How to Make Better Decisions: The State Factor You Miss

Vikram runs a Series B technology company in Mumbai. He is disciplined about decisions. He keeps a decision journal. He uses a structured pros-and-cons matrix for significant calls. He runs 10-10-10 thinking on major strategic choices: how will this look in ten minutes, ten months, ten years. He has read Daniel Kahneman. He understands System 1 and System 2 thinking at an intellectual level. And he still has a clear pattern in how his decisions land: he over-indexes on relationships when making partnership calls, de-prioritizes cost signals when moving fast, and consistently underestimates execution timelines when the opportunity is visible and exciting.

He knows this about himself. He has noted it in the journal multiple times. And he still makes the same calls the same way. The framework does not prevent it. The debrief identifies it afterward. Neither changes the pattern that made the decision.

This is the gap that most approaches to better decision making do not address. Decision frameworks are tools for the conscious processing layer. They help you organize the information you have access to and evaluate it by a structure you have chosen. What they do not change is the fast, automatic process that has already reached a conclusion before you open the framework document. Antano Solar John, a Personal Evolution Scientist with over two million installations across fifty industries, shows this with precision in the video above. The decision process runs below conscious awareness in a fraction of a second. The sequence is automatic. It follows the same internal strategy the person has used for every significant choice they have made. The framework operates above that. It does not reach it.

This is why smart people with good frameworks make the same category of bad decision repeatedly. The framework improves the analysis layer. It does not touch the pattern layer. And the pattern layer made the decision before the analysis started.

Antano Solar John describes the unconscious decision strategy with a precision that most decision-making literature misses. The strategy is not about thinking style or personality. It is a specific internal sequence: what the person does with information inside their own mind before they commit to any choice. Some people build a vivid visual image of the outcome. They have already seen the result before they open the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is a translation of what they already know from the image. Others build two complete scenarios and compare them. They toggle between Option A and Option B in their head, and the decision is made when one scenario stops generating doubt. Others need to feel the outcome. They are running a physical simulation: what does it feel like to say yes to this? The feeling resolves into a signal, and the signal becomes the decision.

The critical point is that this strategy is consistent across contexts. The same person who goes to a restaurant with a pre-built image of what they want approaches business acquisitions the same way: they know what they are looking for before the meeting starts, and the meeting either confirms or does not confirm it. The person who toggles between two complete scenarios at lunch does the same in a hiring decision, a pricing discussion, and a strategic pivot. The stakes do not change the strategy. They amplify its output.

What this means for how to make better decisions is direct. The question is not which framework to add. The question is what strategy is already running, and whether that strategy is producing the quality of output the situation requires. Vikram's image-based strategy works well for markets and product bets, where his ability to see outcomes quickly is an advantage. It works badly for partnership evaluation, where the image of the person in front of him overrides the cost signals and execution history that the situation actually requires him to weight. His strategy is not wrong. It is running in a context where a different process would serve him better. And it runs automatically every time, regardless of which framework is open on his laptop.

Antano Solar John's work shows that this strategy is observable. The way someone handles a low-stakes decision in a supermarket shows the same sequence as their highest-stakes business call. The hand that places a chocolate into a cart as carefully as a jewel is the same system that signs a contract with extreme care about terms. The person who picks up a detergent and runs a lengthy internal comparison process does the same in a board meeting. The pattern is consistent. The observation is possible. And once the strategy is visible, the work of improving decision making shifts to the level where the decision is actually made.

A CFO at a manufacturing company in Chennai noticed something over two years of tracking his decisions. His calls made in the first half of the day were demonstrably different in character from his calls made after 4 PM. The morning calls were more open, more willing to take on calculated risk, more capable of holding multiple factors simultaneously. The afternoon calls were more defensive, more likely to default to the established procedure, more prone to the answer he had given the last time a similar situation arose. The data being evaluated was not different. The situation was not different. He was different.

This is the state factor in decision quality. The state the person is in when they encounter the decision shapes what data registers as salient, what risks the pattern weights heavily, and what conclusion the internal strategy reaches. A state built from fatigue, after a difficult meeting, after sustained pressure, narrows the option space. The strategy runs, but it runs in a narrower territory. The same person, same strategy, in a broader state, has access to more of the territory and generates a better-quality decision.

Decision frameworks do not account for this. A pros-and-cons list built under fatigue is a list of the considerations that the narrowed state can access. It feels complete. It is not. The considerations that a broader state would have added are not visible to the narrowed state, so they are not on the list, and the decision that follows does not include them. The framework looks rigorous. The output reflects the quality of the state that built it.

This is what Antano Solar John means when he describes life outcomes as connected to the decisions people make about their business and career. The formula A times T equals C: adjustment across time produces consequences. The adjustment that changes decision quality at the root level is not another framework. It is an expansion of the installed pattern that runs the decision, and an expansion of the state range the person can operate from when that pattern fires. Leaders who have developed this through Excellence Installation Technology make decisions from a broader and more stable state base than their equivalent-intelligence peers. The difference in outcomes across three to five years is not explained by the frameworks they used. It is explained by the quality of the state from which the same frameworks were operated.

The practical implication of everything above is that improving decision making requires two simultaneous changes. First: make the installed decision strategy visible. What sequence does your system actually run when you make a significant choice? Do you arrive at conclusions before you analyze, and then use analysis to validate? Do you need to feel the outcome before you can commit? Do you build elaborate internal comparisons? Many people have never mapped this because the strategy runs below awareness. Making it explicit changes what you can do with it.

Second: work on the state range available to you when the strategy fires. A person whose installed pattern makes decisions from a broad, resourceful state makes different decisions than the same person running the same pattern from a narrowed or defensive state. The strategy does not upgrade itself based on reading books about decision-making. It upgrades when the pattern underneath it changes, and the state it has access to expands. This is the category of work Antano Solar John and Harini Ramachandran do with leaders across fifty industries.

The practical version of this in everyday decision contexts looks like what Antano describes in the video: go to the supermarket and watch people. Watch how they physically handle the moment of decision. Watch the sequence. The person who picks up an item, pauses, runs an internal visual comparison, and then either places it in the cart or returns it is showing you their decision strategy in a context with zero stakes. The same sequence runs for their most important calls. Once you can see the strategy in yourself and in others, the question changes from how do I make better decisions to what does this strategy need in this context to reach its best output. That is a much more tractable question. And the answer to it changes what the decisions look like.