Decisions.

The framework

1. 01

   Run the three tests — without all three, there is no option to buy.

   An option is only worth paying for when three conditions hold at once. The commitment must be genuinely hard to undo — Day 64's one-way door, given a number this time: the cash you would not get back, the months you would lose. The uncertainty must be real and due to resolve: name the specific fact you do not yet know. And you must hold actual latitude over timing, which is rarer than stated deadlines suggest, because most deadlines are negotiating positions rather than physics. Fail any one of the three and the option is worth nothing, and what you are calling optionality is delay you have not priced.

2. 02

   Buy the option with structure, and name the premium before you sign.

   Optionality is purchased with terms, not intentions. A pilot instead of a rollout. A break clause instead of a three-year term. A contractor before a permanent head, a deposit before a purchase, a non-exclusive agreement before you hand someone your market, one tranche of spend instead of the whole build. Every one of them carries a price: the pilot costs more per unit, the break clause costs you a discount, the contractor costs a premium on the day rate. Write that premium down as a figure. An option whose cost you have never named is one you will keep buying, in every deal, without ever noticing the bill.

3. 03

   Write the trigger and the expiry on the day you buy it.

   The common failure is not buying too few options; it is buying them and never exercising them. So at the moment you take the option, write two signals and a date: the evidence that would make you commit, the evidence that would make you walk away, and the day the question closes whether or not the world has been kind enough to answer it. Without an expiry the pilot quietly renews, the contractor becomes staff by accident, the letter of intent becomes a relationship nobody has priced. On the expiry date, the option converts into a decision — never into another extension.

4. 04

   Know when to burn it — the point of deciding later is to decide.

   Options cost money to hold, and they cost something worse: they cap what you can win. Half-commitments buy weak versions of everything — the contractor who never learns your business, the pilot too small for the customer to take seriously, the market entry that never earns a defensible position. Some prizes are only available to the side that has visibly burned its own exit, because staff, suppliers and customers all price your seriousness before they price your product. Treat optionality as a phase with a known end rather than a temperament. You buy the right to decide later so that you decide better, not so that you never have to.