Free, ungated
The toolkit
Seven worksheets that turn the method into something you can open and fill in, taken from the book’s own appendices. No email required, no signup wall, no lead-capture form standing between you and a Markdown file. Take them, adapt them, put them in your internal wiki with your own examples in them.
- 01
The Write-up
The eight-section list from Appendix B. Use it before you open a notebook. If a section is empty, you are not ready to present. The one-page version uses six of the eight; the full note uses all of them.
Use for: Every decision you intend somebody to act on.
- 02
The Structure
The companion to the Write-up. That one gives you the sections; this one gives you the order the argument goes in and the tests that tell you whether it holds, including the ten-second removal test that separates a parallel group of reasons from a brittle chain.
Use for: When the sections are full and the note still does not land.
- 03
The Working Sequence
Fourteen steps in order, from Appendix A, plus the four-step compression for when you have two days rather than six weeks. A checklist, not a methodology, and nobody should see it but you.
Use for: Pinned somewhere you will find it on a Monday.
- 04
The Choice Sentence
A fill-in worksheet for the one sentence everything downstream depends on: by this date, this person will choose among these alternatives, in order to this, knowing that this will still be uncertain.
Use for: Before anything else. Ten minutes.
- 05
Four Questions Before You Analyze
The four answers you need before spending serious time, and the three cases where the right move is to decline the work rather than reframe it.
Use for: A fifteen-minute conversation with whoever sent the brief.
- 06
The Complexity Ladder
Seven rungs from a count to an optimization model, with the condition for climbing each one, the rent each charges, and the twenty-minute second-route check almost everyone skips.
Use for: Before you build anything more elaborate than a query.
- 07
The Rule Specification
Seven items that turn a recommendation into something Tuesday actually does, including the check that every input is knowable at the moment the rule fires.
Use for: Before you call a decision finished.
Why these are free
The templates are not the scarce thing
There is a standard model in which the templates sit behind an email capture, because the templates are the value and the value should be exchanged for a contact. The model is wrong on its own terms.
A template is cheap to reproduce and easy to find. Gating it buys a small number of low-intent addresses and costs you every reader who was not going to trade an email for a Markdown file, which includes most of the people whose adoption would actually matter. More importantly, a gated template cannot be linked to, cited, or put into someone’s internal wiki, and those are the mechanisms by which a method spreads.
The scarce thing is not the worksheet. It is the judgment about which of three plausible choice sentences is the right one for this request, in this organization, this week, and about which branches of the tree can be pruned without regret. That judgment is what coaching is, and it does not fit in a file.
So take the templates. If they change what gets run after your next meeting, you will know where to find me.
What Would Change the Ranking
New templates as they are written
One piece of the method, one worked example from real operations, and one thing to try before you open a notebook. No news, no roundups, no launch announcements.
Diagnosis before treatment
Not sure which of these you need?
The diagnostic takes five minutes and tells you which of the four common failure modes is costing you most, with the specific entries and templates that address it.