A small toolkit for working through a hard decision when you have an hour and a quiet room.
Can this be reversed? Most decisions can. Important decisions that can't be reversed deserve careful attention — slow down, write things down, sleep on it.
Could it ruin me or my organization? If yes, no expected-value calculation matters. Use the tail-risk lens. Are you sure you're in a normal-distribution world?
What am I assuming about how this turns out? Most decisions rest on an implicit forecast. Make it explicit before you commit. A short discipline for forecasts you can actually score.
What kind of decision is this?
For choosing among a defined set of alternatives.
Pick five to seven attributes that capture what matters about the decision. Score each alternative on each attribute, independently, before forming any overall impression. Only after every cell is filled in do you allow yourself a holistic judgment.
The discipline is in the order. Score first, feel second. Halo effects ruin intuitive comparisons; this protocol blocks them.
Source. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate in economics, developed this protocol for Israeli army officer selection and refined it across five decades of judgment-and-decision research.
Reference. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein, Noise (2021), Part VI.
When not to use it. When alternatives differ wildly in shape — when one option could ruin you and another can't — averages across attributes mislead. Use the tail-risk lens.
For when the shape of outcomes matters more than the average.
When the payoff curve is bowed or ruin is on the table, expected-value thinking fails. Diagnose first, then act.
Source. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, former options trader, has spent thirty years working on decisions under uncertainty and the asymmetric properties of fat-tailed distributions.
Reference. Taleb, Antifragile (2012), especially Book IV.
When not to use it. When the decision is small, reversible, and the distribution is well-behaved. Don't bring tail-risk thinking to lunch choices.
For a question too big for one evening. Tonight, decompose it.
Some questions are too big to answer in an evening — and trying to force a conclusion anyway is how you end up with whatever you were already inclined to believe, dressed up with whatever facts were handy. The move instead is to spend the evening making the question concrete. Break the main question into three to five considerations — second-level questions that, if answered, would resolve it. Under each, list the hypotheses that would have to be true or false. That's tonight's work, and it's enough: you end the evening knowing exactly what the question requires rather than pretending you've settled it.
The tests come later — over days, with your team, on your calendar. What you've built tonight is the map of what to investigate. You can do the whole decomposition on paper. The Framework Builder page adds a prompt that drafts it for you, plus guidance on designing tests worth running when you get to them.
Source. Roots in the scientific method and the issue-tree tradition from strategy consulting (MECE — mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). No single canonical reference.
Reference. Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle (1987).
When not to use it. When you already know the question and the alternatives. You're probably in MAP territory — go there instead.
After the decision. Write down what you decided and what you expected to happen. One line in your calendar entry, the meeting notes, or a Word doc — wherever you'll find it later. Not a journal. A breadcrumb. Future you will want to know what past you was thinking.