Reid Hoffman’s “Single Decisive Reason” thing (mentioned on our walk): > When there’s a complex list of pros and cons driving a potentially expensive action, seek a single decisive reason to go for it — not a blended reason. For example, we were once discussing whether it’d make sense for him to travel to China. There was the LinkedIn expansion activity in China; some fun intellectual events happening; the Chinese edition of The Start-Up of You was launching. Together, these constituted a variety of possible good reasons to go, but none justified a trip in and of itself. Reid said, “There needs to be one decisive reason. And then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste a time.” He did not go on the trip.If you come up with a list of many reasons to do something […] you are trying to convince yourself — if there isn’t one clear reason, don’t do it. [https://hbr.org/2015/03/reid-hoffmans-two-rules-for-strategy-decisions](https://hbr.org/2015/03/reid-hoffmans-two-rules-for-strategy-decisions) A colleague comments: > I think it’s a combination of a psychological claim, plus something about 80/20 distributions.It’s easy to rationalise lots of reasons to do something or not. So coming up with a long list of pros and cons isn’t that useful.But probably due to 80/20 distributions, there are a couple of key driving sources of value. If you can’t identify a big one, that’s a worrying sign.I think there’s also something about being able to act quickly in highly uncertain situations. If you pick one key outcome that matters, at least you have a clear way to assess success (and due to 80/20 distributions, it’s probably not a terrible measure). If instead you have 5-10 outcome measures, it’s going to be confusing to assess and communicate to others. > > (Obviously it only works as a heuristic - in theory you could imagine 3 reasons which all really do contribute 1/3rd of the value and that the resulting sum is high enough to make it the best action.)