Formats for getting decisions made: options briefs, one-pagers, confirmation documents, talking points, and status updates, all built for readers who scan and decide rather than read and admire. From enterprise and government delivery, where the customer's decision is the deliverable and everything else is preparation.
Delivery teams produce analysis. Customers produce decisions. The gap between those two is where programs stall: the analysis was right, the deck was thorough, and the decision still didn't happen, or happened softly and got relitigated a month later.
Decision communication treats that gap as a craft with rules:
- Lead with what you need and when. Bottom line up front, always. Busy readers decide in the first two lines whether the rest gets read.
- Criteria before options. State how the choice should be judged before showing any choice. Criteria first makes the room evaluate; options first makes the room advocate.
- Show every trade out loud. An option with no visible downside reads as either dishonest or not understood. Naming the cost yourself is what makes your recommendation trustworthy.
- Recommend, with reasoning showing. You've seen the whole board. Say what you'd choose and why in two sentences. The customer can overrule a recommendation; they can't act on a shrug.
- A decision they understand is a decision that holds. The test of every format here: can the decision-maker defend the choice a month later, without you in the room? If not, you got a nod, not a decision.
| Format | Use When |
|---|---|
| Options Brief | A significant choice with 2-4 viable paths: criteria, comparison matrix, detail cards, recommendation |
| Decision One-Pager | One decision, one page, ninety seconds to read: the workhorse format |
| Confirmation Brief | You need the customer to validate your understanding before a consequential step: "here's what we believe; is this right?" |
| Talking Points | The decision happens in a live conversation: points to land, objections pre-answered, the ask |
| Status That Scans | Recurring updates that maintain trust: health cards, no surprises, decisions surfaced early |
| Slide Storyline & Critique | The decision needs a deck: sequence the story before building, de-clutter after |
examples/worked-example-sunset-decision.md shows a confirmation brief driving a contested legacy-system retirement to documented agreement, using the same fictional fleet-maintenance program as my other repositories.
examples/worked-example-decision-one-pager.md shows the one-pager format completed end to end for a fictional municipal fleet program. Real structure, invented content.
Every format here is the same move at different scales: do the customer's thinking-work for them without doing their choosing-work for them. Structure the information so the decision is easy to make and hard to misunderstand, then ask for it explicitly, with a date. That's the whole craft. The formats are just that sentence, applied.
All examples use fictional systems and invented content. Nothing here is derived from customer systems, government documents, or work product.
Maintained by Graham DeNoyer. Part of a set covering the full delivery path: Delivery Planning Framework · User Engagement Playbook · Requirements Engineering Framework · AI Delivery Toolkit.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Share and adapt freely with attribution, for noncommercial use, under the same license. For commercial licensing, contact me via LinkedIn.