A Better Framework for Business Decision Making

I once did an exercise with a new client. Their leadership team had four members, and I gave each of them a stack of small sticky notes. The instruction was simple: write down what you think of when you hear the word "goal" — as it relates to the company you're leading.

The whiteboard filled up fast. Revenue targets. Employee retention. Customer satisfaction. Market expansion. Profit margins. New product launches. Hiring plans.

All worthy objectives. I wouldn't call any of them wrong. But were they all goals? Or were some of them strategies? Were a few actually tactics?

Nobody could agree. And in my experience working with business leaders, that's more common than most teams want to admit. Without a shared language for categorizing decisions, every planning conversation risks becoming a debate over semantics rather than a conversation about direction. Teams stay busy making decisions all day but can't point to which ones actually moved the business forward.

Goal, Strategy, Tactics, Execution

In Craft: The Expedition of Business, I introduce a framework called the Pyramids of Decisions — a structure where most business decisions find a home across four levels, stacked like a pyramid, each level supporting the one above it. The same structure works whether you're mapping out a five-year plan or figuring out why leftovers are piling up in the break room fridge.

A goal is what you're trying to accomplish — the outcome, the destination.

A goal is the target — it doesn't support anything else; everything else supports it. It's the answer to "Where are we going?"

A strategy is the core bet you're making about how to reach the goal. My favorite definition comes from Seth Godin: "Strategy is our philosophy of becoming." It reflects what you believe matters most and what you're willing to trade off. Will you compete on price or quality? Grow through new customers or deeper relationships with existing ones? Build expertise in-house or partner with specialists?

A good strategy reflects a clear point of view about what matters most and what we're willing to trade off. It's the bets that we're willing to place.

Tactics are the specific actions that make the strategy real. And execution is how well you actually do what you said you'd do.

Execution is where most businesses win or lose — not in having the perfect strategy or clever tactics, but in doing the work that reinforces the base of our Pyramids of Decisions.

In my business, the goal was running a successful professional services company. A core strategy was leveraging more junior and less expensive staff to do work on par with their more senior counterparts. One tactic to support that strategy was a series of checklists that created a scaffold for people to climb as they completed a project. Decisions around execution included making those checklists easy to find and requiring a signed version to be turned in with each project.

Many decisions. Varying degrees of importance. But each had a clear place in the pyramid, and each either supported or undermined what sat above it.

What Happens When the Levels Get Confused

A town manager is proud of their city parks. They're ornate and manicured, but one park keeps having trouble with kids trampling the flower beds. It's working against the department's goal of keeping the parks beautiful.

Their instruction to the maintenance crew — their strategy: "Keep the kids out of the flower beds."

I saw the result when I visited the park. The flower beds were full of blossoms, a kaleidoscope of colors. But also there were the biggest, tackiest signs you can imagine: "STAY OUT OF FLOWER BEDS."

The tactic (the signs) supported the strategy (keep kids out). But it sabotaged the goal (keeping the park beautiful). If the goal had been communicated alongside the strategy, would the tactic have been different? Almost certainly.

This pattern shows up in business constantly. A sales team told to "grow revenue" says yes to every lead — including terrible-fit customers who churn quickly and consume disproportionate support resources. The tactic supports the stated strategy. But it undermines the actual goal of building a profitable, sustainable company.

The problem isn't bad people making bad choices. It's a missing structure connecting daily decisions to the destination they're supposed to serve.

The Weight Matters Too

My wife recently interviewed for a leadership role managing a team of twelve. During the process, she was asked: "What would you do if you made a decision, and all 12 people on your team disagreed with you?"

It sounds like a reasonable question until you realize it assumes all decisions carry equal weight — when one of a leader's chief responsibilities is knowing they don't.

If it's on the tactics or execution level, then my job is to explain — hopefully with a first-principles understanding of why — how it supports the relevant goal or strategy. If it's a decision about our goal or a key strategy, then I'm on a fool's errand trying to accomplish either with a full mutiny brewing.

People getting bent out of shape about granola bars replacing potato chips in the break room is a different situation than someone redefining the ideal customer. How you respond to disagreement should depend entirely on where the decision sits in the pyramid.

Why This Changes How You Lead

When a leadership team can look at any decision and place it in the pyramid, the way they work together shifts. Delegation gets easier because you know which decisions require your involvement and which ones don't. Alignment improves because everyone understands how their daily work connects to the bigger picture. Disagreements become more productive because the conversation moves from "I think we should do X" to "where does X sit, and does it support what's above it?"

And maybe most importantly, it changes how you communicate with your team. Instead of issuing instructions and hoping people fill in the gaps correctly, you're giving them a map — one that connects their daily execution to the strategy it serves and the goal it's all pointed toward. People stop guessing what matters and start knowing.

It all starts with the leadership team being honest about one question: can we all agree on what our goal actually is? If the sticky notes don't match, nothing beneath them will either.