I recently became very curious about the concept of decision risk.

I’m currently reading Entreprenørstaten — The Entrepreneurial State in English — by Sigge Winther Nielsen. It explores the remarkably poor track record of major political reforms in Danish politics. Time and again, large initiatives end up going terribly wrong.

I’ve seen countless examples of the same thing in the private sector. Product teams build at full speed, only to create something that nobody wants to buy or use. It ends up being a total waste of time and money.

This is closely related to the concept of decision risk.

In situations of high uncertainty, many people excuse poor decisions to launch major initiatives that ends up failing by arguing that there wasn’t enough information available, so there was nothing they could have done to reduce the risk. I strongly disagree.

I believe it is absolutely possible to reduce decision risk, even in highly uncertain situations.

The technique is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning. And I really mean the smallest possible chunks in terms of the resources you invest. Instead of making one huge bet, you spend smaller amounts of money on small iterations, learn from each one, and adjust as you go.

This way of working requires leaders to define the outcome to be achieved—not the output to be delivered. The team close to the domain and learning should be hill-climbing toward a desired outcome rather than implementing a predetermined solution.

When someone in a position of power specifies the output, despite not being the person doing the implementation, they’re making the arrogant assumption that they already know the right solution before getting close enough to the problem to understand it.

To be honest, it’s painful to read Sigge’s book. Politics is deeply broken when it comes to effectively solving society’s biggest and most important problems.

However, I’m pretty convinced that it doesn’t have to be this way, and I choose to be optimistic that things can change.

I’m super curious about ideas, insights, and ways of thinking that could improve how political reforms are carried out in Danish politics today.

Is it possible to identify the root causes of what’s broken in the current political system and develop mechanisms to address those issues, making political reforms more effective to solve important problems in society? This seems like a super valuable meta problem to solve and that is the kind of question that really stimulates my systems-thinking-addicted brain. I simply refuse to believe it has to be this way.