Systematically think through a decision by examining its consequences from 4 different perspectives
It's a model that allows us to systematically think through a decision by examining its consequences from 4 different perspectives and make the right choice. If you're hesitant to make a decision, this may help you. You need to think of the events that may or may not happen if you choose one way or another.
This method is not actually very helpful if you want to decide which laptop to buy or what to cook. It's rather useful when you want to decide whether to buy a laptop or not, or to cook or not. Generally, if your question starts with "should I" and doesn't contain "or" then this method can help you get a better perspective and make a better decision. However, if you want to choose which laptop to buy (Lenovo or Apple), you could do this twice: 1) Should I buy a Lenovo laptop? and 2) Should I buy an Apple laptop? and compare your scores.
The idea of the method is to think of all the events that may or may not happen based on your decision answering 4 simple questions:
If it seems confusing at first, don't worry, you just need to realize that "this happens/this doesn't happen" refers to your problem/decision. If you want to decide whether to become the president of the USA or not, the questions will look like this:
You answer these questions not just once, but add as many answers as you can for each question. In the end it gives you an overall idea of what would the general outcome be if you made a certain decision, more or less.
The method is credited to 17th century French scientist, mathematician, philosopher René Descartes. He was a cool guy, and you should definitely read more about him. This method is used in many areas nowadays. Well, I assume so, if I heard of it and decided to use it, then many more people must have done so before. You could look it up if you're interested in its origin or the author himself, who as mentioned before was a cool guy. Again, I'm assuming, but he has a long wikipedia page, also he's the guy who said: "I think, therefore I am". 😎 So, cool!
If you think about it, it's kind of a fancy Pros and Cons list, isn't it? You can practically fit all the events in the squares into a usual pros and cons list. That's right, but this is better, instead of columns it has squares (technically rectangles with corners) with at first confusing headings, it feels more scientific, at least to me.
I first heard about this when my mom was taking an online training for her job, and there was a session about decision making titled "effective decision making with Descartes' square" or something similar. I knew who Descartes was, a little bit about his work in mathematics, but I'd never heard about this method before. So, I decided to look this up in the encyclopedia, then I remembered about the invention of the Internet and looked it up online instead.
A quick tip, if you're trying to look up a French person's name online, learn the language first to be able to spell their names. It will save you a lot of time. Who knew the letter "s" would appear twice in a name that is pronounced /deɪˈkɑːrt/. 🤷
My mom's trainer told that they should take a sheet of paper, divide it into 4 squares and in each square add events answering those 4 questions, look at them and make a decision, or something like that. But it seemed incomplete and unnecessary to me, I could think of those events in my head and visualize them on a page of a beautiful ancient manuscript with colored letters and nice drawings on the sides. That wouldn't help me make a decision. I needed numbers.
Well, I took a sheet of paper, divided it into 4 squares and in each square added events answering those 4 questions about whether I should make a digital version of this model or not? You could probably guess the recommendation I got.
Here, instead of just adding event names, we also add values, weights to them depending how important each event is. Usually, if an event or the change it brings is positive, you set its value as 1, and -1 if it's negative. But you can adjust the values, an event may have a value of 2 because it's more important than the others.
So just fill in the events and assign them values, and your score will be automatically calculated for you. If the score is positive, the recommendation is to make that change. If it's negative, the recommendation is not to and if it's zero, you need to add at least another event to break the balance.
I came across some resources on the web about this, but most of them discuss a decision whether someone should change their career or not, that's a good example, and here are 2 more: