Decision Ninja is a free web app for smartphones. It supports personal decision making, powered by radical self-honesty.
This blog post unpacks a bit about what that means, and why it might be helpful to you.
Self-Honesty in Decision Making
If you ask a friend for advice on decision making, or even search google for advice on the topic, you’ll get the following pieces of advice:
- weigh up the pros and cons of each option
- clarify the decision to be made.
These are both sensible pieces of advice. The former has a long history, being found in the writings of both Plato and Benjamin Franklin. But there’s something important missing too.
Both these recommendations focus our attention on the options available, and the decision to be made. In doing so, they take attention away from ourselves, and what we actually need.
This is a problem, because far from being transparent to us, our own needs are often opaque and concealed from us. If we don’t have clarity about what our actual needs are - and which ones matter the most to us - the likelihood of us making good decisions that make our lives wonderful becomes slim.
Identifying Our Needs
We often move forwards in our lives with little awareness or appreciation of what is motivating us. We are motivated by our needs. Needs for safety, love, community, contribution… They motivate us to do what we do. But we are easily distracted from an awareness of these needs by our thoughts, judgements, plans and strategies.
Our needs are always alive in us. But if we want to make decisions that satisfy them, we need to give them our attention.
It can be hard to name our needs. But it doesn’t have to be. Human needs are universal, and when we are offered a list of the most common ones, it becomes easier to pick out which ones are important for us in this moment.
I’ve personally learned this through practise in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Lists of universal human needs are a commonly-used tool in NVC that can help us to identify our current and ongoing needs.
So, after clarifying the decision to be made, Decision Ninja shifts your attention from the options, to you, the decision maker. It invites you to reflect on your needs in two ways:
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first, to choose items from a list of needs that might be relevant to you
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second, to weigh these needs up against each other, and order them in relative importance.
Analysing the Options
After identifying the needs that matter most, you are invited to weigh up each option according to how it satisfies each of these needs.
Decision Ninja then presents this information back to you in an integrated view.
This information graphic should give you clarity on which option will allow you to act in accordance with your most important values.
You may now be ready to make your decision. If not, you can go back around and revisit any stage of the process - as many times as you like.
Five Minutes or Less
Decision Ninja is a simple tool that you can easily use in five minutes or less, to help to bring your attention to what really matters, when you are faced with an important decision.
Decision Ninja is purpose-built for smartphones, so it can be in your pocket ready to use, whenever you need it.
Getting Access to Decision Ninja
Decision Ninja is currently in an Open Alpha.
If you’d like to try it out, please join the Decision Ninja Discord Channel, where you’ll be able to get access.