When problem-solving is aimed at making a decision or taking an action, our goals tell us what we hope to change in the world through our choices.
Identifying goals
What’s essential and what’s negotiable.
Why problem-solving starts with your goals
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While we often simplify our models by leaving out the complexity of the world, doing so means that they will never reflect our true priorities.
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To support our true decision-making, we need to capture the tradeoffs between the top issues we care about.
A simple model
There are ways to systematically examine possible goals, including the simple model below.
- Begin by writing down what you consider to be your goals.
- Take a model-based approach to identify other candidate goals. For example, corporations always want more profit and more revenue, but they also might like having more customers, more market share, and so on.
- Human preferences are an often-overlooked aspect of goals. Taste, comfort, happiness, all can be part of the things you seek to improve using the Meta-Problem Method.
- Risk is also an important part of decisions. Generally, we want lower negative risks (downside) and higher positive risks (upside).
- Unknowns are a final important category. Sometimes our goal should be to learn more before we decide.
Once we have created a long list of candidate goals, we can identify the most important drivers and the ones that are most in conflict. This is inspired by the math of optimization since the most important or contradictory goals will drive the solution.
Understanding how to identify goals is just one part of the Meta-Problem Method. You can also see illustrations of this idea in practice on the Examples page.
Check out the other pages on the science of the method
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