Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts. The role of True Vs. Truth and probabilities in the decision-making. You don’t want to learn the hard way.

The decision quality increases exponentially if everything that counts can be counted.

Leaders seek fact-based input for consideration.

Everything that is known must be out in the open and considered.

The discrete input items are factual, let’s call it “True".

True becomes "Truth" when it is a complete set i.e. everything that is known and that counts is counted.

Partial facts despite being true will compromise the quality of the decision.

Let’s consider the hypothetical scenario where a party has unlimited upside i.e. rewards when things go right but no skin in the game when things go wrong. The skewed incentive will result in an input tilt toward the upside ignoring the downside.

On the other hand, input from a team that will pay the price when things go wrong will be skewed towards the downside.

Aligning incentives across all parties such that risks and rewards are equally shared is essential to transforming True into Truth.

It is also very important to ignore items that can be counted but do not count very early on.

Now that the easy part is done, moving on to the hardest part -assigning probabilities to a set of truths to arrive at the set of outcomes.

Probability is a fancy word for risk but the question is can we measure risk with a number?

It is hard to make a decision in a world that is probabilistic, one can predict a 40% chance of rain but in the end it either rains or does not.

Annie Duke elegantly summarized "Outcomes tend to be very binary. They either happen or they don’t. It’s hard to know that prospectively those things are probabilistic, but then once it settles to one or zero, it’s really hard to remember that it was probabilistic retrospectively and not deterministic."

What is an ideal decision-making framework?

Improbable things happen and probable things fail to happen all the time, especially in the short run.

Warren Buffet summarized his decision-making record in two numbers.

The first was Berkshire’s returns over 60 years period: 3,787,464%.

The second number was smaller and less precise but no less astonishing.

Berkshire results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years.

Leaders get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions that produce outstanding results over the long term.

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