Best for
- Decisions stuck in week three of 'we should discuss this'
- Replacing the meeting that explores with the memo that decides
- Making the recommendation without hiding the alternatives it beat
What you give it
- The decision needed, the context and constraints, and what you actually think (it will be argued, not hidden)
What you get back
- The question framed decidably: what is being decided, by when, by whom — and what is explicitly not in scope
- The options as real alternatives: each steel-manned (its best honest case), costed, risked — including the do-nothing baseline that every comparison needs
- The recommendation with its reasoning: why this one beats the others on the criteria that matter, what would change the answer, and the reversibility of the choice — then the decision line waiting for a name and a date
How it works
- Sharpens the question first: most stuck decisions are three questions wearing one name — the memo states what is being decided, by whom, by when, and what is out of scope, because an undecidable question produces undecidable meetings.
- Steel-mans every option: each gets its best honest case, its real costs (over the honest horizon), its risks and its reversibility — the memo that strawmans the alternatives gets relitigated by their defenders.
- Includes the baseline: do-nothing is always an option and usually the incumbent — its real costs quantified are what make the comparison honest.
- Recommends with reasoning, not hedging: the pick, the criteria that decided it, what would change the answer — and the decision line (name, date) that converts the memo into a record.
Example
You: We have debated build-vs-buy for the billing system for a month. Write the memo that ends it.
Result: The memo: the question sharpened first ('which path gets us compliant invoicing by Q3 at sustainable cost' — the debate had been running on three different unstated questions, which was why it never converged), four options including the two nobody had formalised (do-nothing's real cost quantified: the manual workaround's hours and its error rate; and the hybrid the team kept gesturing at, finally specified), each steel-manned with its costs over three years not one (the build option's maintenance tail was the number that changed minds), the recommendation argued (buy, on the compliance-deadline criterion that outranked cost — with the two conditions under which build becomes right, named), and the decision line. Circulated Tuesday, decided Thursday in a 25-minute meeting that argued the memo instead of rediscovering the question. The month of debate had cost more than the price difference between the options.
Limits — please read
- The memo structures the decision; authority makes it — the decider named must actually decide, and the memo's date line is the gentle forcing function.
- Honest costing needs honest inputs; where numbers are estimates, they are ranged and labelled, because false precision decides wrongly.
- Some decisions genuinely need the meeting (values conflicts, missing trust); the memo still sharpens what the meeting must resolve.