THE CHALLENGE
Not all decisions need a lot of careful thought. Choosing a hot drink doesn’t require in-depth analysis—you just go ahead and select what feels right in the moment. But when you’re deciding something more consequential, you really don’t want to be on autopilot. That’s because, left to itself, the brain uses energy-saving shortcuts to minimize mental effort and make efficient use of its limited cognitive capacity. We’re not conscious of these shortcuts—which scientists refer to as biases—but they’re always chugging away in the background.
For example, our brain focuses attention on evidence that confirms our existing opinion, which saves us from having to change our mind if the evidence points in another direction—that’s confirmation bias. We’ll evaluate the option that’s in front of us, without taking the time to compare with alternatives—that’s default bias. And recency bias means we tend to choose options that we’ve recently seen or learned about, whether they’re right or not, since they’re easy to bring to mind.
So your brain automatically steers you toward the quickest and easiest choice—which is often not the optimal choice. Fine when it’s just coffee; less fine when you’re picking suppliers or strategies. When it comes to a decision that counts, you want to come off autopilot and use a more structured approach that’s been shown to improve your odds of a successful outcome.
THE ADVICE: THE ACORN APPROACH
This is the structured approach that I’ve seen leaders use successfully again and again. I call it the ACORN decision-making approach, named after the acronym of its five steps:
1. AIM: What is the objective of making this decision?
2. CRITERIA: What characteristics does the ideal solution have?
3. OPTIONS: What are the options (plural)?
4. RATING: How do those options score against your ideal criteria?
5. NEXT STEPS: What do your ratings suggest you should do next?
You can use it to make broad choices about strategy and organizational structure, but also narrower (but still important) moves like hiring a new employee. This is a technique where something is always better than nothing. If you only have time to do Steps 1 and 2, studies suggest you’ll already have improved your odds of making a good decision; if you do the other steps too, you’ll find yourself even better off.
By the way, if you’re reading all this and thinking “My problem isn’t that I make decisions too quickly, it’s that I overthink everything and move too slowly,” you’ll be glad to know that this can help you, too. While the model certainly helps to ground more instinct-driven decision-makers, it also unblocks anyone who’s feeling bogged down in complexity, by providing a way to organize and progress their thinking.
1. AIM: What is the objective of making this decision?
First, step back and ask yourself: What are you really trying to achieve by making this decision? Put another way: If you make the right decision, what good things will happen? It’s easy to skip this step, but getting clear on your Aim at the start can do a lot to clarify your thinking and speed the process later on.
2. CRITERIA: What characteristics does the ideal solution have?
The next step is to list the characteristics of the ideal solution. These will be your Criteria for choosing among options. For example, one of those criteria might be speed, if you want to see impact quickly. Another might be how much it benefits your customers. A third could be the extent to which it minimizes disruption to the business. There may not be an option that scores highly on every criterion, especially if your wish list is long. What matters is that your eventual choice performs well on the dimensions that matter most to you.
For a more sophisticated decision process, you could assign different weights to different criteria. For example, if you know that one criterion is twice as important as anything else, you could decide now that you’ll double the points on this dimension when you total up the scores in Step 4.
Even if you don’t assign weightings, one important distinction to make at this point is whether any of the criteria you’ve noted feel like dealbreakers. For example, maybe you want a solution that moves quickly—but definitely not at the expense of leaving customers worse off. That might mean “benefit for customers” is a dealbreaker, and any option that fails to score positively on this criterion should be taken off the table. Be as clear as possible about which criteria must be met for an option to stay on the table, before you move on.
3. OPTIONS: What are the options (plural)?
Then: articulate the potential Options for addressing the issue or opportunity. Always bear in mind:
- Don’t just evaluate one default option. Come up with at least two or three options, so that you don’t fall victim to default bias. People make better decisions when they compare multiple options side by side, even if they start off with one preferred option.
- Don’t forget to evaluate the option of doing nothing. Especially if you know you’re procrastinating about making a choice, it’s important to examine the effects of leaving things unchanged just as carefully as you examine the effects of taking action—something that research on omission bias tells us we often forget to do.
4. RATING: How do those options score against your criteria?
Next up: Rate your options. Collect as much relevant information as you can, and then score each option against your selection criteria.
You can do the ratings informally as a first pass—a “yes” or “no” is the most basic way of doing it. A slightly more detailed approach is to rate each option as high/medium/low on each criterion. However, there are real benefits to going a step further and rating each option on a scale from one to 10. It means you can add up the scores at the end, which gives you a more finely tuned sense of the right way forward. One leader I coach who uses this technique says: “It really does help to put numbers on it. You can say ‘I don’t know,’ but when you force yourself to say ‘This is an eight, and this is a six,’ you surface more of your rationale and sharpen your thinking.”
Your ratings may only be guesses at this point, but aim to make a good first attempt. (Below, we’ll look at ways to improve the rigor of your ratings.)
In Leadership Intelligence, I work through the example of the board chair of a bank, Angela Park. The board needed to agree a new strategic plan, because the bank been missing its business targets and needed to raise capital. People around Angela were jumping ahead to their preferred solutions, but she wanted to lead a high-quality discussion that would get them to the most robust answer. So she walked the board through the ACORN process. The Aim was to find a sustainable business plan, not a quick fix. There were four key Criteria: solid path to profit, ability to raise funding, retention of key talent and acceptance by the regulators. There were three possible Options, and the board then dug into the process of Rating them against their Criteria. The scoring looked something like this:
5. NEXT STEPS: What do your ratings suggest you should do next?
Back to the ACORN model: Finally, you need to take a clear-eyed look at what’s emerging from your ratings. What do you notice? Is there a “winner”? If so, do you feel comfortable or uncomfortable with the conclusion that’s implied?
Comfortable with a clear favorite?
If you are happy with the way the scores landed, I need to ask an annoying question: Might you have rated your initial favorite a bit more generously, to make the scores come out the way you wanted? It’s a natural thing to do—it’s a bias called motivated reasoning in action. If there’s a chance you did this—or if you simply want to increase the robustness of your decision—it helps to push your thinking into the future. Two ways of doing that, to test your leading option:
Future Back (prospective hindsight): “What went wrong?”
- Imagine it’s a year from now. You went ahead with the leading option and unfortunately, the decision turned out badly. Sorry about that. Ask yourself:
- What went wrong?
- Why did it go wrong?
- What did I miss when I was making the decision?
- Now, bring yourself back to the present, and ask:
- What does that mean I should change about my decision now?
Now Forward (consequence tree): “If this, then what?”
- For the option you like most, ask: If I do this, then what happens next?
- Maybe there will be two, three, or four possible outcomes—sketch out all the branching possibilities.
- Estimate rough probabilities for each branch.
- What does that mean you should factor into your decision now?
What if you’re not comfortable with the winning option?
If you don’t like the way the ratings stack up, don’t fret—discomfort is often a sign that you’re successfully challenging your thinking. It can feel hard because we’re wired to stick with our first instinct, and it takes mental effort to override that. Consider sitting with the outcome for a day or two and see how it settles in your mind.
However, you might be feeling uncomfortable with your ratings because the process has made you realize that you’re missing important information that is needed to properly assess some of your options. If some of your scores were too rough to be useful, it’s helpful to recognize this now rather than later. Research what you need to know, then have another go at rating.
Finally, the process may have made you realize something new about your criteria or options:
- There’s an additional option—maybe a hybrid option—that wasn’t on your original list. This can be a very useful revelation. Hybrid options often emerge as a result of this process, allowing you to combine the advantages of more than one solution.
- You’re missing a criterion that actually matters to you. In that case, go back to Step 2, revisit your criteria and start your structured approach again from that point onwards.
- One or more of your factors should be weighted more heavily. If one criterion is clearly the most important thing to achieve with your decision, but you didn’t recognize that before, you may need to give its score extra weight.
Just be careful with this kind of retooling of your ACORN criteria and ratings after you’ve run the process. It’s a very human instinct to want to keep tweaking to get your conclusion to line up with your initial hunch. The best approach is to go back to Step 2, do one firm rethink about your criteria and their weightings, and then rerun the process with an open mind about the outcome.
The end of the story
Angela says the ACORN approach helped the board feel that everyone in the room was being objective. “And it quickly became evident what the right decision was,” she says. “It was amazing how having a structured process allowed us to get to the decision reasonably promptly. Getting aligned on the aim and the criteria up front meant the discussion of options wasn’t emotional. It felt logical and analytical.”
You can’t be sure that any decision will play out exactly as you hope, however carefully you evaluate your options. Luck and circumstance play a role. But what you can control is the way you make decisions, so that you can be proud of the process you followed—however things work out.
Adapted and excerpted from Leadership Intelligence, in agreement with Crown Currency, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Caroline Webb.
