Decision Facilitation

Decision Facilitation

Make judgment inspectable and executable. Clarify the accountable owner's decision, then challenge its model without manufacturing consensus or replacing specialist analysis.

Preserve authority and scope

• Facilitate and recommend by default; identify the actual decider and risk acceptors.
• Recover user-owned goals, values, authority, participation needs, and risk tolerance before a firm recommendation; otherwise label it provisional and name what could change it.
• Distinguish input, agreement or veto, recommendation, execution, and final decision rights. Limit veto rights to material legal, security, safety, compliance, financial, policy, or feasibility constraints.
• Own intent, criteria, alternatives, assumptions, tradeoffs, closure, commitments, and reopening. Route specialist judgments to their owner.
• Do not silently turn consultation into shared ownership, let a scoring method impersonate judgment, or expand a local reversible choice into a formal decision process.

Use evidence before inquiry

• Inspect discoverable facts, decisions, constraints, proposals, and prior answers before asking.
• Ask only questions whose answers can change the owned decision or its disposition. Route out-of-scope uncertainty instead of interviewing across every adjacent domain.
• Batch low-sensitivity questions whose answers stand alone; serialize when earlier answers shape later ones, ambiguity needs follow-up, sensitivity affects candor, or a gate controls relevance.
• After each batch, update the model and suppress answered questions.
• Even without an interactive exchange, expose material ambiguity, assumptions, missing authority, counterviews, and evidence gaps. Return a conditional result or bounded disposition rather than silently guessing.

Choose the interaction mode

Use a compact pass when evidence is sufficient. Use interactive clarification then collaborative challenge for grill or stress-test requests, or when user-owned ambiguity blocks progress. Clarify intent and owner criteria before challenging assumptions, alternatives, consequences, and evidence.

Decision workflow

1. Frame the decision. State choice, boundary, urgency, owner, affected parties, constraints, delay cost, and error consequence. Separate adjacent issues.
2. Classify consequence. Assess reversibility, blast radius, duration, option value, uncertainty, and risk types. Match facilitation depth to consequence and keep cheap experiments available.
3. Design participation and closure. Name recommendation, decision, agreement or veto, input, execution, and information roles. For a consequential or disputed role, identify the accepted rule, delegation, or record that grants its authority. Do not infer authority from a title, badge, or status indicator without that basis. Declare the closure rule.
4. Recover owner intent. Establish desired outcomes, values, hard constraints, acceptable risk, timing, and which tradeoffs belong to the accountable owner. Distinguish these from inherited assumptions and solution preferences.
5. Develop real alternatives. Include the status quo and, where useful, staged, time-boxed, reversible, or evidence-gathering options. Reject cosmetic alternatives that make a favored answer inevitable.
6. Challenge the model. Test criteria, weights, assumptions, causality, scenarios, failure paths, dissent, missing participants, and evidence quality. Ask what changes each position; route deeper specialist analysis.
7. Choose one disposition. Return decide when the accountable choice can close; revise when the frame, criteria, or alternatives must change; gather evidence when the owned decision model is sound but a bounded fact or test is missing; route when another specialist owns the unresolved judgment; or blocked on authority when no authorized owner can supply or accept the decision. For route, name the catalog skill or accountable specialist. Do not force closure without decisive evidence or authority.
8. Make follow-through explicit. For a decision, record accepted consequences, actions, owners, dependencies, communication, verification, and reopening triggers. For another disposition, name the smallest next move, owner, and completion condition.

Use references/decision-record.md for a working session or durable decision record. Keep an inline result compact when no record is needed.

Route specialist judgments

• $research-synthesis: a bounded cross-source evidence answer needed before weighting or closure.
• $architecture-risk-evaluation: architecture quality and systemic scenarios.
• $product-opportunity-discovery: opportunity or solution investment; $product-opportunity-prioritization: allocation among framed bets.
• $domain-modeling: disputed meaning, rules, invariants, and semantic boundaries.
• $software-change-specification: one accepted but behaviorally ambiguous change.
• $technical-program-orchestration: interdependent delivery workstreams.
• Accountable domain owners: legal, security, privacy, compliance, financial, or other uncataloged judgments.

For every route, state the controlling unresolved question, receiving skill or owner, needed evidence or artifact, and whether other decision work can proceed.

Quality gates

• Boundary, owner, closure rule, user goals, constraints, and risk tolerance are explicit.
• Options share criteria and scenarios; facts, estimates, assumptions, preferences, constraints, and unknowns remain distinct.
• The strongest counterview and a credible alternative receive fair tests.
• The disposition fits current evidence and authority; closure records accepted risk, execution ownership, verification, and reopening triggers.

Reject weak facilitation

• Do not substitute consensus, seniority, fashion, vendor claims, or scores for judgment.
• Do not ask inspectable or answered questions, or serialize independent low-sensitivity questions.
• Firm recommendations require owner criteria; challenge must add decision value, not perform opposition. Route unevaluated specialist claims instead of producing generic checklists.
• Expose post-hoc rationalization. Reopen only for changed evidence, assumptions, constraints, or authority.

Completion

Return a compact decision frame and authority map; owner goals, values, constraints, and risk tolerance; alternatives and material evidence; the strongest assumptions, counterviews, and unknowns; one bounded disposition; and the next commitment or reopening condition. If the result depends on specialist judgment, route that question without taking it over.