Deciding means picking a binary sub-goal to care about.

The central idea of strategy is that channeling effort in the right direction, in the long run, is far more important than just being productive or doing more things faster.

The importance of strategy becomes clear in complex long-term endeavors (such as companies), where well-intentioned effort often goes to waste (unlike in school homework).

For now, we’ll say that strategy is the result of making decisions over time, ideally ones that align effort and lead to better long-term outcomes.

• There’s a lot of writing out there about strategy, especially in the context of business:

Despite many well-articulated intuitions, the words “decision” and “strategy” still often have an aura of hand-waviness around them. For me, some questions seem to be glossed over:

• How exactly do we evaluate a decision as good or bad, or at least “coherent”?
  • Of course, sometimes it’s obvious. But often, even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to analyze a decision in isolation from all the factors that contributed to a long term outcome.
• How do we know when there is a decision be made?
  • Again, sometimes it’s obvious. But when it’s not, we are often completely oblivious to decisions that we could have made, or paralyzed by seeing everything as a decision.
• Is decision-making a general skill that can be learned?
  • If so, how can we get better at it?

Requirements

This post proposes a framework to answer these questions, and explores how it might inform our day-to-day actions. But first, we’ll set out requirements to motivate and constrain our framework:

1. Conceptual Justification: Our framework must explain why the concept of “decision” is necessary when trying to describe the world.
   1. It must explain why we can’t just think of everything in terms of “actions”.
   2. It must help us distinguish between merely “taking an action” vs “making a decision”, in a way that lines up with our intuitions.
2. Not Trivializing: Our framework must align with common experience surrounding the prevalence of “bad decisions” and the difficulty of decision-making.
   1. It must explain why decision-making cannot be learned as straightforwardly as other “skills”.
   2. It must also allow room for the reality that some people, through experience, do seem to develop generally better decision-making.

I’m not aware of any popular conceptual frameworks that fulfill these requirements in a satisfying way. Hopefully if we can construct one ourselves, it will help us analyze our decisions more clearly and find ways to improve them.

• Ok but surely this is not how frameworks actually get built?

Case Study: Slay the Spire

Turn-based games (including most board games, and some video games) are ideal playgrounds for strategy because they isolate decision-making from other forms of skill, speed, and effort that are required to win most games. Among turn-based games, I am most interested in those where the consequences of decisions unfold and compound over time (rather than suddenly making you lose).

• Examples of turn-based games categorized by how quickly decisions can be evaluated:

The difficulty in such long-term strategy games is not confined to precise and careful calculation, but also includes what I consider to be “strategy” in a richer long-term sense.

An example is the digital card game *Slay the Spire.* It is a rouge-like deck-building game where the player acquires cards and modifiers through various battles with monsters, increasing synergies and building up strength for the final boss battle. Since its success, many roguelike games have been created with a similar structure.