, I know that I have a certain capacity. My stomach is only so big. And the purpose of this list and, you know, this external stimuli is for me to just choose, like, how do I want to spend this capacity that I have right now.

And I read a book that I mentioned in the introduction to Free Time where it asks the question, where are you ordering off of yesterday's menu. And I think that's so interesting too. So you have your weekly menu versus a to do list. And we can say, where has my menu gotten stale? Or the specials are no longer special. Right. So I think it's interesting to look at that both ways. It also strikes me that a huge part of this, well, what I've observed tends to be people being afraid of others reactions to big decisions. And I'm thinking about, I just had a conversation with someone at dinner the other day who said her parents, and it is an immigrant family, her parents were deeply upset that her sister's husband shifted from full to part time at work. And this has created a rift in the family. The parents are livid. It's just unacceptable to them. And they feel very involved, let's say, in their daughter's husband's career choices. And even if intellectually we know this is America, like we're so individualist here compared to more collectivist cultures and societies. But that doesn't change how freaking hard it might be to make a decision that, you know, feels right and then have to deal with so much fallout from a partner or spouses or frustrating manager at work. You know, I just feel like there are sometimes consequences that, that even if it's the right thing, are so heavy to deal with on the other side.

A hundred percent. And I mean, I think that's the other thing to keep in mind. Are we optimizing for easy or are we optimizing for what's important? Because that's also just like another thing that society sometimes tell us, like it should be easy or at least like everything should be nice and happy all the time. What I'm hearing kind of like in the undercurrents here is also the question around trade offs. And sometimes when I talk and teach about trade offs, people are like, I don't want to trade off anything. If you're not making trade offs, that means you're not really articulating what is most important to you. I come from an immigrant family. I also coach a number of people who have immigrant parents. And it is something real that comes up. And if it's important enough, sometimes it's perfectly fine to say that one of my objectives is harmony in my family. But when we frame it like that also it may not necessarily be like I need to please this person. But the objective is harmony. And when you define things that way, you can explore, well what might be other options for achieving that. Is it that I need to be having different types of conversations with people? Is it that I need to build trust in different ways if it happens, like at work, that type of thing? But that's something that comes up a lot because we don't operate in vacuums. And sometimes one of our explicit objectives are who are the people that I need to consider?

And like you said, just acknowledging the trade offs and even that they're hard. Like sometimes there's no getting around it. But what are you optimizing for? Yeah, you mentioned this great exercise you have called the decision inventory exercise. Can you walk us through what that looks like?

So I think I'd said earlier, one of the first steps that I recommend to people when they feel like they're spinning in a particular decision, like this is the type of decision that's like keeping you up at night or you've thought about it for hours and you find yourself thinking in circles, is to put things on paper. And so what the decision inventory exercise is, is a guided exercise of doing a brain dump of all of the thoughts, feelings, what ifs, like everything that you might be carrying with respect to a particular decision and getting it down on paper. And what that does, one, it gives you a sense of, yes, what are all the things that you've been carrying? And two, it puts it somewhere where you can, like, physically shelve it if you need to, like, go to sleep and you can come back to it later. And once you've done that brain dump, the other part, the second part of the exercise is beginning to sift through what is there? One of the frames that I use are those three components that I mentioned earlier. Plus, what are the decisions that are embedded in this bigger decision and what are the feelings that are present? And as I've led people through that exercise, it's been really interesting to hear how people notice where they've been spending a lot of their time and energy and where is it that might be more fruitful for them to direct their attention?

I love it. And we'll put the link that's one of the resources on your website, so we'll put the link to that. What's the thing you wish people knew about decision making that you feel is not as much part of the conversation yet as it should be or could be?

I'm so glad you're asking this question because I realized that backing up, we haven't talked about decision quality. And so there's this myth that a lot of people ascribe to about what makes a decision. Good, because oftentimes I'll start with asking people, how do you feel about decision making? And if anyone talks about, I feel stressed, I'm like, okay, where's the stress coming from? Oh, I feel like I'm anxious that I might make the wrong Decision. Ooh. Okay. What is a wrong decision? Oh, if I make a decision and bad things happen. And that's really interesting because that tells me that someone believes that the quality of a decision basically, was this decision, good or bad, is equal to the outcome of the decision. Did good or bad things happen? And the thing is, at least those of us who are in the decision analysis field, and actually, Annie Duke wrote a really great book that just talks all about this. Thinking in Bets is how the quality of a decision is distinct and separate from the quality of the outcome. Meaning you can have bad outcomes and still have made a good decision. And also, sometimes you can make a bad decision and have good outcomes, just like you can make a good decision. Good outcomes, bad decision, bad outcomes. But the thing is, the only part of things that we can control is the decision part, the decision process. And then once that decision goes out into the world, there may be other things that happen that affect the outcomes. But sometimes we're carrying the burden or trying to think that actually, in order to make a good decision, I need to. If I'm going to put it in extreme terms, I need to be clairvoyant. I need to know exactly how things are going to turn out, and I need to be omnipotent. I need to control how things are going to turn out, which is just not a realistic standard for folks. And I think that's why people stress out so much.

Yes. And then I always think about. I mean, I love you teasing this apart, that the quality of the decision is not equal to the outcome, that we don't control all the outcomes of a decision, and that sometimes what might even seem like a bad quality of decision, I just think sometimes it could have been worse. So maybe you made the better of two subpar choices, but thank goodness you made the one you did because it could have been even worse. You know what I mean? So we're just not guaranteed that just because we're at a decision point that there is, like, the perfect decision and then the perfect outcome, and it's all our fault if it doesn't work out that way.

Right. I've seen so many people who are sometimes paralyzed by the guilt of past bad outcomes because they feel like, oh, things turned out bad because I made a bad decision, and how can I possibly trust myself to make a good decision going forward? And I think recognizing that separation between the quality of decisions and quality of outcomes can relieve people of that guilt and instill more confidence that actually, if you're paying attention to those three Components. Like, if you've done your due diligence and actually named what your objectives are, if you've thought of some creative options beyond the obvious and you've done some diligence in trying to collect information, you're improving your decision quality versus baseline.

Do you have a post decision review process, given that this is your passion and field of study, where after a big decision in your life or maybe something you've created for others, you actually do reverse engineer and go back and analyze it?

One of the things that I tune into first is when does it feel necessary to do some sort of post decision reflection? And that's where, again, like, I encourage people to tune into how do they feel after the decision has played out? How are they feeling? And when there's that kind of like weird feeling in your stomach or kind of like that sense of like, ugh, I wonder if there's something that I could have done better. I'm like, okay, so let's go back. Let's go back and see. Not necessarily, like, how would you do things over, but what portions of the decision did you pay attention to? What does that mean for what you might do differently in your decision process going forward? I mean, I think one thing that I want to call out is I should have known better is not really an effective postmortem process. I should have known. Well, okay, like, if you should have known, what is the actual thing you would have done? How would you have known when you had gotten enough information or something like that? Because the thing is, knowing that the quality decision is distinct from the quality of the outcome, you have to be able to define the quality of your decision at the point that you make it. And so I think the key question is, like, okay, what is it that it would take to have you feel good and feel at peace with this decision, regardless of what the outcome is going forward?

That's fascinating that you analyze it at the moment of the decision and not necessarily based on the outcome. And also link in the show notes, the podcast My First Million, they had a really interesting episode where they were talking about how to make better decisions. And then one of the co hosts has a decision register. And I'm pretty sure it's a pretty detailed process, so you'll have to check that out too and see what you think in terms of how it fits your framework.

I am totally a proponent of keeping a decision journal.

Yeah, he said it helps so much and that it's just this crucial thing for learning and improving, and I love that. So, yeah, I'll put the episode and the template that he uses in the show notes.

And I think what's useful about kind of writing down these inputs as you're making the decision is that it can combat some of that hindsight bias of I should have known. Because if you do actually capture all of the things that were known at that point in time, I think it can allow you to have greater compassion for that past self that couldn't actually have possibly known what you know now.

If you could leave listeners with one tiny thing to try around all this in the next week, what would it be?

I'd say practice writing things down. If you have a big decision that you are facing, even just doing a brain dump on paper so that you can get a sense of like, okay, what are some of the themes or patterns I'm seeing here? What are some of the big information gaps that I'm really worried about? Even just writing things down on paper can help illuminate what, what good next steps might be. And then you can feel more equipped to face the decision. Because I think something that can be so paralyzing is not knowing, like, what do I do right? And so there are baby steps that can be taken.

And we can all try an attractive concerning table instead of a simple pro con list as well. I'm excited to try that. Yeah. Michelle, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights around this. I know we just barely scratched the surface of all of your studies and findings around decision engineering. Is there anywhere you'd like to send people in addition to your fantastic Ask A Decision Engineer podcast?

I mean, I'd say definitely start with the AskAD decisionengineer.com webpage. And also there's a link to the decision inventory exercise there. I also have a self paced course for people who are making personal decisions, especially on a deadline. It's less than two hours of video and all the people who have gone through it thanked me like, oh my gosh, this just made things so clear.

Good.

But I'd say start with the podcast. There's a lot of different things there. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Michelle. And big thanks everybody for being here listening.

All right, thanks Jenny for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.