What Is Choicetech?

We usually describe technology by its function.

Google Maps is a navigation app. Hinge is a dating app. ChatGPT is an AI tool. Power BI is business intelligence software.

Those labels are useful, but they organize technology around the product.

Choicetech organizes technology around the choices it changes.

Instead of asking what kind of technology we’re using, we can ask what using that technology changes about our decisions.

Choicetech changes how and what we decide.

Think about the last time you used Google or Apple Maps.

You probably weren't choosing among every possible route between where you were and where you wanted to go. The app had already done quite a bit of choosing before you ever saw the screen. Before you ever saw the screen, the app had already narrowed the possibilities: which routes were plausible enough to show you, what counted as faster, which delays mattered, and which information would help you make the final call.

You still decided where to go.

But you didn't make that decision alone.

We interact with technology this way constantly, although the role it plays is not always as obvious as a blue line on a map. A dating app changes who enters consideration in the first place. A hiring platform turns complicated work histories into information that can be searched and filtered. A dashboard can make one problem obvious while another takes hours of work to uncover.

Once you start looking for that role rather than a particular kind of software, choicetech shows up everywhere.

Why use the term choicetech?

Because looking at technology through the lens of choice gives us a different way to evaluate it.

Instead of stopping at:

What does this technology do?

we can ask:

What is it doing to our choices?

Choicetech is about the relationship between technology and decision-making. Naming that relationship makes it easier to examine and evaluate based on what really matters—how and if it is supporting better decision making.

A tool can work exactly as designed and still change our choices in ways that don't support what we're trying to accomplish.

Choicetech and Remake The Rules

My work at Remake The Rules is about understanding the environments in which people and organizations are making decisions, including the technology involved. Once we can see how choicetech is changing a choice, we can evaluate whether that change actually supports what we are trying to accomplish.

Learning to recognize choicetech is only the beginning. Learn what it means to build choicetech literacy →