Making Hiring Criteria Explicit Boosts Success Rate

The Power of Making the Implicit Explicit in Decision-Making

Annie Duke's approach to improving decision quality centers on a core principle: take what's implicit in your thinking and make it explicit. This simple but powerful shift creates measurable improvements in decision quality across various contexts.

The Discover-Discuss-Decide Framework

• People generally think meetings serve three purposes:
  • Discover: Find out what others think
  • Discuss: Talk about those ideas
  • Decide: Make a choice together
• Critical insight: Only the discussion part should happen in meetings
  • Discovery should happen independently and asynchronously beforehand
  • Decision-making should also happen outside the meeting

How to implement this approach:

1. Before the meeting (Discovery phase):

   • Send questions to participants independently
   • Ask for written responses without "reply all"
   • Have people force-rank options with brief rationales
   • Use tools like Google Forms, Airtable, or Coda to collect responses privately
   • Compile and distribute all responses before the meeting

2. During the meeting (Discussion phase):

   • Focus only on discussing the pre-collected opinions
   • Concentrate on areas of disagreement rather than agreement
   • As a facilitator, reflect back what people say without offering your opinion
   • Avoid interruptions and statements like "I think you're wrong"
   • Create psychological safety by not expecting alignment

3. After the meeting (Decision phase):

   • Use a single decision-maker model when possible
   • If voting is needed, do it privately
   • Accept that not everyone will agree with the final decision
   • Use "nevertheless" to acknowledge input while moving forward

Benefits of this approach:

• Prevents the loudest or most confident voices from dominating
• Reveals a wider range of opinions and perspectives
• Makes people feel truly heard even if the decision doesn't go their way
• Creates ownership of the decision across the team
• Reduces the coercive nature of traditional meetings

Applying Pre-mortems Effectively

• Pre-mortems alone don't change behavior unless paired with pre-commitments
• The real power comes from establishing "kill criteria":
  • Identify specific signals that would indicate failure
  • Pre-commit to specific actions when those signals appear
  • Example: "If we can't get a decision-maker in the room after three meetings, we'll stop pursuing this deal"

Shortening Feedback Loops

• "There is no such thing as a long feedback loop"
• Instead of waiting for final outcomes, identify correlated signals:
  • What must happen for the ultimate goal to be achieved?
  • What early indicators correlate with eventual success?
  • Example: For venture investments, funding at Series A is necessary (though not sufficient) for a billion-dollar exit

On Quitting

• By the time you're thinking about quitting, it's probably already past the time you should have quit
• We tend to continue until there's absolute certainty of failure due to:
  • Sunk cost fallacy (not wanting to "waste" what we've already invested)
  • Endowment effect (overvaluing things we've built)
  • Identity concerns (fear of being seen as a failure)
• The real cost isn't just continuing something unproductive, but missing other opportunities