The canon
The method
Eighteen entries, one per chapter of the book. Each gives the definition, the mechanics, a worked example drawn from operations, and the failure mode that most often breaks it. Nothing here is gated, abridged, or held back.
Read in order, or take what you need
- 01The Analysis Is Not the ProductChapter 1The deliverable is a commitment among alternatives, not an explanation of what happened.The founding claim. A study that cannot change which alternative is chosen is decoration, however accurate it is, and most technical weeks produce exactly that.
- 02Name the ChoiceChapter 2A single sentence naming who will choose among which alternatives, by when, and to what end.A complete choice is a sentence, not a topic. It carries alternatives of the same kind, a person who can commit, a date the choice goes stale, and the uncertainty that will still be there when it is made.
- 03Problem, Decision, OutcomeChapter 3The separation of what is wrong, what we are choosing among, and what we want to be true afterward.Three different objects that arrive mashed together in almost every brief. Splitting them is cheap, unglamorous, and resolves more confusion than any other single move.
- 04Invent the AlternativesChapter 4The step of enlarging the option set before ranking it, on the grounds that decision quality is usually more sensitive to the menu than to the mathematics that ranks it.The alternatives are not given, they are made. A ranking of a bad menu is still a ranking of a bad menu, and no amount of evidence rescues a list that never contained the commitment you should have considered.
- 05Refuse the First BriefChapter 5The practice of returning an underspecified request rather than absorbing it into analysis.Four questions to get answered before you spend serious time, what to do when you cannot get them answered, and how to decline a request without becoming the obstacle.
- 06Work Backward from the ChoiceChapter 6Starting from a provisional answer and finding the cheapest evidence that could overturn it.Write the candidate ranking before you open a notebook, then the claims that could kill it, then the cheapest test that could change your mind. Data last.
- 07Cut the Question Into PartsChapter 7Decomposing a question into branches that can be independently tested, then eliminating the branches that cannot change the answer.Draw the tree, check that the branches neither overlap nor leave a gap, then mark every branch that cannot change the ranking and leave it alone. The pruning is the point.
- 08Complexity Must Pay RentChapter 8The principle that added method must be justified by a specific claim the simpler method could not settle.A ladder from a count to an optimization model. Start at the bottom and climb only when a lower rung cannot settle a claim that is carrying weight. Heuristics are first-class.
- 09Economics Before MetricsChapter 9Ranking alternatives by the cost of being wrong rather than by movement in an internal measure.Put consequences in units that bite. House metrics are not consequences, and a metric treated as an objective will quietly decide the ranking for you.
- 10What Would Change the Ranking?Chapter 10The identification of the specific conditions under which you would recommend a different alternative.The question that does more work than any framework, because it cannot be answered with a chart. Name the quantity, the threshold, and what it would cost to find out.
- 11Who Undoes This?Chapter 11The check that a recommendation survives the responses of the people it makes worse off.Locally optimal, globally stupid. Find the adjacent team that will dislike your recommendation if it works as designed, and go ask them what they will do about it.
- 12Diagnosis, Then a RecommendationChapter 12A stated causal mechanism followed by an actual commitment among the alternatives.Name the mechanism you could intervene on, then commit to one of the named alternatives. Teams that skip the first produce guesses; teams that skip the second produce reports.
- 13Writing the DecisionChapter 13Presenting a decision in the order a reader can act on, which is the reverse of the order the work was done.Lead with the pick. The opening and the pyramid are one structure. Headings are full sentences that carry the argument, and layers serve different readers without dumbing anything down.
- 14Interests, Not PositionsChapter 14The distinction between a stated demand and the underlying concern it protects.A position is what someone says they want. An interest is what they are actually protecting. Arguing against a position that stands in for an unstated interest cannot succeed.
- 15What They Do If You FailChapter 15The set of actions each party will take if the decision produces no commitment, treated as alternatives on the menu rather than as context.Every party in the room has a walk-away, whether or not they have said it. Those walk-aways are the alternatives that remain if your work produces nothing, and a ranking that ignores them ranks a meeting rather than a company.
- 16Disagreement Is Not a Request for Another NotebookChapter 16Handling objection by resolving the actual disagreement rather than by producing additional evidence.When the room pushes back, the instinct is to go do more analysis. That instinct is usually wrong and always expensive. Name the fight, agree the criteria, and let people change their minds cheaply.
- 17What a Repeating Rule Is Made OfChapter 17The five elements that together make a repeating decision specifiable, as distinct from a one-time recommendation.Five moving parts: the state it can see, the decision it may take, the information that will arrive, the transition to the next state, and what it accumulates. Most analysis specifies two and discovers the other three in production.
- 18Install the RuleChapter 18The specification that lets an organization run a decision repeatedly without the analyst in the room.A decision that cannot enter an operating process is unfinished. Owner, cadence, thresholds, the unsure case, a priced exception path, feedback, and a revisit date that is a date.
How to use this
The entries follow the book's order, which is the order the method runs in: name the choice, earn the evidence, write the decision, install the rule. Read straight through the first time.
If you have one live brief to fix this week, the order is different. Start with the choice sentence, then the candidate ranking and its kill conditions, then the flip point. Those three account for most of the available improvement on any single piece of work, and all three happen before you open a notebook.
If the same problem keeps recurring across projects, it is usually the brief you accepted or the rule you never specified. Those are the two ends nobody owns, and they are where good work is most often lost.
The toolkit turns the entries into worksheets you can fill in, and the diagnostic will tell you which of the three parts is missing from your own work.
Beyond reading
Reading the method and installing it are different problems
Coaching works on your live documents rather than on exercises. Team engagements work on the system that produces them.