Framing Decisions for Leadership
When you ask a leader for a decision, you are asking for their Judgment. Your job is to make that judgment as easy as possible.
The "3 Options" Rule
Never present just one option (that's a demand) or ten options (that's confusing). Present three:
- Option A (Recommended): The balanced path.
- Option B (Aggressive): Faster/Better but higher cost/risk.
- Option C (Conservative): Slower/Cheaper but lower impact.
The Framing Framework
- Recommendation: "I recommend we go with Option A."
- Rationale: "This gives us the best balance of speed and security."
- Trade-offs: "The trade-off is that we'll have to delay the mobile app by one month."
- Risks: "The main risk is that a competitor might launch their version first."
Vocabulary of Choice
- Lever: A specific action that drives a result. ("Pricing is our biggest lever for growth.")
- Opportunity Cost: What you lose by choosing one path over another.
- Risk Mitigation: How you plan to reduce the danger.
- Inaction: Doing nothing. ("The risk of inaction is that our churn will continue to rise.")
Alex's Tip: Use the phrase "Strong opinion, weakly held." It means you have a clear recommendation based on data, but you are open to being proven wrong if the leader has better context.
The discipline of the memo is the full sentence. Bullets let you skip the connective logic; sentences force you to show it.
- Bullet (weak): Will save time. Reduces errors. Improves morale.
- Sentence (strong): Automating the reconciliation will save the finance team 10 hours per week, reduce manual errors by an estimated 40%, and free the team to focus on analysis rather than data entry.
The sentence carries the reasoning. The bullet hides it.
The silent read
In an Amazon-style meeting, the first 10-15 minutes are silent reading. Everyone reads the memo. This levels the playing field: everyone has the same context before discussion, and no one can bluff through slides they half-understood.
If you adopt this culture, the lesson is: invest in the document, not the deck. A great memo makes a great meeting.
Common mistakes
- Slide decks for complex decisions. Slides hide logic; use a narrative memo.
- No executive summary. Leaders should grasp the proposal from one paragraph.
- Bullets instead of sentences. Bullets skip the reasoning; sentences prove it.
Practice
Write a one-paragraph executive summary for a proposal to adopt a new tool:
- Context: _
- Recommendation: _
- Rationale: _
- Ask: _
Example: Our deploy pipeline takes 40 minutes, slowing the team to one release per week. I recommend we migrate to the new build system, which cuts deploys to 8 minutes and enables daily releases. The migration takes two engineers for three weeks. Can we approve the allocation?
In the next lesson, you will learn decision-recommendation framing, the heart of executive influence.