Nikolaj K. Mandsberg
Physicist · Decision Systems Designer · TEDx Speaker · FindMyLab Founder
I am a physicist who builds systems to improve decision quality: a Physics PhD from DTU, a Fulbright Fellowship, a "PhD Thesis of the Year" award, and postdocs at KIT and DTU.
The more useful training was less formal. I served as a Royal Guard, a job that consists almost entirely of standing still. I have travelled through 47 countries. And I spent thirty days ordained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, which is what the book I am writing is about.
I now apply the analytical rigor of my scientific training to Decision Fluency: the difference between running a decision process and no longer needing one. Through FindMyLab, DecideBetterDaily, and Fishbowl, I build tools for the three places that fluency tends to break.
Decision Fluency
Fluency in a language means you have stopped translating. Fluency in decisions means the same thing: you are no longer running a process, because the process has become the way you see.
Most decision advice hands you a pipeline: clarify, explore, prioritize, act, review. A pipeline is what you need when you are not fluent. It is training wheels: genuinely useful, and not the thing you are aiming to still be riding.
Two things get you off them.
The first is state. Every good decision I have made came from a steady mind, and every bad one from a mind already in motion. The calm is not the reward for deciding well. It is the instrument you decide with, and almost nobody treats it as equipment.
The second is structure, in the three places fluency actually breaks. That is what I build tools for:
- FindMyLab: the field is noise. Too many options, no shape to them, so the choice gets made by whatever is loudest.
- DecideBetterDaily: nothing is recorded, so nothing is learned. Ten years of decisions and no way to tell which instincts were any good.
- Fishbowl: knowing, and not doing. The gap between the decision and the act, which is where most decisions quietly die.
Collaborate
I work with labs and organizations on selection processes, decision systems, and product strategy.