Last year I had to screen 447 job applications. Of those, 54 made it to an interview, and 3 ended up being hired to my team. I had over 20 applications coming in every day, and usually less than an hour to go through them. This is just one, and very straight forward, example where reduction of choice is essential for making right decisions. Failure to do so is a surefire recipe for analysis paralysis. At work, it’s very easy to forget that defining what we are NOT trying to achieve can be just as important as what we are. Boundaries, paradoxically, often provide us with the freedom to make choices without second-guessing ourselves.
Games like 7 Wonders, the grandfather of modern card drafting games, push you to remind yourself what you are and aren’t trying to do. The first turn of a 7 Wonders game looks like this—You have your own unique wonder, which produces one type of resource. You need a specific combination of resources to advance the construction of your wonder. Maybe you’re producing papyrus while playing as the ancient city of Ephesos. Ephesos is home to the Temple of Artemis, and in order to build it, you will, at different points in the game, need stone, wood, linen, and glass.
You don’t have to build your wonder—It is one of several valid paths you can take during the game, a natural inclination that you may choose to follow or ignore. In your hand are 7 cards, representing several aspects of civilization - economy, culture, science, etc., - of which you can play only one.
Here comes that small moment of panic. You have little to no knowledge of what the next turns may bring, only the options in your hand and your natural inclination. The following turns will bring further knowledge, as you know which opportunities you’ve passed on and are presented to your rivals. Like in business, in 7 Wonders, the clearer a space becomes to multiple competitors, the fewer opportunities it holds as everyone has already grabbed their piece.
It is entirely possible your first move will determine what the rest of your game will look like. No pressure.
There is only one sane thing to do when faced with a multitude of options - disqualify as many as you can. Remember - our brains can only hold about four concepts at any given moment. The rest is noise between you and your decision. So you lay down the cards you can’t afford and forget about them. Next come the duplicates.
What’s left can be put into two buckets - Things you are set up to self-manufacture, and things you can afford to buy. Buying costs you future opportunities by reducing your liquid wealth, strengthening the competition by increasing theirs. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad option, just a thing to consider. A manager often has to decide between developing a skill inside the team to perform a task, renting the skill from the outside, or buying a tool that compensates for not having it.
Now that we are down to somewhere around 3-4 unique options, we can start comparing between them.
Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted, and Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts
Unlike the ancient cities of 7 Wonders, companies and teams don’t really measure their wealth in gold. Yes, you have a departmental budget you need to spend carefully. I, however, measure my team’s wealth in it’s resilience, adaptability, velocity, and morale. Unlike gold, these are hard to weigh, and centuries of a currency based economy have taught us to undervalue what we can’t measure.
When comparing between opportunities, us managers have a sacred term we throw at everything - Return of Investment (ROI). On its surface, the concept is simple. You put in X (person days, money, machine hours at a given cost, delivery & distribution), and you gain Y benefit. If Y is greater than X, the strategy is valid. If you compare between two options this way, you choose the one where the difference between Y and X is greater. That’s great when X is measured in effort and Y in revenue, but not so easy when value is measured in opportunities lost or gained, erosion of team morale, or even public support. You can’t just apply simple math.
A good drafting game will put you in the same dilemma often to keep you on your toes. Some things are easy to measure - This card rewards me Y points, and costs me X gold to build. Other times, it’s not that simple. One card is worth 3 points now, the other is worth 1, but may increase in value with the right synergies. Or maybe it doesn’t give you any points but increases your production, or your wealth?
7 Wonders is unlikely to give you the analytical tools required to measure cost and gain in your workplace, but the act of making a choice, or an educated guess, in uncertainty is a necessary tool for a manager. Just as important is the instinct to demand from your team as much information as can be obtained with reasonable effort.
Getting 3 points at differing costs is an easy choice. Deciding between producing 1 brick or 1 wood requires you to collect data, which means asking a lot of questions -
Which am I more likely to need in the future?
What will my rich neighbors need and will likely buy from me?
Does this choice put me in a competition with another player on the same resource or outcome?
If so, do I think I can beat them?
If not - we will both diminish each other’s gains, to the benefit of all other players.
Can I count on a cash flow from my neighbors if I spend my money now on making something available to them?
That usually means ensuring you are the only one they can buy from, and they can’t produce themselves.
No matter how exhaustive your list of questions will be, eventually you’d have to make a choice based on partial knowledge. The important thing is to realize that is just how things work. You can be principled and disciplined even while guessing - keep your synergies in mind, allow yourself room to pivot when necessary, and, when the pieces fall together, commit and push with all your might. Commitment should come only when the payoff from the opportunities you’ve created earlier comes to play.
Interesting! I don't know the game, but I'd like to try it.
An economist's perspective: if you want to make an analytically valid choice between an arbitrary number of alternatives, you can convert all the resources and values to some single type of unit. For example, utility. This can make your priorities explicit to yourself. When you don't know how a certain action will affect a given resource, you can articulate this uncertainty using a probability distribution over possible outcomes. If you wanted to teach a computer to play seven wonders, I think this is a good place to start.