14 Crucial Decisions
decisions a day—what to eat, where to walk, what to say, none of which have a lasting impact. Even big decisions—what car to buy, where to live, what job to take—feel major in the moment but generally don’t register with too much command in our life story. Who to marry, what degree to study, whether to join the armed forces, whether to have a child—these typically represent our most lasting decisions, those we consider crucial. In today’s world of instant everything, most things are less permanent. Therefore, crucial decisions are less and less frequent. Where do we see them? When leaders are making decisions in complex situations. Back to coronavirus in 2020, did we save lives? This is a difficult question. After all, every one of us will eventually pass away. If by “save lives” we mean certain lives were extended, then yes, some were. However, what if another group of lives were shortened? When all is said and done, I believe the data will reveal this is exactly what happened. In other words, some lives were positively impacted while others were crushed, and as a society the net gain in terms of lifespan was negligible. At the same time, the economic, emotional, and mental toil of the times has been some of the worst in history. It seems that, at best, we spent trillions of dollars to prolong a small number of lives for a short time (on average). By contrast, we could have directed one tenth of those resources to improve and extend the lives of ten times as many people. More on this, shortly. But how did we decide to prioritize these people with this extraordinary sum of money for a relatively small return? Simply put, our processes for making these crucial decisions were outdated. Leaders across the business and political spectrum were put in impossible positions, asked to make gut calls reacting to input from a small group of people, based on an incomplete set of data. This led to conclusions that drove uncertainty, not reliability. What Happened? “It seemed sensible enough. After we started hearing about coronavirus, it appeared that we might be facing huge
