Suneet Singal on what decision you are actually trying to make

Suneet Singal hosts a podcast titled The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal, and one episode is titled What Decision Are You Actually Trying to Make? The title raises a question. It is a title, not a quotation of his advice, and this page does not pretend to replay the episode. The useful work begins before anyone collects a quote, a price, or a vote. People in a hurry often gather facts for a question they have never written down. Vendors, dates, and opinions then answer whatever question each person privately assumed. Naming the decision is a short piece of writing. The sentence should say who will commit, which alternatives are really open, and what will count as having decided. His published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance, work in which a fuzzy question burns the next hour. The same waste appears on a household calendar and in a volunteer board. This entry stays with that naming step, then points to the pages that ask what success means and what the choice gives up.

The episode raises the question

Suneet Singal hosts The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal. One episode on Podbean is titled What Decision Are You Actually Trying to Make? A video on YouTube carries the same title. The title is a title. This page does not turn it into a quotation, and it does not summarize remarks that are not printed here. What the title does, usefully, is put a prior question on the table. Before a group argues about an option, it can ask whether it has named the decision those options are meant to serve. The podcast page on this site, The Opportunity Notebook, is the place for the episode list. The companion essay whose definition of success you are using asks the next question, about the test the decision is trying to pass.

A question can sit in a title and still be skipped in a meeting. Someone shares a document. Someone else reacts to the most vivid sentence. A third person answers a question they were asked last month. By the end of the hour the group has produced motion without a commitment. Naming the decision is how you stop that drift with a piece of writing small enough to fit above the agenda. The rest of this entry is about that piece of writing: what a decision is, how to say it in one sentence, how to tell it apart from the surrounding trouble, who is allowed to close it, and when a new fact means the sentence should be rewritten.

People who like research will feel the naming step is too small to deserve a page. The step is small in the way a key is small. A long afternoon of price checks, reference calls, and slide decks still opens the wrong door if the sentence above them is the wrong sentence. Naming is also easy to revise, which is a mercy. You can cross out the sentence when the facts change. You cannot easily recover the afternoon. The pages that follow this one, on opportunity cost and on the one-page memo, assume you have something stable enough to cost and to file.

A decision is a commitment

A decision is a commitment to one alternative that the other alternatives do not share. The commitment can be tiny. Choosing Tuesday rather than Thursday for a standing call is a decision if both days were open and only one remains open afterward. The commitment can be large. Choosing a city, a vendor, or a design for a program is a decision when the choice binds time and money that the rejected options will not receive. Size changes the care you owe the choice. It does not change the grammar. There are alternatives. One of them is selected. The selection has a consequence the others do not.

If two options would leave the relevant world in the same state, you do not yet have a decision between them. You have two descriptions. People often debate descriptions because descriptions feel like progress. A useful test is to ask what would be different on Friday if option A were chosen and what would be different if option B were chosen. If the honest answer is that the same people would do the same work, the group is still searching for the decision. When the Friday stories diverge, the decision has started to show its shape. Write that divergence down before the debate about preferences begins.

Preferences are allowed. They are simply not the whole of the decision. A person can prefer the blue paint and still need a sentence that says who picks the paint, by when, and what happens to the rooms already scheduled for painting. Preference without a commitment leaves every later meeting free to reopen the same taste. Commitment without a named alternative leaves people agreeing to a mood. The sentence holds both: a live set of options, and a person who will close one of them. John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa, writing in Harvard Business Review about traps in decision making, treat the frame of the problem as the choice that quietly governs every later choice.

The sentence a stranger could repeat

Write the decision in a sentence a person who missed the meeting could repeat without a phone call. The sentence has three jobs. It names the person or group who will be bound. It names the alternatives that are actually open, including the alternative of leaving things as they are. It names the act that will count as having decided, such as a recorded vote, a signed note, or a change on a calendar. A badly framed problem, in the language of that same Harvard Business Review article, pulls every later fact into the wrong container. The one-sentence decision is a plain defense. If the sentence cannot be read aloud in one breath, it is probably two decisions wearing one coat.

Several familiar sentences fail the test. We should really do something about outreach is a topic. We need more data is a request for a task. I feel good about vendor A is a mood. None of these tells a stranger what will be different when the meeting ends. A repaired sentence sounds more prosaic and is more useful. The outreach committee will choose on Thursday whether to keep the spring fair, replace it with three neighborhood workshops, or do neither this year, and the chair will record the choice in the minutes. The prose is plain. The commitment is visible. People can disagree with it, which is the point of writing it down.

Read the sentence to someone who cares about the outcome and was not in the drafting. Ask them only what they think will be different next month. If they describe a different commitment from the one you meant, the sentence is still doing you a favor. Fix the words before you fix the plan. Groups sometimes skip this reading because they are embarrassed by how ordinary the sentence sounds. Ordinary is a feature. A decision you cannot say in ordinary words is a decision you cannot assign, schedule, or revisit. The embarrassment passes. The ambiguous minutes remain.

The trouble around the decision

A messy situation often hides more than one decision. A community kitchen may be short of volunteers, unhappy with its supplier, and unsure whether to stay open on Mondays. Those are three troubles. They can support three decisions or one, and the work goes badly when the group pretends they are the same question. The volunteer trouble asks who will staff the next month. The supplier trouble asks which vendor will deliver flour. The Monday trouble asks whether the kitchen is open. Facts about flour prices do not staff a shift. A roster does not, by itself, settle the hours. Separating the decisions is an act of respect for the people who will have to live with each one.

Information costs attention, and attention spent on the wrong question is the first cost of a sloppy frame. Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, in their Harvard Business Review article on checking a big decision, argue for a review of the recommendation itself, including whether credible alternatives were considered. Alternatives appear only after someone has said what the decision is. A review of a recommendation that answers an unstated question is a review of a rumor. Ask which sentence the packet is trying to settle, and refuse to score the packet until that sentence is written at the top.

There is a practical way to separate troubles without turning the meeting into a seminar. List the pains in a column. Beside each pain, write the smallest commitment that would change it. If two pains share a commitment, they belong to one decision. If they do not, give them separate sentences and separate dates. The kitchen can choose a flour vendor on Monday and a staffing rota on Wednesday. It should not pretend that a vote on flour is a vote on being open. People leave combined meetings angry because they lost a vote on a question they were not asking. Separate sentences keep the losses local and the work movable.

Who is allowed to close it

A named decision still fails if nobody is allowed to close it. Advice, consent, and authority are different roles, and meetings blur them. An advisor can say which alternative looks stronger. A person whose work will change can say what the change will cost them. The decider can bind the group. When these roles are unspoken, the loudest advisor becomes a temporary decider and the actual decider discovers the commitment later, in a hallway. Write the role into the sentence. The board decides. The director decides within a budget the board already set. The family decides together, and a silent member is asked directly. Clarity about authority is ordinary manners. A two-person household needs it, or every preference becomes a draft of a veto.

There is a second boundary around evidence. The person who wants a particular outcome is a poor sole judge of the case for it. Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony suggest that the people checking a recommendation should be able to stand a step away from the team that fell in love with it. You do not need their full list of questions to use the idea. Ask someone who will not be praised for a yes to read the one-sentence decision and say what it leaves out. Then let the person with authority close it. A decision that nobody will sign is still a wish, however detailed the appendix has become.

Authority also has a size. The person who can close a decision about a Saturday cannot, on the strength of that permission, close a decision about the next five years. When a small yes starts to imply a large one, stop and rename. Say which commitment is being made today and which commitments remain unmade. This is how a step you could still undo stays a step you could still undo. The page on reversible and irreversible decisions takes that distinction further. For the naming step, it is enough to keep today's sentence from smuggling in next year's promise. If the smuggling is the point, then next year's promise is the decision, and it deserves its own sentence and its own decider.

A labeled hypothetical about a workshop

This is a labeled hypothetical. The people, the prices, and the conflict are invented for the lesson. A neighborhood arts group has $800 set aside and one free Saturday in the hall. Two members arrive with a shared sense of urgency and two different decisions. Mina wants to decide whether to hire a guest instructor for a single workshop. Luis wants to decide whether this year the group teaches skills to adults or mounts a show for teenagers. Both decisions mention the hall, the money, and the Saturday. They are not the same decision. Hiring an instructor assumes the workshop is the program. Choosing between teaching and a show reopens the program. If the group lets the instructor decision go first, the show disappears without ever being rejected.

Put the two sentences on one sheet and ask which commitment is actually open. If the mission statement already says the group teaches adults, Luis's question may already be closed, and Mina's hiring question is the live one. If the mission statement is silent, the hiring question is premature. The facts each sentence needs are different. Mina needs the instructor's fee, the number of seats, and whether $800 is the whole cash account. Luis needs a definition of a good year, which is the subject of the companion page on success. Neither person needs a tour of every possible craft. The sentence selects the facts. In this hypothetical, the group writes Luis's sentence, because nobody has ever chosen the audience. The instructor conversation waits for a week. Nothing in the story is a result from anyone's life, and nothing in it is a recommendation to run a workshop.

Notice what the group did not do. It did not average the two proposals. It did not ask for more brochures. It did not treat the shared urgency as evidence that the decisions were the same. Urgency is a feeling about time. A decision is a sentence about commitment. The hypothetical keeps those apart so the method is visible. When you use the method on a real choice, label your own unknowns the same way. Say which facts you have, which sentence is live, and which appealing option is waiting because it answers a question you have not yet chosen to ask.

When the name of the decision should change

A decision sentence is allowed to be wrong. It is not allowed to be invisible. New facts should revise it in writing. Suppose the group discovers that the hall is unavailable on the only Saturday teenagers can attend. Luis's sentence, as written, may die. The new sentence might be whether to move the show to a Sunday at a school, or to drop the show this year. That is a new decision, not a footnote. Leaving the old sentence at the top of the notes while the conversation slides to the new one is how groups pretend they are consistent. They are consistent about a choice that is no longer available. Rewrite the sentence, date it, and say which alternatives just closed.

Some revisions are larger than a scheduling fact. A change in whose life is affected, or in what will count as success, renames the decision. The page on opportunity cost asks what the chosen path uses up. The page on a one-page decision memo is where the sentence, the alternatives, and the review date can live together. Use those pages after the name is stable enough to survive a week. If it cannot survive a week, you are still naming, and more research will only add paper. A renamed decision is a sign of attention. An unnamed slide from one decision to another is a sign that the notes have stopped telling the truth.

Keep a short history of the names. Three lines are enough: the date, the sentence, and the fact that forced the change. The history prevents a later argument about what the group thought it was deciding. It also teaches the group its own pattern. Some groups rename every time a new objection appears, which means they have not yet found a decider. Some groups never rename, which means new facts are being stored in people's heads instead of in the sentence. The history makes both habits visible. Then the work can move to the definition of success, the cost of the path not taken, and the memo that a stranger can read.

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.

From here, read whose definition of success you are using, then opportunity cost and how to write a one-page decision memo. Episode listings sit on the podcast page.