It took the rest of the week to get home to my family on the west coast.

It took three more months for me to finally start processing what did and didn’t happen that day, and what it meant. I quit the company I was working for, bought two plane tickets for Australia, one for me and one for my wife, and I sat on a beach on the Gold Coast and wrote in my journal. I felt like something important had happened to me, but I had no idea what.

One of the directions that emerged out of that time was to get serious about understanding decision making. While my decision to stay in the hotel on 9/11 was less than rational, the general arc of decision making as a discipline suddenly felt very important. So one of the decisions I made was to head in that direction professionally which led to creating a consulting firm with some colleagues dedicated to the idea of helping people make, and help others to make, high quality decisions.

Over the ensuing years, we’ve done some great work for clients and trained a fair number of people in our frameworks. Along the way, I