A sponsor shows the preferred plan beside alternatives built to lose on every criterion displayed, so choosing it feels like independent judgment and the decision is hard to question afterward.
An example
Three options reached a regional airline's board for its fleet decision. The first kept the current turboprops for six more years at rising maintenance cost. The second bought a new regional jet at a price the slide showed as 30 percent higher. The third, the recommendation, leased a different jet type, and it beat the other two on all six criteria in the comparison grid. A director who had served on another airline's board asked who had chosen the six criteria and who had prepared the two alternatives. The answer to both was the fleet planning team that had recommended the lease. The director asked what else had been considered. There had been a long list of seven, including a mixed fleet, and none of the other four had reached the board. The vote was postponed one meeting, and finance prepared the mixed-fleet case.
Why it works
Placing the recommendation next to engineered losers makes it look better than it would alone, as reasonable reads as excellent by contrast. It makes approval easier, because the slate feels like due diligence and gives the approver a defensible story later. And it makes the alternatives look worse by construction, since they were built to be overpriced, underscoped, or slow. A two-option version pairs the plan with a catastrophe and spends most of the deck on the catastrophe. Four conditions carry it: the board accepts the set as complete, the decoys are plausible enough to pass, the sponsor chooses the criteria, and time pressure blocks independent work.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon Administrative Behavior (1947) analyzes organizations as systems of decisions shaped by premises the organization supplies, such as goals, information, and procedures, and whoever controls those premises influences the decisions. A fleet planning team that chooses the options and the six criteria supplies the premises of the board's choice. The defense goes after the premises: the long list, who chose the criteria, and an option built by someone else.
Richard H. Thaler Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008), by Thaler and Sunstein, holds that the way options are presented always influences choice, so there is no neutral design. A slate in which two options are built to lose is choice architecture aimed at one answer. Requiring that at least one option come from outside the sponsoring team is a design rule that restores a real choice.
Warning signs
Two of the options are beaten by the third on every displayed criterion. The sponsor chose the criteria, and the pack shows no long list of options considered. The preferred plan and its comparators trace back to the same author or team. In the two-option version, most of the deck demolishes the alternative and few pages describe the proposal. The timetable leaves no room to develop anything else.
How to defend yourself
Audit who built the slate before you weigh the options on it.
- Ask what was dropped before these options made the slate, and request the full long list.
- Ask who chose the criteria and who prepared each option.
- Have an independent analyst or staff function build at least one option, or invite the sponsor of a real competing proposal to present it.
- When only two options are offered, ask why these are the only two. One director with standing who asks that question breaks the binary.
- Push back on deadlines that leave no time to develop alternatives.
The recommendation may still be the right answer. Make sure it wins against a real competitor.
How a leader shuts it down
Disclosure rules help most: every decision pack should show the long list, the authors of each option, and who set the criteria. On major decisions, at least one option should come from outside the sponsoring team, and an independent staff function should get the time to build it.