Suneet Singal on how to write a one-page decision memo

Suneet Singal's page on the one-page decision memo is a writing lesson for people who must choose in a room full of competing memories. It accompanies the podcast The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal. The memo is a discipline this entry describes. It is not a quotation, and it is not a form he is claimed to have invented. One page is short enough to hold in a meeting and long enough to force five elements into the open: the decision sentence, the live alternatives, the definition of success, the facts that would change the choice, and the date when the choice will be looked at again. His published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance, fields that generate long packets. Length is not the same thing as a decision. The page works when a reader who missed the meeting can say what was chosen and what was refused. A labeled hypothetical memo uses a library's Saturday hours.

One page is a discipline

A one-page decision memo is a constraint that forces a choice into a shape a stranger can read. The constraint is the point. Packets grow because every contributor adds the paragraph that protects them, and the decision hides under the protection. One page, with ordinary margins and ordinary type, holds a handful of paragraphs. If your decision does not fit, you either have two decisions or you have not yet decided which facts are the facts. Both discoveries are useful. Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa treat a misstated problem as a trap that spoils everything downstream. The memo is where the statement has to survive without an escort of slides.

Suneet Singal hosts The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal. This page does not say that he uses this form, and it does not quote him. The podcast page is the index of episodes. The memo is a general writing habit placed beside those episodes because the episodes' neighborhood is judgment. His background in real estate and corporate finance explains why a reader of this site meets long documents. A long document can support a memo. It cannot replace one. The memo says what was chosen. The packet, if you still need it, holds the backup. Anyone who wants the backup can ask. Anyone who only has ten minutes should be able to finish the page.

Write the memo to be read, not to be performed. Purdue's online writing guidance on memos treats a memo as a professional document with a purpose a reader can find quickly. You do not need a university template to take the hint. Put the purpose in the first lines. Use labels. Prefer sentences a person can repeat. Avoid a tone that sounds like a verdict from a court. This is a record of a choice, written so the choice can be found again on a tired afternoon.

The decision sentence comes first

Open with the sentence the naming page asks for. Who will be bound, which alternatives are open, and what act counts as deciding. If the sentence is not ready, the memo is not ready. Do not fill the page with background while you wait for courage. Background without a sentence is how a memo becomes a history essay. The sentence can be provisional, and it should be dated. Provisional is a status. Invisible is a failure. A reader who stops after the first paragraph should already know what is being decided and who will decide it.

Under the sentence, write the recommendation or the decision in the same tense you mean. If the memo asks for a decision, say what you want the reader to do. If the memo records a decision already made, say what was done and on what date. Mixing those two purposes is a common way to avoid responsibility. A request looks like a record. A record looks like it is still open for lobbying. Garvin and Roberto, in their Harvard Business Review article on how decisions get made, contrast advocacy, in which people prosecute a position, with inquiry, in which the group tests alternatives. A memo can serve either. Label which one this page is. An inquiry memo that hides a prosecution in the adjectives is the worse of the two, because the reader cannot see the role they are being given.

Keep names on the actions. The director will choose on Thursday. The board decided on 3 March to keep Wednesday hours. Passive sentences, it was decided, are how a choice loses its owner. The checklist's question about who decides belongs here in ink. If the owner is a group, name the group and the rule, such as a majority of members present. A memo that cannot say who owns the act has described a conversation, not a decision.

The live alternatives, including leaving things alone

Give each live alternative a short block of the same shape. What it is. What it would cost from now on, in the unit that matters, including the opportunity cost. What residue it leaves if you later change your mind. What next ring of effects you can actually foresee. Same shape means a reader can compare without being spun by one option's extra adjectives. The option of leaving things as they are gets a block too. It is an alternative, with costs of its own, including the cost of the problem you are refusing to touch. Omitting it makes every other option look like action and therefore like virtue.

Three alternatives are usually enough. A memo that scores twelve options is a spreadsheet in disguise and will not be read as a page. If you have twelve, you have not done the prior cut. Say, in a line, which options you cut and why they were not live. Dead options can be named so that people do not accuse you of hiding them. They do not each deserve a block. Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa's even-swaps article is a method for comparing options across several objectives without drowning. You can use it behind the memo. The memo itself should show the result of the comparison in sentences: we prefer A to B on the success test, and B is easier to undo. The reader needs that sentence more than they need the worksheet.

Sunk costs stay out of the comparison blocks except as a labeled line of history. The shelves already paid for, in the hypothetical on that page, are not a reason inside the future blocks. If you mention them, mark them sunk. A reader in a hurry will otherwise add them to whichever option the writer meant to punish. The memo's job is to make that addition difficult.

The test, and what would change your mind

Write the definition of success in one or two sentences, with the name of the person or group whose definition it is. Include what you will not count. A memo without this block can be technically clear and still aim at a borrowed scoreboard. The companion page on definitions is the workshop. The memo is the place the result of that workshop is stored. Date the definition. A later meeting should be able to see whether it is grading the choice under the rule that was in force, or under a rule invented after the result.

Then write what would change the decision. This is the most neglected block, and it is the one that makes the memo a tool rather than a plaque. A fact, a date, or a threshold: if fewer than fifteen neighbors come to the first two sessions, we reopen the question. If the staffer says in week two that the Sunday rota is not survivable, we stop. Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony ask what information you would want if you had to decide again in a year, and whether you can get some of it now. The change-your-mind block is where that question lands. It also prevents the sunk-cost feeling from being the only voice in the review. The review has a trigger you wrote while you were calmer.

Close the block with a review date even if no trigger has fired. The date is a promise to look, not a promise to reverse. On that date the memo is read again before anyone tells the story from memory. If the trigger fired and nobody looked, the memo has documented a miss. That documentation is uncomfortable and useful. A plaque has no misses. A decision record does.

What stays off the page

Leave off the chronicle of every meeting that led here. Leave off motives you cannot document. Leave off adjectives that score points, such as obvious, visionary, or reckless, unless you can replace them with the fact that made you reach for the adjective. Leave off numbers you cannot source in a phrase. The expected-value page is strict about this. If a number is a judgment, the memo should say judgment. If a number is a count, the memo should say of what, over what period. A naked 40 percent is how fake precision travels into the archive. Either give it a source and a class, or replace it with a sentence about what you believe and how unsure you are.

Leave medical checklists, legal threats, and investment instructions off the page entirely. This set of essays does not provide them, and a decision memo is a bad place to improvise them. If the choice truly needs a lawyer, an accountant, or a clinician, the memo can say that the choice is waiting on that person. It should not play that person. The tone to aim for is a careful colleague. The Purdue memo guidance is useful here mostly as a reminder that professional writing is for a reader with a job to do. The reader's job is to know what was decided. Entertainment, score-settling, and literature can live somewhere else.

Attachments are allowed and should be listed by title, not pasted in. Premortem list, checklist answers, expected-value sheet with judgments labeled. The page stays one page because the attachments are not secretly page two through twenty of the same essay. If you cannot explain the choice without the reader opening an attachment, the attachment has stolen the decision. Move the stolen sentence back up.

A labeled hypothetical memo about Saturday hours

This is a labeled hypothetical. The library, the hours, and the counts are invented. The whole memo fits in the shape this page describes, and it is quoted here as an illustration of the shape, not as a real library's record. Decision: the branch librarian will, on Thursday, either keep Wednesday afternoon hours, or swap them for Sunday afternoon, and will post the result the same day. Alternatives: keep Wednesday, which serves the homework group she counted, in this fiction, at twelve students last Wednesday, and costs no change in the rota. Swap to Sunday, which matches a ten-person preference conversation she is willing to call a judgment rather than a survey, and which risks the Sunday staffer's resignation, a second-order effect she is writing down rather than discovering later. Do neither new thing, which leaves a known complaint in place. Success, on the librarian's definition, adopted by the board for this season: the branch is a reliable place for students after school on at least one weekday. A photo in the town paper does not count. Change our minds if, by the second Sunday, the staffer says the rota fails, or if weekday homework attendance drops below half the fictional twelve for two weeks running. Review on the first Monday of next month even if neither trigger fires.

Read that block as a memo and notice what a stranger can do with it. They know who decides, what the options are, whose test is in force, which number is a count from one afternoon and which is a judgment, and when the choice comes back. They do not know the librarian's childhood or the board's politics. They do not need to. The opportunity cost of Sunday is partly named, as the risk to the rota and the loss of the weekday room. A fuller memo would add one line on what the staffer's Sunday was going to be. The illustration is already enough to show that one page can hold a real choice. It is not a recommendation that libraries open on Sunday, and it is not about Suneet Singal.

If the board wants a longer story, it can keep minutes. The memo is what gets read at the start of the review Monday. If the memo and the minutes disagree, the memo is wrong and must be corrected, or the minutes are a conversation that never became a decision. Write down which one you found. That single audit teaches a group more than a new template does.

How the page is used in the room

Read the memo at the start of the decision, not only after. People who hear it can correct the sentence before it hardens. Reading it at the end produces editorial comments on a choice that has already been lived. For a request, send the page the day before and open the meeting by asking which line is wrong. For a record, read it aloud and invite correction of fact, not a reopening of the argument, unless the group has a rule that allows reopening. The distinction keeps the memo from being either a surprise attack or an endless draft.

Store it where the review date will find it. A beautiful page in a forgotten folder is a diary. The checklist can include the question where is the memo, and the review date can be the moment the checklist comes back. When the date arrives, read the change-your-mind lines before you read anyone's impression of how it went. Impressions are allowed afterward. They are not allowed to erase the triggers. If you continue, say so in a new line on the same page or in a successor memo that cites the old one. If you reverse, the reversal is a new decision, with its own sentence, not a silent edit of history.

The other essays in this set are the workshops that fill the lines. Naming, success, opportunity cost, the door, the premortem, the next ring, the checklist, expected value, sunk costs, base rates, and narrow framing each answer a question the page should not leave blank when the question matters. Not every line needs a seminar. Every line that is present should be specific enough that a person who missed the meeting can tell whether you did what you said you would do. That test, more than the elegance of the prose, is what a one-page decision memo is for.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

Fill the page from what decision you are actually trying to make, the checklist, and the premortem. A memo that only remembers one vivid detail is already drifting toward narrow framing.