Stop waiting to make the perfect choice

We spend most of the time living in autopilot mode. Your environment and your brain mostly decide for you to waste as little energy as possible. Of course, we sometimes stop to think and reflect on hard choices, especially during these hard times (COVID) and the New Year. When it comes to decisions about life choices and important matters that will affect us, we use energy to reflect and plan to make sure that we make the right choice. But the question is, how do we know what choice to make? Do we have any clear criteria? Is there really a best choice?

In this article, I will reflect on how we should stop waiting for the perfect answer to come up, and instead act and test our ideas quickly like designers when we face important life decisions.

Real-life choices are messy and complex

Designers are well used to deal with complex, messy problems, as they are asked to come up with creative ways to create new things in the world. And to do that, they have to be able to deal with uncertainty, try new things, ask questions that have no perfect answer, and even create things that will inevitably fail.

Real-life decisions are hard to define and are messy, a bit like this uneven shape. They don’t come in a perfect shaped box.

Being a designer requires a lot of vulnerability because you are never certain of what the outcome will be. In other words, you cannot be creative if you wish to have the correct answer right away. I can see similar characteristics of design problems with real-life problems, that is important decisions that will affect the trajectory of our lives.

Overanalyzing choices paralyze us

Yet, when it comes to making decisions, we often do not behave or even think like designers. We tend to think that life problems have a perfect single answer. Therefore, we reflect, think, wait, list all the possible options, create a list of criteria that will help us narrow down our options. Yet, despite all those efforts, we do not make a decision. Why so? Because by thinking about our options, we often end up being paralyzed by choices, and because we think that we have to make a perfect choice, we are afraid to make a mistake.

Listing all the choices possible is infinite. Some choices are better than others. How do you choose among all the options?

The truth is that the perfect choice does not exist, except maybe in your head. Your math teacher may have told you that there is a perfect answer in algebra. But we are not dealing with clearly defined problems, we are dealing with uncertainty, ill-defined problems that have many possible good answers. And because of that, we must think differently, and I think that the reason we struggle with our real-life problems is that we tend to think of them as mathematical problems.

The designerly way to think

There is a different way: the designerly way to think, which is not taught off in high school. When designers are faced with a challenge, we spend time researching for information to understand the context. Once we have an idea of how to tackle the challenge, we test it as soon as possible, instead of waiting and reflecting on the perfect answer. We go into the field and speak with other people, ask what they think of the idea, and we test it with them and refine the idea until we have something that works. Of course, we start again if the idea fails, but we know that is just part of the process.

We transform messy shapes into “more defined shapes”.

Here is a reflection that I want to share with you. What if we stopped constantly waiting to make the perfect decision, and we would spend more time doing something? What if we embraced uncertainty, creativity and accepted that failure is part of the process. Because without failure, there wouldn’t be anything meaningful in this world.

For this new year, I hope that we can be a little less afraid of failure, that we will go from sitting to walking, try messy, new things to create meaningful and beautiful things.

Happy new year!