Start from the situation you’re actually in.
Each of these begins where a hard week begins — not with a framework, but with a moment you’d recognise — and shows how a documented thinking method reads it before you act.
Prepare the decision before you prepare the words.
The conversation you are putting off is a decision wearing a script problem's clothes. How to separate what is true, what matters and what you are avoiding — before you draft a single sentence.
Read the guide →Begin with the question you are actually responsible for answering.
Naming the decision, defining the criteria before the options, and asking what evidence would change your mind — so judgment has a process, not just instinct.
Read the guide →Choose the lens before you choose the leader.
Promotion, succession, a founder handing over: five things to test before the appointment, and the line between preparing your own judgement and deciding about someone else's job.
Read the guide →Say what happened, then ask what you missed.
The observable behaviour, the impact it had, and a next step you can check — rather than the perfect phrasing for a conversation you have rehearsed three times.
Read the guide →Sort by consequence, not by volume.
Telling urgency apart from consequence, and responsibility from reflex — plus what you owe the person whose work you are about to defer.
Read the guide →An impossible date is a decision nobody has made yet.
Scope, time, capacity, quality: which one is actually moving, who owns that call, and how to say so early enough that it reads as evidence rather than excuse.
Read the guide →Ask which regret you could live with.
Compensation is the easiest thing to compare and rarely the thing that decides. Weighing the manager, the work, and the constraint you are not willing to break.
Read the guide →The assumptions never announce themselves.
Name what must be true, sort fact from forecast from habit, and test the ones whose failure would actually cost you something — before an assumption quietly becomes a commitment.
Read the guide →The strongest prompt is not the most revealing one.
Role labels, ranges and the minimum-context brief: enough truthful context for useful analysis, without the names, documents and private details that identify or expose.
Read the guide →Choose the channel before you choose the words.
What needs HR immediately, when a direct conversation is the more proportionate first step, a four-question threshold test, and how to bring a factual, useful escalation.
Read the guide →Judgment support, not decision outsourcing.
Bring a live decision rather than a request for advice, choose a lens that fits the tension, read the response as hypotheses to test, and keep the consequences yours.
Read the guide →The argument is rarely the conflict.
Name the type of dispute, run a process people can accept, move from positions to trade-offs, and turn the agreement into a rule that holds under pressure.
Read the guide →Stay or leave is not yet a decision.
Name the decision beneath the decision, sort fact from forecast, price the trade-off honestly, check whose standards you are using, and leave with one accountable move for the next seven days.
Read the guide →More starting points are being written — each one a situation this product demonstrably serves, with its own worked example and its own honest limits. This list is meant to stay short.