Compare a business decision before committing

A decision record with options, tradeoffs, a test, and a review date.

What to bring

• The decision and its deadline
• Options, including waiting or doing less
• Verified evidence, constraints, and decision criteria

Remove personal or confidential information that is not needed. Check whether you are allowed to share the remaining material with your chosen tool.

Where AI fits, step by step

1. Human

   1. Frame the decision

   Write what must be decided and by when. Identify the owner, constraints, and criteria before looking for reasons to support a preference.

2. AI

   2. Compare and challenge

   Ask for a side-by-side comparison, missing evidence, and the strongest argument against each option. Avoid invented precision.

3. Human

   3. Choose what to test

   Identify which uncertainty could reverse the decision. Choose a small, reversible test and define a useful signal.

4. AI + human

   4. Record the reasoning

   Ask AI to organize the decision note. The owner approves the choice, records the evidence, and sets a review date.

A worked example

An illustrative business is deciding whether to add a new service or improve delivery of the existing one. Both use the same limited team capacity, so revenue potential alone is an incomplete criterion.

AI organizes a comparison across customer demand, delivery effort, cash required, and reversibility. It leaves demand unknown where there is no evidence instead of assigning a convincing-looking score.

The owner chooses to interview existing clients and manually deliver one small pilot before hiring. A review date and stop condition make it easier to change course. The test may reject the favorite idea; learning that early is still useful.

The human review

• Are criteria chosen before the answer?
• Are unknowns visible?
• Is the next commitment proportionate to the evidence?

Use the AI output review worksheet to record these checks and build a revision brief.

Choose the tool after the task

A document and a general assistant are enough to start. Waymaker is another option for a connected business-building process; shared ownership is disclosed in the tool guide.

Compare tools and read the ownership disclosure.

What to measure

Record what evidence changed the decision. Revisit assumptions on the chosen review date rather than rewriting the story after the result.

For repeated work, use the workflow value calculator to include review time and setup effort. Its result is an estimate, not a promise of savings.

Go deeper

Read the full strategy field guide.

• Turn a crowded week into three finished priorities
• Turn a customer problem into a prototype brief