RESULT OBTAINED
Canonical method
Objective or decision: what you must settle is not what you want to reach
What must be established
A useful analysis keeps its controls visible.
- 01
Look for the options: a statement that admits only one is an objective, not a decision.
- 02
Name what each option gives up, in resources, in customers or in lead time.
- 03
Appoint who settles it, by which date, and what happens if nobody does.
Decision reference
Make the next choice more explicit.
DECISION SUPPORTED
Is what you are about to weigh up a decision, or merely a desired outcome?
DELIVERABLE TO KEEP
A decision question carrying at least two mutually exclusive options, their renunciation, an owner and a date.
NEXT ELEMENT TO EXAMINE
Strategic choiceExplore →Spot an objective disguised as a decision
Lift the margin by three points, become the reference in the sector, improve satisfaction: these statements describe a desired state, not a choice. Two tests expose them. The first: can anyone answer no? A decision admits a reasoned refusal, an objective admits only agreement, and a meeting where nobody may say no settles nothing. The second: is there another option that serious people would defend? If everyone agrees on what comes next, what remains is not a decision to take but a plan to write. Then come false alternatives, harder to spot. Doing it or not doing it only pits two options against each other if the status quo is genuinely tenable; otherwise the matter is already settled and the discussion is about timing. In the same way, two delivery variants presented as a strategic choice, two ways of keeping the same promise to the same customer, change neither the ground nor the resources committed.
- Can anyone say no?
- A defensible option
- A tenable status quo
- Variant or option
Turn the objective into a decision question
The objective does not disappear: it changes role and becomes a criterion. Lifting the margin by three points stops being the question and serves to separate the options of another one: which segment should receive a limited production capacity, and at the expense of which. What remains is to find the right granularity. A question that is too broad, which strategy should we adopt, cannot be settled: nobody knows what they would be approving. A question that is too narrow, what price to grant this customer, belongs to execution and commits no lasting resource. Between the two, the useful question commits resources that cannot be redeployed elsewhere, and admits an answer by a given date. Horizon and scope bound it: over what period the decision holds, and what it does not cover. Without those bounds, each participant answers about a different object, and the disagreement settles on the frame rather than on the substance.
- Objective turned criterion
- Resources committed
- An answer by a date
- Horizon and scope
Check that a renunciation is really there
A decision that costs nothing is not one. The renunciation is stated in resources that cannot be redeployed, in customers who will be served less well, in lead time accepted, or in options that the choice closes. If it remains nowhere to be found, the statement is still an objective, or the options offered are two variants of the same path. The renunciation is checked with those who will bear it, because a loss nobody acknowledges will be contested at the first obstacle. Finally, the owner and the date must be appointed: without them the question stays a meeting topic that returns indefinitely, and each return costs the time of everyone who prepares for it. The absence of a decision is itself an option, rarely a neutral one: it lets the market, the competitors or the calendar settle the matter in the organisation’s place, and its cost is written down with the others.
- A named loss
- Who bears it
- Owner and date
- Cost of not deciding
DECISION ASSET
Statement test: objective or decision
The opening statement passes four checks before becoming a question that can be settled.
Statement
- Input
- Opening wording
- Control
- Can anyone answer no?
- Output
- Nature of the statement
Options
- Input
- Defensible alternatives
- Control
- Two exclusive options?
- Output
- Options at one level
Renunciation
- Input
- What each one gives up
- Control
- Who loses what?
- Output
- A named renunciation
Mandate
- Input
- Owner and deadline
- Control
- Who settles it, and when?
- Output
- Decision question
- Roger Martin, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, Harvard Business Review, 2014 (opens in a new tab)Sets the comfort of planning, made of objectives and budgets, against the discomfort of strategic choice.
- Collis and Rukstad, Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?, Harvard Business Review, 2008 (opens in a new tab)Separates objective, scope and advantage, and shows what a statement must carry to be decidable.
MOVE FROM ANALYSIS TO YOUR DECISION
Produce a testable decision mandate
AFTER THE FRAMING
Framing clarifies the choice. A shared record makes it defensible.
This page helps compare the options and document the trade-offs. When the choice has to be worked through with finance and operations, then defended before a committee, Innovatio structures it in a shared decision record.
RETURN TO THE DECISION SYSTEM
See the canonical definition of marketing strategy→