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Decision Asymmetry: How Elite Strategists Create Uneven Playing Fields

8 min readMay 24, 2025
Photo by ᴊᴀᴄʜʏᴍ ᴍɪᴄʜᴀʟ on Unsplash

Conventional wisdom tells us that success comes from making better decisions than our competitors.

But elite strategists know a deeper truth:

The greatest advantage does not come from optimizing choices within given parameters

The greatest advantage comes from fundamentally restructuring the decision environment itself.

This is called Decision Asymmetry.

Decision Asymmetry is the art of deliberately creating uneven playing fields where the rules, risks, and rewards are engineered to favour you while disadvantaging others.

As legendary investor Warren Buffett explains:

“I don’t try to jump over seven-foot bars. I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.”

This deceptively simple statement reveals the essence of decision asymmetry — rather than competing directly under equal conditions, elite strategists reshape the competitive landscape itself.

In this article, I will present you 7 sophisticated strategies through which you can engineer the decision environment to create structural advantages for yourself.

1. Information Gradient Engineering: Creating Knowledge…

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Fahri Karakas
Fahri Karakas

Written by Fahri Karakas

Associate Professor in Business & Leadership at University of East Anglia. Passionate about doodling, imagination, and creativity. Author of Self-Making Studio.

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