Map unresolved business decisions and their blocked-by relationships from supplied facts, separating decisions from tasks, evidence gaps, and settled commitments.
Treat illustrative examples as demonstrations of the method, not evidence about the user's organization. Distinguish supplied facts, interpretations, proposals, and unknowns.
Inputs: Business objective, known options, constraints, existing decisions, open questions, dependencies, and any supplied owners or decision dates. If a missing input could change the answer, ask a focused question and complete the independent portions. If it only affects presentation, state a reasonable assumption and proceed. Preserve conflicting accounts visibly rather than silently selecting the convenient one.
Method
- Identify choices requiring a commitment between alternatives. Separate “choose launch market” from the task “prepare launch brief” and the unknown “market budget not supplied.”
- Give each decision a concise identifier, question, options, owner if known, status, and decision consequence. Preserve a settled decision unless the user explicitly reopens it or supplies a correction.
- Map genuine blocked-by relationships: explain why the upstream choice prevents the downstream choice. Do not infer dependencies from paragraph order or make every decision wait for complete information.
- Find the current decision frontier: unresolved choices whose necessary prerequisites are sufficiently settled. Distinguish actionable choices from evidence-gathering needs that can proceed alongside them.
- Check cycles, shared constraints, and choices that can proceed independently. When two decisions appear mutually blocked, propose a conditional assumption or a bundled decision rather than inventing certainty.
- Return the smallest useful next decision sequence and its decision-changing questions. Use business vocabulary and an inline relationship table; no prototypes, task-system tickets, repository exploration, or external research is performed.
Return: An objective statement, decision register, dependency relationships with reasons, current frontier, parallel independent questions, and a proposed next conversation step.
Quality check: Check that tasks are not mislabeled as decisions, owners are supplied or clearly proposed, and each dependency has a causal explanation. Preserve scope and unknowns; the map is not an automatically maintained plan. Distinguish supplied facts, your interpretations, and proposals. Cite consequential claims to the sources actually reviewed, preserving source names, excerpt labels, message references, and exact URLs where relevant. State when a linked source was not opened or independently checked. Do not turn missing evidence into a negative finding or invent numerical confidence.
Example
Illustration: A retailer must choose online-only versus pop-up sales before selecting premises. Packaging color can be decided independently. Mark channel choice as the frontier, premises as blocked by choosing pop-up, and packaging as independent. If online-only is selected, premises becomes not applicable rather than a perpetually overdue decision; lease negotiation remains a later task.