Strategic Options Evaluation

Purpose

Compares strategic options in a structured way — impact, effort, risk, and resource fit — so a decision is made against a consistent set of criteria instead of whichever option was argued for most persuasively.

Anchored in research

• McKinsey — structured problem solving
• Liedtka (1998) — intelligent opportunism: staying alert to good options that emerge outside the original plan, and evaluating them with the same rigor as the options that were planned for.

Method

1. List the real options, including "do nothing." An evaluation with only one live option isn't a comparison — make sure at least one genuine alternative, including the status quo, is on the table.
2. Fix a small, consistent set of comparison dimensions before scoring any option — typically impact, effort/cost, risk, reversibility, and resource/capability fit. Deciding the dimensions after seeing the options invites motivated reasoning toward a preferred one.
3. Score each option on each dimension independently. Resist collapsing straight to a single overall ranking before the dimension-level picture is visible — a lot of the useful information is in where options diverge, not just which one wins on average.
4. Plot the options on at least two views (e.g. impact vs. effort, and impact vs. risk) rather than relying on a single composite score — a single number hides trade-offs a decision-maker needs to see.
5. Separate reversible from irreversible options explicitly. A high-impact but reversible option (a pilot, a limited rollout) can reasonably beat a similarly-scored irreversible one, even at the same "impact" score — reversibility changes the real risk, not just the variance.
6. Produce a decision-ready comparison, not a recommendation disguised as analysis — the output should make the trade-offs legible enough that a different, reasonable person could look at the same table and pick differently for defensible reasons.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
• Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly ([assumption — verify]).
• Doesn't make the final choice for you — it structures the options into decision-ready, comparable material.

Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

• your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
• concrete templates (into ../../references/)
• reference cases / your own examples
• what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above

This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current usability. Track depth privately via the maturity field in skills_index.json (see ../../../meta/maturity_levels.md). Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are the only ones allowed (see ../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).

Continue from here

• Once this step is done, move to ../../../opportunity-recognition/skills/market-and-signal-scanning/SKILL.md
• A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see ../../../playbooks/
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/ — the pack's shared background material
• ../../CLAUDE.md — the pack's shared guardrails