Glossary
The words of a decision record.
Each term defined in one paragraph that stands on its own: what the thing is and why it exists.
- Decision record
- The written account of one decision: what was being decided and why, the paths considered, the conditions the chosen path rests on, who was asked and what they said, the moment somebody committed, and the look-back when it came due. A log says what was decided; a record says what would have to be true and whether it was.
- Big bet
- A decision that is expensive to get wrong and hard to reverse: a market entry, a senior hire, a price change, a large purchase. Big bets get the full treatment (independent input, a premortem, an opposing case, tripwires, a look-back) because that is where the cost of deciding badly concentrates.
- Everyday call
- A decision that is cheap to reverse or low in stakes. It is worth writing down in a few minutes and not worth a process. Most of a company's decisions are everyday calls, and the point of sorting them out is to keep the heavy treatment for the few that deserve it.
- Condition
- A statement that would have to be true for the chosen path to work, written so it can be proven wrong. "Customers will pay 15% more without churning" is a condition; "pricing is an opportunity" is not. A decision written as conditions can be checked by other people before the call and scored after it.
- Independent input
- The practice of collecting each person's read on a decision before they see anyone else's, and before they hear the decision-maker's. It is the cheapest known defence against the room converging on the first confident voice, and it turns a meeting's one opinion into several.
- Contributor
- Someone asked for their read on a decision. A contributor answers specific conditions rather than reading the whole file, does so on their own, and can say "I don't know" as a complete answer. Contributing is not deciding: the record keeps the two apart.
- Decision-maker
- The one named person who commits. Others contribute, argue, or execute; the decision-maker's name goes on the record next to the conditions and the date, which is what makes a look-back possible.
- Premortem
- An exercise run before a decision is final: assume it is a year later and the decision failed, then have each person write down, independently, why. Described by Gary Klein in 2007, it turns vague unease into specific causes while there is still time to act on them.
- Opposing case
- The strongest argument against the path the decision-maker is leaning toward, built from the company's own evidence and put in front of them before they commit. It exists because a decision that has never met its best objection has not been tested.
- Tripwire
- A signal, agreed in advance, that means the decision needs another look: a number crossed, a date passed, an event that was not supposed to happen. A tripwire makes the future decision to reconsider a matter of fact rather than of nerve.
- Kill criterion
- A tripwire with a consequence attached: if this state is reached by this date, we stop. Annie Duke's phrase for it is "states and dates". Writing a kill criterion before you start is what lets you quit a failing bet without a fight about whether it is failing.
- Look-back
- The dated review of a decision after the fact: were the conditions right, did the tripwires fire, and was the call a good one given what was known at the time. A look-back scores the decision and the outcome separately, because a good call can lose and a bad one can win.
- Resulting
- Judging the quality of a decision by how it turned out. The word is Annie Duke's. It is the habit a look-back is designed to break: an outcome is one draw from a distribution, and a decision made well on the evidence available deserves the same review whether the draw was lucky or not.
See the words in use on a real decision.
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