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# The three-question filter we use before any decision
- URL: https://azimuth.aftertype.studio/three-question-filter/
- Published: 2026-08-07T12:24:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T12:24:10.000Z
- Description: Most decisions in a small team don't need a framework. The ones that do only need three questions.
- Author: Ida Mercer
- Tags: Decisions, #Start here, #Import 2026-10-06 19:29

For the first two years, every decision at the company I ran got the same treatment: a meeting, a document, three more meetings. It felt thorough. It was mostly theatre.

What changed wasn't a framework. It was three questions, asked in order, before anything else happens.

## 1\. Does this need a decision, or a default?

Most of what arrives dressed as a decision is actually a default waiting to be named. "Which project management tool should we use" is rarely a decision - it's whichever one the team already uses for something adjacent, made official.

## 2\. Who is actually affected, and did we ask them?

Not "who should be in the room" - who is affected. Those are different lists, and the second one is almost always shorter and more specific than the first.

## 3\. What do we lose by waiting a week?

> Almost nothing is as urgent as it feels in the meeting where you're deciding it.

If the honest answer is "nothing," the decision waits. If the answer is real - a contract expires, a hire will take another offer - it moves immediately, without another round of consensus-building.

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None of this is clever. It's mostly a way of admitting that most of our decision-making overhead was never about decision quality. It was about feeling responsible. The filter doesn't make you feel responsible. It just gets out of the way.