A scoring rule for hard decisions

Hi Everyone,

On the hardest team decisions, the most confident person in the room usually wins, whether or not they're right.

Sounding sure and being right are not the same thing. When Dartmouth researcher Jeffrey Friedman tested about 2,000 national security officials, the statements they were 90% sure about turned out true only about 60% of the time.

Most leadership teams misjudge their own certainty just as badly. And the calls that split a team are rarely 90/10 anyway. They're the messy 55/45 ones, where reasonable people read the same facts and reach different conclusions.

Today we're walking through a scoring method for better decisions.

Why do the close calls keep coming back?

On a clear yes or a clear no, the room agrees and moves on. The decisions that resurface week after week sit right in the middle, where the facts are ambiguous and another hour of debate won't help.

Without a shared metric, these choices devolve into a yes-or-no standoff won by whoever argues the loudest. Often, that person is not the one with the most expertise.

Quantifying your conviction before anyone speaks makes these dynamics instantly visible.

How to run it

Three steps, in any decision meeting.

Score on your own first: Before any discussion begins, everyone writes down a conviction score from 0 to 10. Scoring privately prevents people from anchoring to the first opinion voiced, separating what someone actually believes from how aggressively they argue.

Look at the spread between scores: The average score always hides the disagreement. The gap between a 7 and a 4 is the exact area worth discussing, because it points directly to your true disagreement—usually a conflicting assumption or a different assessment of risk.

Set the rule based on reversibility: For a reversible decision, move forward if the average is 6 or higher and no core expert is below a 4. For an irreversible decision, raise the bar to a 7 average and ensure no expert is below a 5. The threshold must match the cost of being wrong.

Committing when you disagree

Scores rarely line up perfectly, so you need a mechanism to move forward despite disagreement. Jeff Bezos famously calls this "disagree and commit."

In his 2016 letter to shareholders, he described greenlighting an Amazon Studios show he personally doubted. His team wanted to do it, and he did not. Instead of forcing them to win a protracted argument, he wrote back, "I disagree and commit," and let their choice stand.

When a team scores conviction openly, making that choice becomes much easier. A leader sitting at a 4 can confidently back a team sitting at an 8, because everyone can see exactly where they stood when they decided to proceed. The decision is made, and the disagreement is documented if you ever need to review it.

Index Ventures operates exactly this way. Partners score every deal from 1 to 10. Anything above a 7 is automatically approved. For deals landing between a 5 and a 7, the partner sponsoring the investment makes the final call. The score forces everyone to take a clear position and hands the close calls to the person who must live with the outcome.

Try this in your next meeting

Pick the one decision your team has left open for a week or more without resolving. Before your next meeting on the topic, ask everyone to write down a private 0 to 10 score and bring it with them.

Open the meeting by reading the scores out loud. Find the lowest score and ask that person what specific change would move them up two points. Whatever they say is your missing piece. Start the conversation there, before anyone begins arguing for a yes or a no.

Go deeper

👉 Texas National Security Review: The World Is More Uncertain Than You Think – Friedman's study of about 2,000 officials and 60,000 judgments, plus the two-minute training that improved their calibration.

👉 Amazon: 2016 Letter to Shareholders – the source for "disagree and commit," in Bezos's own words.

👉 TechCrunch: Index Ventures' partners on how they decide – partner Mark Goldberg explains the 1 to 10 vote and how the close calls get routed.

Coming up on Monday

This is it for this week! Thank you for reading. On Monday, we're breaking down what a new leader should actually accomplish in their first 30 days and why fast starts backfire.

P.S. What are you reading right now, fiction or non-fiction? We're always after the next good one, so let us know.