Simple lenses for difficult commitment decisions.
Use familiar decision models to see margin, feasibility, interaction, evidence and authority more clearly.
One-way doors and two-way doors: a mental model for commitments
Some decisions are easy to reverse. A customer promise often becomes much harder to reverse once it is external.
Read →Interaction RiskSecond-order effects: the deal after the deal
A mental model for asking what the commitment causes next—not only what it wins now.
Read →Delivery feasibilityInversion: what would make this commitment fail?
A mental model for finding hidden weaknesses by asking the failure question before the promise is made.
Read →Delivery feasibilityThe bottleneck decides the delivery promise
A mental model from constraint thinking: the scarcest critical capability often determines what the whole commitment can safely promise.
Read →Deal economicsThe margin waterfall: follow value from price to realised economics
A mental model for seeing where a good-looking deal loses value before and after signature.
Read →Deal economicsExpected value, not headline revenue
A mental model for comparing upside with probability-weighted downside when a commitment carries material exposure.
Read →Authority & evidenceThe pre-mortem: imagine the bad outcome before signature
A mental model for surfacing plausible failure modes without waiting for hindsight.
Read →Deal desk & commercial governanceGoodhart’s Law and deal velocity: when the metric starts hurting the decision
A mental model for avoiding a common trap: optimizing approval speed until decision quality becomes the hidden casualty.
Read →Different format. Same standard.
Direct language, a clear decision problem, useful reasoning and a path back to real enterprise economics.