Decisions are binary and dynamic.

So what is a decision? How long are they good for? How often do you have to make or refresh them? If you advocate that players should be decision-makers I believe, that at the least, you should consider these questions. So here are some answers.

A decision, in an energy information context, is an explicit selection of an idea. An example is in the game show where a contestant has to choose door number 1, 2 or 3. The host asks, “have you decided?” The contestant answers “yes” but that isn’t true. He or she can still change their mind, have a different idea and select one of the other doors. It’s only when they have made it known to others that have they ‘made their decision.’

Elaboration, decisions are binary. Back to the free auto story. When you chose your car you eliminated all other possibilities. It was yes to one and no to all others, a yes/no process. Decisions rest in the process of selection, not in the number of options or what was selected. Even if there was only one car left you still could decide as long as you had the option to turn it down. You have the option to not select.

Decisions are dynamic. This from Marianne Paget, “Action is seen, as it were, through the prism of “a decision”… It is not a decision but a sequence of acts of deciding being described as though it were a single decision.” (Consider coaching that sees a player making a 40 yard run as executing a single decision, that’s absurd.) This implies that decisions have a very short shelf life. The instant that you have made one, with or without acting on it you need to make another. It never ends.

Decisions are value free, there are no good or bad decisions at the moment of selection. Again from Paget, “mistakes are known always after they are made… A mistake follows an act. It identifies an act in its completion. It names it.” which applies to success also. At the moment of selection the result has yet to unfold.
 

So what is being selected? We have clues in the earlier quotes from Szilard and Bateson. In the former we had the “notion of a bit of information-the information obtained from the answer to a yes/no question.” For the later, this bit is “a difference that makes a difference and a difference that makes a difference is an idea.” What we are selecting are ideas. Decision-making is simply choosing ‘the difference that makes a difference.’ It’s a meaningful idea that is observed in the present moment. That idea, that difference, that bit will be found in the flow of visual, tactile or auditory energy information.

The most important energy information source is other people, especially their actions. That’s the second example in the auto story. Remember when you were too late and had to restart your selection process? You never act in isolation from other people’s decisions and actions. When someone got the keys to your first choice you had to go to ‘plan B.’ You may have done the same to someone else then. These events cascaded through everyone who was still ‘in the hunt.’

Other people includes teammates as well as opponents. It’s all mutually influential, a ‘cognitive furball.’ In a game you lead or follow others while they lead or follow you in a dance where the difference in who leads is a microsecond. But that’s getting ahead of the story.