Annie Duke

Meetings should be reserved exclusively for discussion, while discovery and decision-making should happen independently and asynchronously.

"People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part."

To avoid groupthink and the influence of the loudest voices, gather individual opinions before the group meets.

"The best way to get somebody's opinion is independently of other people's opinions, independently asynchronously. So the way that I put is I want people to stop talking to each other so much."

Effective meeting facilitation involves active listening and reflecting back participants' views to ensure they feel heard without the facilitator imposing their own bias.

"So what I heard you say is that not all functions are created equal... Is that what you meant? And then they have the ability to say, 'Yes, that is what I meant'... you're reflecting back what they sa..."

Improving hiring success requires transforming vague 'gut feelings' about candidates into structured rubrics and explicit criteria.

"Can you explain to me what that means? In the abstract, what are the things that you're looking for in someone that you want to fill that role? And we can then excavate that, right? And make what is i..."

Intuition is most valuable in hiring when applied *after* a structured evaluation process, not as the primary filter.

"And then what he found was after you've gone through that process, if you then use your intuition after having done that, not before, that then you actually can really drastically improve your hit rat..."

The word 'nevertheless' allows leaders to acknowledge dissenting opinions while maintaining the authority to move forward with a decision.

"I hear what you're saying and I understand. Nevertheless, this is what's going to happen. And obviously, the words that you can use for that might be different... I heard you and your input, trust me,..."

High-quality decision-making requires moving from 'gut feel' to explicit models that can be tested and refined.

"It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explic..."

You can shorten any feedback loop by identifying and tracking leading indicators that are necessary for the final desired outcome.

"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?"

Seeking 'alignment' often leads to coercion; instead, aim for a process where everyone is heard, even if they don't agree with the final decision.

"The word alignment is stupid... because it doesn't exist. You have 10 people in a room and they're all really different people with different opinions, and they're never going to come out of the room..."

To evaluate whether to continue a project, ignore sunk costs and ask if you would start the project today with the current information.

"Waste is a prospective problem, not a retrospective one... if you wouldn't start this today, then that means that everything that you're putting into this going forward is the actual waste."

A pre-mortem is only effective if it results in 'kill criteria'—pre-determined signals that will trigger a pivot or shutdown.

"So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals."

Pre-mortems counteract the 'sunk cost' bias by establishing objective exit points before emotional attachment to a project grows.

"What a pre-mortem allows you to do is to set up kill criteria. So kill criteria are just a set of signals that you might see that would tell you that it's time to pivot or stop because once we actuall..."