decision-making

Decision Making

Apply Tier 0 axioms to evaluate decisions and recommendations.

When to Use

• Before making significant choices
• When evaluating options or recommendations
• When assessing risk
• When prioritizing work

Book Triggers

Reference: [[books/thinking-rationality.md]]

• Apply "Black Swan" fat-tail thinking to risk assessment
• Use "Scout Mindset" for truth-seeking over confirmation
• Apply "Thinking in Systems" for feedback loop analysis

Reference: [[books/systems-thinking.md]]

• Use "Product Development Flow" for opportunity cost and queue theory

Decision Framework

Step 1: First Principles Decomposition

Before evaluating options, decompose the problem:

1. What are we actually trying to achieve? (Not the solution, the goal)
2. What constraints are truly fixed vs assumed?
3. What would we do if starting from scratch?

Step 2: Falsification Check

For each option, actively seek disconfirmation:

• What evidence would prove this wrong?
• What are we assuming that might not be true?
• Pre-mortem: It's 6 months later and this failed. Why?

Step 3: Risk Assessment Matrix

Evaluate using these lenses:

Step 4: Opportunity Cost

Explicitly name what you're NOT doing by choosing this path:

• What resources get allocated here?
• What alternatives become impossible?
• Is this the highest-leverage use of effort?

Step 5: Pareto Filter

Apply 80/20 thinking:

• Which 20% of this delivers 80% of value?
• What can be cut without meaningful impact?
• What's the minimum viable version?

Output Format

When documenting decisions, use this structure:

## Decision: [Title]

**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Status:** Proposed | Approved | Rejected

### Context
What situation prompted this decision?

### Options Considered
1. Option A - [brief description]
2. Option B - [brief description]

### Analysis

#### First Principles
[Decomposition of the actual goal]

#### Risk Assessment
- Reversibility: [two-way/one-way]
- Via Negativa: [failure modes]
- Margin of Safety: [buffer assessment]
- Second Order: [downstream effects]

#### Opportunity Cost
[What we're giving up]

### Decision
[The choice made and why]

### Review Trigger
[When/what would cause us to revisit this]

Anti-Patterns

Avoid these decision-making failures:

• Confirmation bias: Seeking evidence that supports preferred option
• Sunk cost fallacy: Continuing because of past investment
• Availability heuristic: Overweighting recent or vivid examples
• Anchoring: Over-relying on first piece of information
• Groupthink: Consensus without genuine dissent

Integration

This skill is foundational. Other skills should invoke decision-making when:

• Choosing between implementation approaches
• Prioritizing backlog items
• Evaluating feature requests
• Assessing technical debt tradeoffs

See company/docs/decision-principles.md for the Tier 0 axioms reference.