What To Do When A Big Decision Is Shared With Someone Else
A decision scientist's step-by-step guide to combining utility functions with a co-decider
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Welcome back to a month of answering reader questions! Remember, if you’d like me to answer your questions about making big career and life decisions, leave a comment below or send me an email. Readers who ask my favorite questions get a signed copy of Solving for Why.
This week’s question, like last week’s, comes from Ali, who wrote: “How do you convince others that the decision they think you made about a huge life changing event being completely out of left field is actually rational, thought through, and OK. Is it their insecurities or is that decision completely barking mad!!”
In last week’s post, we covered what to do when the decision is yours and other people don’t like it. When you own a decision, then naysayers provide important information. But they don’t have veto power.
On the other hand, sometimes the pushback isn’t pushback. Sometimes it’s a co-decider who’s exercising their legitimate decision rights. So for this week’s question, let’s talk about
How are you supposed to co-decide with someone else, especially if you don’t agree?
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The Problem With Co-deciders
Last week, we went through an exercise in determining whether someone was just a stakeholder in your decision, or whether they had standing to make the decision with you.
For example, in most relationships, career decisions can’t be made in isolation. For many people, “Hey, I’m moving to Boston for this new job; if you loved me, you’d come with me” can be grounds for a break-up.
In other words, some decisions don’t just have stakeholders who are impacted by your choice; they have co-deciders: you and your partner on whether to have a(nother) child. You and your co-founder on whether to pivot. You and your siblings on what to do about your aging parents.
In these cases, you can’t just thank everyone for their input and proceed. You’ve actually got to combine your preferences with theirs.
Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Elicit values independently, before discussing them with each other
I know, this goes against the traditional advice to talk through your decision (don’t worry, talking is important…we’ll get to the talking in just a sec).
But the reason I suggest not talking first is because whoever speaks first anchors the conversation, and from then on everyone is forced to define their own values relative to the opening offer.
Decision scientists call this anchoring; economists call this first-mover advantage.
Before you talk, then, get each person to write down what they’re solving for in this decision. What values are they pursuing, what are the things they hope the decision accomplishes?
[A note on the word values. I use that word often to describe the things that a decision is trying to achieve. Those may be “values” in the traditional, normative sense—doing good in the world, for example, or having an impact, or helping the poor—but they don’t have to be. Getting more rest, making more money, spending more time with family can all be outcomes that you’re hoping a decision will achieve. Don’t get distracted by the word values into thinking that any decision must necessarily have a goal that other people would approve of. Your values in any decision are the things you’re hoping to solve for.]
OK. Write yours down. Have your co-decider do the same. Then you talk about them.
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Step 2: Build a shared list of values
Compare your two lists and, if I can be a little math-y here, produce a union, not an intersection. In other words, Step 2 is a both-and exercise.
If salary matters to one of you and not the other, then salary is on the final list. If being near family matters to one of you, then it’s on the list.
The principle: any attribute that matters to one decider matters to the decision, full stop.
Filtering—or worse, judging!—each other’s values out at this stage is how resentment is seeded. It’ll grow in later steps, so nip the resentment in the bud right now.
Step 3: Separate vetoes from weights
Some things are uncompromisable. Most things aren’t. Distinguish those from each other. Document what things are deal-breakers, and which are differences in importance.
In a good shared decision, there are always some deal-breakers—but there aren’t a lot.
For example: “I won’t move to another country” might initially feel like a deal breaker. In my experience, the best way to test whether it actually is, is to make every other attribute ridiculously good—and see if the deal-breaker remains.
In other words, would you move to another country if the salary was a million dollars a year, you had two months of vacation per year, and you got a company car? If the answer is still no, then moving is probably a deal-breaker.
But if the answer is, “there’s some salary for which I would actually consider moving,” keep moving on your list and assign it a weight in the next step.
Importantly, it’s easier to question the deal breaker in your co-decider’s list than it is to assess your own. So check your own self…are you making the decision unnecessarily difficult because you’re insisting on too many deal-breakers?
And then, once you’ve both identified your deal-breakers, respect them.
If your partner has a hard limit, then that’s a limit. If that limit shrinks the options you’re working with, well…you both work within the smaller space.
A veto disclosed in week one is a boundary; a veto sprung in week six is a betrayal.
Step 4: Use swing weighting
For one-person decisions, it’s often sufficient to assign importance weights to each value. I give a worked example of this last month, in the story of Aya’s divorce.
But when there are two deciders, sometimes raw importance weighting simply isn’t robust enough.
For example, imagine a job decision in which one spouse says that salary is 10/10 important, while the other says that it’s only 2/10—because being home with the kids is 10/10.
How do you balance mismatched weights?
Welcome to swing weighting. Instead of just assigning a raw importance number to an attribute, ask yourselves a different question:
Imagine swinging from the worst option to the best option on this attribute alone. How much happiness does that buy us?
For example, let’s say you’re deciding between two jobs. The difference in salary between the two is $20K, while the difference in commute is 90 minutes a day. The question would look like this:
“Suppose a job was at the worst possible scenario. Would you rather improve the commute by 90 minutes, or would you rather improve the salary by $20,000.”
I know this sounds technical, and the decision science literature can get very wonky about how to calculate swing weights, but there’s no need to get into the weeds. Even asking the worst-to-best question brings a lot of clarity.
Step 5: Score each option on each attribute before combining your scores
Swing weighting tells you how important each attribute is. It doesn’t tell you how well each option performs across those attributes.
That’s what happens in this step.
Here, rate each option, on each attribute, separately and independently: On a scale from 1–10, how good is the salary at Job A? How good are the work hours?
Once you and your co-decider have done this for yourselves, independently, resolve disagreements. There are usually only two types:
Factual disagreements (“Is the salary actually $120,000?”) are resolvable with research. Go find out.
Preference disagreements (“I scored a $120,000 salary 8/10, but you scored it only 4/10”) are not resolvable by more research. These have to be bargained, traded, split, or agreed on by consensus. Spend your emotional energy here. This is where the friction happens, so take the time to smooth it out.
Step 6: Agree on the decision rule before you see the result
OK, this is super important. Before you actually decide, decide how you’re going to decide.
Are you going to sum your scores and take the highest one, like Aya did? Will you pick the option that’s got the most amazing best-case scenario? Will you choose option that cushions the worst-case scenario as well as possible, even if the potential upside isn’t as good? Do you choose based on the most important attribute first, and then break ties with the second? Does anyone have a veto? If so, how many?
Don’t wait to see the results before deciding. Decide how you’re deciding first. Agree on it without even seeing the results, because if you wait until after the scoring to choose the rule, then whoever dislikes the result might feel tempted to attack the rule itself. Pre-committing protects the process from motivated reasoning—including your own.
Step 7: Decide
Once you’ve done all that, apply your agreed-upon decision-making rule to the information you have. By this point, you know what you’re solving for, how important each of those whats are, and which of your options is most likely to achieve that.
Choose that, but…
Finally, Accept That There Is No Perfect Group Decision
Way back in 1951, the economist Kenneth Arrow proved, mathematically, that there is no method of combining individual preferences in such a way that satisfies all fairness criteria simultaneously. In other words, you simply cannot take a group of people, each with their own individual preferences, and combine those into a single group preference that satisfies everybody fairly.
Seriously, I’m not being pessimistic. It’s literally called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. He won a Nobel Prize for it in 1972.
So, accept that the best you can do is approximate. No single procedure will produce the objectively right answer multiple co-deciders. Not even the process above.
What the process does produce, though, is transparency. Each co-decider can see exactly where their preferences align, where they diverge, and where the final choice favored whom.
Across repeated choices, in sustained interactions, this is the sort of decision-making that builds durable buy-in.
The couple who swing-weights together doesn’t always stay together—but at least they don’t end up, ten years on, re-litigating the same fight about who really chose to move to Boston.
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