Step 5 of 7 · Days 8 and 9
What do we commit to?
The hard decisions everyone already knows are needed, and nobody is making. Sometimes a decision genuinely cannot be made yet because information is missing. What breaks companies is letting that float with no line in the sand.
Deferred calls do not get easier. Pressure rises while the odds of making the call well fall, until someone else makes it on worse terms. This step gets the call onto paper while everyone is calm, with success and failure agreed upfront, and gives the honest answer to whether the business can be saved, with a plan for whichever of the four outcomes the evidence supports.
Building a verdict on a vibe about runway, dressing a mindset picture up as arithmetic, or folding an unsigned page into a wait so nobody has to hear the answer.
Tool 21 of 32
A one-page picture of what waiting costs. Deferred calls do not get easier; eventually someone else makes them on worse terms.
On decision day, drawn once, immediately before presenting the Decision Contract, with real facts spoken beside it from the captured baselines.
Tool 19 of 32
One page per hard decision, with success and failure agreed upfront and signed while everyone is calm.
On decision day, immediately after the Decision Decay Curve, on a page drafted before the meeting, decided on paper, confirmed in person.
Tool 20 of 32
A dated record of who expected what, so the company stops arguing about the past and starts weighing written accuracy.
Installed on decision day as a standing practice, then read back at every checkpoint.
Tool 22 of 32
How much time the company actually has, from trailing actuals or an honest band, on the record from day 0.
At intake, day 0, before any desk analysis, so the number or band exists as an input from the first day, never as a decision-day exercise.
Tool 23 of 32
Whether the market can currently support the business at all, so a timing problem never gets misdiagnosed as an execution problem.
Opened at intake and the first leadership contact, so the reading is in hand well before decision day. Runs for companies still searching for a market, and wherever the Value-Source Audit finds no current value engine.
Tool 24 of 32
The honest answer to the biggest question, decided by hard conditions first. Four outcomes, keep going, change direction, wait, or wind down, and every outcome ships with its plan.
On decision day, assembled from the outputs of the earlier tools, never from impressions, and never from fresh fieldwork. If a verdict needs new evidence, the upstream tools were skipped.