Decisions.

The framework

1. 01

   Write their case in their words, until they would sign it.

   The test is not whether you can describe their position; it is whether they would recognise it. Write their argument in the first person, in their vocabulary, at full strength, including the part you find least fair. Then check for the courtesy steelman: the version that concedes the small point and quietly shrinks the one that actually hurts. If your account of their case contains the words just or simply, you have already done it. The standard worth holding comes from the game theorist Anatol Rapoport, in the philosopher Daniel Dennett's rendering of it — put their case so faithfully that they would rather you had said it than them, and only then say what you disagree with.

2. 02

   Separate the fact from the reading — the fact is shared, the meaning is not.

   Take the three or four things both sides agree happened: the invoice went out nine days late, the headcount was cut, the meeting moved twice, the discount was withdrawn. Put them in one column, then write two more — what each fact means from your chair, and what it means from theirs. Most conflicts you are inside are not disputes about the record; they are two coherent readings of an agreed record. Doing this on paper is what kills the private-motive discount, where your own late invoice is explained by circumstance and theirs by character. If a fact reads the same in both columns, you have not left your chair yet.

3. 03

   Look at your last three moves as behaviour, because that is all they get.

   Your intentions are vivid to you and invisible to everybody else. What travels is the behaviour, stripped of the reasoning that made it feel reasonable. So list what you actually did across the last quarter — the reply that took nine days, the price held firm through their bad month, the person you moved off their account — and write down what somebody with no access to your reasons would conclude from that pattern. This is the part of the exercise that stings, because the story the pattern tells is rarely the story you tell about yourself, and it is the one they have been working from all along.

4. 04

   Three honest outputs, and no fourth.

   If the decision comes out of this untouched, you did not test it, you rehearsed it. You change the decision, because their reading exposed something yours could not see. You keep the decision and change how you carry it — the order you say things in, the concession you lead with, the claim you now know you must prove rather than assert. Or you keep both and name the cost you are choosing to impose on them, to their face and in the note that follows, so it becomes a decision rather than a blind spot. Write which of the three you took, and one sentence of why, before the meeting rather than after it.