Most teams don't fail to make good decisions because they lack smart people. They fail because of how the group process itself distorts what smart people are willing to say, hear, and believe.

Core Concept: Strategic decision-making in negotiations, pricing, or partnerships requires modeling the other party as an active decision-maker, not a static obstacle, using Pfleiderer’s Game Theory Framework.

Pre-mortem: assume the plan already failed completely, then work backward to explain why. Pre-celebration: assume the option you rejected became a massive success, then explain why that happened.

Core Concept: Resolves multi-criteria tradeoffs by converting non-monetary disadvantages into explicit monetary penalties relative to a base anchor, abandoning arbitrary weighted matrices.

The quality of a decision is capped by the quality of the option set you're choosing from. You can run a flawless evaluation across two mediocre options and still land on a mediocre decision.

Every decision process starts with the same silent shortcut: people name a solution and call it an objective. "I want to hire a new manager.", "I want to switch vendors.", "I want to go part-time.", “I want to start my own company.”. These are actually actions, guesses at what might get you somewhere, dressed up as the destination itself.