Decisions
When we decide to take path A or B, we put our thinking and judgment into practice. Those choices reveal priorities, clarify tradeoffs, set precedents, and teach people what the organization actually values.
Making a decision requires understanding the situation, weighing the options and risks, and explaining the tradeoff. Speed and being right about your own part of the problem matter, but so does considering how the decision affects everyone else and what they will learn from it.
Decisions As Signals
People use today's decision to anticipate what will happen next time.
What Your Decisions Teach People
People remember the tradeoffs you actually make, and use those decisions to interpret the policy.
Roles And Decision Rights
Strong opinions do not tell a team who owns the call. When roles are unclear, teams can receive conflicting direction or have no clear next step.
When The Passenger Thinks They're In Charge
A family day trip got me thinking about who gets to decide, how DACI helps, and why having a strong opinion does not put you in charge.
Hidden Costs And Tolerated Problems
Leaving a problem alone is also a decision, even when nobody formally makes it. The team keeps paying the cost of working around it.
The Curse of the Worst Acceptable Solution
How a workaround can be just good enough that nobody fixes it, even as other work starts to depend on it.
Choosing What Gets Our Time
New requests compete with work we already believe matters. Deciding what gets time means deciding what can wait.
Urgent vs. Important: Protecting The Work That Matters
On protecting important work from urgent requests, and using the distinction to discuss priorities with partners.
Deciding What To Leave Out
Building something successfully does not mean it belongs in the finished product.
Strategic Pruning: Deciding What Belongs in a Minimum Viable Product
After a broad set of experiments with an AI agent, I had to choose which parts actually improved the almanac we wanted to use.