Tridirectional Decision-Making Method

This decision-making method is for when you have to engage a certain but highly specific situation that requires a specific strategy to overcome or complete. A situation that’s particularly difficult or tricky.

A cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options.

These situations are expected to occur or are likely to as part of an overall masterplan for an operation of any sort. It can be any of the individual steps / events that require a decision to reach the endgame, including the endgame if it requires decision-making.

The idea is to have 3 different possible responses to use for a specified decision, opting for the best one for the exact moment it’s required. Even if a response to a decision is obvious, there should be 2 others ready – just in case the situation changes or alters in a way that the obvious response is no longer the best.

So it’s having a plan A, B and C, but not on a broad masterplan level scope. It’s for the smaller, specific moments and actions that make up the plan.

In other words, it’s problem solving in a real-time basis using pre-selected contingency parameters for likely / known mission obstacles, conflicts or resistance.

Example: You need to infiltrate an exclusive nightclub. The first mission obstacle is getting through the velvet ropes. Plan A is saying the codeword to the bouncer for access. However, the codeword may be an older version that may not be used by the club any longer. So you need a plan B and C ready to enact seamlessly without delay in case plan a is a bust.

In this example, plan B could be to have a $100 bill to hand over to the bouncer as a bribe. And plan C could be to namedrop someone important – but not the owner or someone that obvious, perhaps a silent yet powerful managing partner of the club that’s only known to insiders and true VIP’ers.

All 3 plans required a certain level of intel gathering. Plan A needed someone with VIP access to obtain the codeword, plan B required a previous chat with a bouncer of how much a bribe will get you in (or if at all) and plan C required investigating publicly accessible business records to obtain the name.

Although plan A is most likely to work, the tridirectional decision-making process lets you have a double failsafe, instead of attempting to generate an uninformed backup plan / workaround on the spot.

Incorporating some feature for automatically counteracting the effect of an anticipated possible source of failure.

When you need to make a mission critical decision on the spot, or worse, an alternate working strategy, with no time to gather more information, it significantly reduces the likely hood of success.

The best decision is an informed one, but without the ability to be more informed at the exact moment, it works to be pre-informed with this method.

Tridirectional decision-making can be applied to both missions and daily life, as long as they’re scenarios you know that will or will likely occur – so you can plan.

It’s having at least 3 different ways to effectively handle an obstacle / problem that you know will happen or has a high probability of it happening.

Instead of going through the cumbersome 7 step mental process of decision-making, you can streamline it instantly for these scenarios in just 3.

It’s having a backup plan plus a failsafe for the back up or dual alternate plans equally as viable as the initial.