Turn ambiguity into a decision that can be understood, executed, reviewed, and superseded.
Choose a mode
- Fast record: context already contains the decision and rationale; write the record.
- Facilitation: important inputs are missing or stakeholders are stuck.
- Research comparison: evidence must be gathered before choosing.
- Experiment to decide: a bounded test has positive expected value of information.
- Audit: evaluate an existing decision record or a decision that is not holding.
Classify the decision as reversible, costly to reverse, or effectively irreversible. This changes the depth and evidence burden; reversibility is not an automatic tiebreaker.
Workflow
- Extract the decision, owner, deadline, status quo, options, constraints, decision drivers, and known evidence from context.
- If a blocking input is missing, ask one focused question at a time. Do not force an interview when the record is already supportable.
- Include the status quo when it is a real option. Allow parallel or phased choices when dependencies, capacity, and order make them genuinely distinct—not as an escape from choosing.
- Evaluate options against the agreed drivers. Use weights only when they clarify the tradeoff; show sensitivity when small weight changes reverse the result.
- Distinguish facts, estimates, assumptions, preferences, and unknowns. Research time-sensitive claims from primary sources when authorized.
- If a short experiment could resolve a pivotal uncertainty, specify hypothesis, cost, duration, success rule, and the decision each outcome triggers. Otherwise decide with current evidence.
- Recommend one option or sequence. State confidence, strongest counterargument, consequences, and what would cause reconsideration.
- Name the first action, owner, due date, review trigger, and how this record supersedes or is superseded by later decisions.
Output contract
Return a concise decision record with:
- title, date, status, owner, participants;
- decision statement and deadline;
- context, constraints, and decision drivers;
- evidence and assumptions;
- options, including status quo where relevant;
- comparison and strongest argument for/against each;
- decision, confidence, and rationale;
- consequences and what is being given up;
- first action, owner, due date;
- review/expiry trigger and supersession links;
- unresolved risks or dissent.
Offer to save it only when the user requested a file or the workspace convention clearly supports one.
Verify
- The record states one executable decision or explicit sequence.
- The recommendation follows the stated drivers and evidence.
- Material claims are sourced, measured, or labeled as assumptions.
- Reversibility, implementation cost, and downside are explicit.
- An experiment is used only when its result can change the decision.
- Owner, first action, due date, and review trigger are present.
- Dissent and the strongest counterargument are represented fairly.