For instance, you're walking around the supermarket, feeling a little hungry and doing your weekly shopping. You see some food on the shelf, which you can never resist. You put it in the basket and walk on. To many people this is as unconscious a movement as tieing your shoelaces or getting to work in the morning. Modeling the strategy of this person can reveal exactly how it works, how that person internally knows what to do next. It can also reveal some simple ways in which can nudge a piece of the strategy into a different modality, and thus change the entire direction of the strategy.

Everybody's strategies are different, although you'll find some strategies are more common than others. For example some people may look at the food on the shelf, talk to themselves about it, make a picture of themselves and then feel good about it. This simple 'decision strategy' is one that is executed every day by millions of people. Some 'decision' strategies don't provide the same level of choice that others do. Some provide less choice but are able to ensure that the choices that are made are more useful ones.

Someone who has consistently made good decisions -- perhaps a CEO of company that has consistently done well throughout times of hardship -- good be very useful to model. Teaching his decision strategy to others in the company can be a powerful way of changing each the company from the ground up. The idea is not to force other people to use his way of thinking, but to give them the extra choice. The choice is to allow them the possibility of thinking about processes they do daily without realising it, and re-designing and improving these processes intelligently.

Last updated: 22 October 1997