Project: Build a Decision Brief with Pre-Mortem and Review Plan
In the last lesson you separated process from outcome: judge a decision by the reasoning available when you made it, not by how it happened to land. This project turns that idea into an artifact you can hand to a skeptical colleague.
Why bother writing it down? Because a decision that lives only in your head cannot be reviewed. Once it is on one page, your assumptions become falsifiable, your confidence becomes gradeable, and your future self can tell the difference between bad luck and bad reasoning.
Your task: take one real, consequential choice you are facing now and produce a one-page decision brief plus a scheduled review.
What You Are Building
One page. Seven fields. An evidence appendix that can be as long as you like. Dated, versioned, signed by the person who owns the call.
We will use a running example throughout: a four-person design studio deciding whether to hire its first junior designer or keep subcontracting overflow work. Swap in your own choice, but keep the shape.
flowchart TD
A["🧭<br/>Decision statement"] --> B["🎯<br/>Goals and bar"]
B --> C["📊<br/>Options and evidence"]
C --> D["🔍<br/>Pre-mortem"]
D --> E["✍️<br/>Commit line"]
E --> F["🔁<br/>Review plan"]
Notice the order: the pre-mortem runs before the commit line, and the review plan is written before the decision is announced. That sequencing is the whole point.
In this lesson
- Four Sittings of About Fifteen Minutes
- How You Know the Brief Is Done
- What the Page Buys You
About this course
Part of Decision-Making and Autonomy: Trust Your Judgment in the Age of AI — Build a repeatable framework for thoughtful decisions without becoming dependent on AI recommendations or endless analysis. Apply it to a real decision, document your assumptions and trade-offs, and learn to improve your judgment through reflection.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Goal
- Build a project
- Language
- English
- Focus
- Framing decisions around goals and constraints Evaluating evidence, trade-offs, and opportunity costs Recognizing biases and avoiding analysis paralysis Using AI to challenge rather than replace personal judgment Reviewing decisions and improving future judgment
- Prior knowledge
- Experience making everyday personal or professional decisions, Basic ability to compare alternatives and explain reasons
- Practice
- Exercises + capstone project
- Time
- ~5.9h
- Voice
- A pragmatic decision coach who presents competing options, exposes hidden assumptions, and asks learners to defend their reasoning before considering external recommendations.
- Not covered
- Advanced financial portfolio optimization, Formal decision theory mathematics, Clinical treatment of indecisiveness, Delegating high-stakes decisions to automated systems
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