Adaptive Decision-Making Quotes

I think it's because I'm unpredictable. I view every situation, every race, and every candidate differently I try not to rely on something that worked before.

A blanket attempt to avoid mistakes is the biggest mistake of all.

What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.

Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there's no need to fret about it. If it fails, you'll know what to do next time.

Leaders honor their core values, but they are flexible in how they execute them.

My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.

Jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictability of the future with the gifts of individuals.

We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.

Successful people make their decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. Failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.

An effective leader allows exceptions to the rule for exceptional results or when circumstance demands.

The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it.

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

The three foundations of judgement: Bold Design, Constant Practice, and Frequent Mistakes.

I try to let my decisions be guided not by what I think will succeed or fail, but what I'm going to learn from that process.

Indeed, in foreign policymaking, inconsistency is often a virtue. I speak not of principles but of policy.

In the space of two days I had evolved two plans, wholly distinct, both of which were equally feasible. The point I am trying to bring out is that one does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit those plans. One tries to make plans fit the circumstances.

The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly.

To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge, knowledge for leadership of transformation.

Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.