What's in store for the Blueprint in 2023?

What's in store for 2023?

In this weekly newsletter, we'll dive into cognitive biases, highlight content, discuss research, and share useful templates from the Blueprint, but today we'll tee up what 2023 looks like:

• 🏔 What's the mission?

• 🚀 Timeline to launch and how you can help!

• 🧠 Covering 50 biases over 50 weeks

🏔 What's the mission?

About a month ago we announced the Blueprint, a community for decision makers aiming to systematically improve the speed and quality of decision making.

How? By creating a library of models and tools, backed by research, with a framework for any team or organization to build their own decision architecture. We call it the Blueprint.

Why? The speed and quality of decision making is the ultimate competitive advantage in environments of extreme uncertainty. We believe that focusing on making implicit decision making processes explicit, then adapting and improving them will profoundly change the way we work.

Why now? Over the last decade, since Marc Andreessen famously said "Software is eating the world", a few emerging trends have started to merge within the broader transformation of businesses:

• Async, distributed work and 'documentation' culture: We're not face-to-face as often and we use written communication more than ever before

• The rise of Neuroeconomics as applied to business decisions: Neuroeconomics is still quite nascent beginning in the late 1990's and this research is now challenging antiquated principles around decision making

• Data Science and AI brought data abundance, but lacks synthesis:The opportunity is shifting from data analysis towards dialog and process as artificial intelligence matures as a copilot for mining information and novel insights.

• There are more knowledge workers than ever before: New outcome-focused ways of working have decentralized decision making and more organizations spend their time product tuning as opposed to product producing. This means optimizing decision making over output capacity.

Yet decision making processes still feel slow, ineffective, opaque, and implicit.

This is why large consultancies Here's Gokul Rajam's take after experiencing this problem at companies like Google, Facebook, and Square:

"I bet you if you survey people at your company today about decision making and their level of happiness, most will say that they don't understand how decisions are made.

I firmly believe that making high-quality decisions can fundamentally transform the way we work. I personally can't wait to live in a world where people and companies make difficult decisions systematically and in a high-quality way."- Gokul Rajam

There is a fast-growing body of thought leadership in this area and we simply believe it needs to be aggregated, synthesized, and shared in an accessible, actionable way.

This is an opportunity for thoughtful practitioners to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

🚀 Timeline to launch

Still on board? Great! As of now, we plan on opening up the community in late February. The initial launch will include:

• A wholeeee lot of content: Building on the list we shared last month, we'll be sharing articles, research papers, book recommendations and more.

• The Blueprint Toolbox: Summaries of 50+ models, tools, and frameworks from thought leaders, top consultancies, and even a few from the Blueprint team 👀.

• The Bias Index: A library of biases that influence the decision making process with links to resources for your own continued research.

Here's a little sneak preview of how the site is shaping up! 🍿🕶

How you can help:

• Do you like writing in your free time? Most of what we're working on is synthesizing and documenting tools from various different sources (e.g. research Gary Klein's Post-Mortem and write a playbook for running it with a team). If that interests you, respond to this email! (or email [email protected]) We'd love the help 🙂

• Can we interview you? We're also always on the lookout for interesting people to interview in this space - so if it's you or someone you know, we'd love to chat! You can schedule here!

🧠 Covering 50 Biases over 50 weeks!

Many of these models and tools are designed to limit the impact of cognitive biases on decision making, information synthesis, and group collaboration - therefore, it's important to understand them!

With the exception of this week and the last week of the year, we'll cover one cognitive bias per week in the Blueprint newsletter.

And we have a fun poster to go with it! We'll send out the high-definition version next week, but we put together a nice poster to help you follow along.

As always, we love chatting about this stuff, so reach out! If you have any questions, have feedback, or you just want to geek out on this stuff, reply to this email!

Thanks and Happy New Year!