Problem, Decision, Outcome

A typical brief reads: fill rate is down, we need better forecasting, and we want to hit 95 percent service without growing inventory.

That is three different objects in one sentence, and they get argued as if they were one.

The problem is what is wrong, stated as an observation: fill rate is down. The decision is what we are choosing among: keep the current replenishment rule, cut inventory across the board, or adopt class-based stocking. The outcome is what we want to be true afterward: service holds while working capital falls.

The KPI sandwich

The characteristic failure is a brief with a metric on both sides and no decision in the middle. Fill rate is the problem, fill rate is the target, and what sits between them is “better forecasting,” which is a capability rather than a commitment.

Capabilities are not decidable. Nobody can approve “better forecasting.” They can approve a specific rule change, with a specific owner, by a specific date, and the moment that sentence exists the sandwich falls apart and the real disagreements become visible.

Observations are not diagnoses

“Fill rate is down” is an observation. “Fill rate is down because the current rule protects high-volume items and the misses are concentrated in low-volume, high-consequence parts” is a diagnosis: a mechanism you could intervene on.

The distinction matters because a decision attached to an observation is a guess dressed as a plan. Teams routinely skip from the first to a recommendation without passing through the second, and the recommendation then cannot survive the question of why it would work.

Why the split helps

Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

It makes the argument tractable, because people who disagree can now find out whether they disagree about the problem, the alternatives, or the objective. Those are three different conversations with three different resolutions, and conducted together they are irresolvable.

It exposes the missing alternative, because once the decision is written down separately, a colleague can see what is not in the list.

It reveals when there is no decision at all. Some briefs, split properly, turn out to be an observation and a wish with nothing in between. That is a finding worth delivering, and it takes fifteen minutes rather than six weeks.

“But they are related”

They are. Relatedness is not a reason to conflate them.

The problem constrains which decisions are worth making. The outcome determines how alternatives get ranked. Keeping them distinct is what lets each one do its job, in the same way that a well-formed model keeps its inputs, its decision variables, and its objective distinct even though all three describe the same situation.