A curated reference
Twelve frameworks across personal, professional, and leadership decisions. Each one paired with the exact situations it's built for — so you reach for the right tool, not the nearest one.
Context
Complexity
Eisenhower matrix
Sort by urgency × importance
You're overloaded and unsure what to work on. Everything feels urgent.
Second-order thinking
Ask "and then what?" twice
A decision seems obvious. Smart people making first-order decisions often create the worst second-order problems.
Regret minimisation
Decide from age 80, looking back
A high-stakes, largely irreversible decision with significant upside if you act and low permanent cost if you fail.
WRAP framework
Widen → Reality-check → Attain distance → Prepare to be wrong
You've narrowed to two options and feel stuck. Often means you're in a false binary — WRAP forces you out.
Pre-mortem
Imagine it failed. Work backwards.
You've essentially decided, but want to pressure-test the plan before committing resources or announcing publicly.
DACI / RACI
One driver. No committee.
A decision keeps getting delayed, reversed, or re-litigated. Usually signals unclear ownership.
Two-way vs one-way door
Calibrate rigor to reversibility
A team is over-processing a decision, or conversely, under-thinking something genuinely irreversible.
Inversion
What guarantees failure? Avoid that.
You're stuck on how to achieve something. Flipping to 'how would I guarantee the opposite?' often unlocks what the forward view misses.
Cost of delay
What does it cost per week to not decide?
A decision keeps getting deferred. Putting a number on the deferral makes the conversation objective instead of political.
Cynefin framework
Diagnose complexity. Match your response.
A leadership situation where the right decision-making style is itself unclear — is this a process problem or a wicked problem?
10/10/10 rule
10 minutes · 10 months · 10 years
Emotional decisions, conflict avoidance, FOMO. Any time your near-term feeling is swamping your long-term judgement.
Opportunity cost matrix
Score impact vs cost. Say no to the right things.
You can't do everything and need to make explicit trade-offs between competing initiatives or priorities.
Low complexity · Personal · Professional · Leadership
Sort by urgency × importance
Dwight D. Eisenhower · popularised by Stephen Covey
When to use this
You're overloaded and unsure what to work on. Everything feels urgent.
How to use it
List everything
Dump every task, decision, or obligation onto a single list. No filtering yet.
Score two axes
For each item: Is it urgent (time-sensitive)? Is it important (moves the needle on your real goals)?
Place in the grid
Q1 (urgent + important) → do now. Q2 (important, not urgent) → schedule. Q3 (urgent, not important) → delegate. Q4 (neither) → eliminate.
Protect Q2
Most leverage is in Q2 — strategic work, relationships, growth. If Q1 is always full, Q2 is being neglected.
Watch out for
Treating everything as urgent collapses the matrix into a flat to-do list. If Q1 has 20 items, recalibrate your definition of urgent.
Pairs well with