How a decision becomes a verdict
Most big decisions don’t fail for lack of information. They fail because no one pressure-tested them from every angle before the money moved.
The Viveka 6-Lens Framework reads one decision six ways — Strategic, Financial, Operational, Risk, People and Customer — and ends in one of three verdicts: proceed, proceed with conditions, or do not proceed. Here it is on a real decision, with the company anonymised.
The decision
A fast-growing product company wanted a bigger market. The plan on the table was a discount to get there.
Review note: the six findings below are a draft written from the pricing story. Strategic, Financial and Customer follow your account; Operational, Risk and People need your confirmation. Edit them in content/worked-example.ts.
- Strategic
- The goal was the corporate market, and the route into it ran through premium positioning. A discount would have bought volume in a market the company was not trying to win.
- Financial
- The lower price needed a large rise in volume just to hold the same margin, and it would have become the starting number in every corporate negotiation that followed.
- Operational
- The business could have delivered the extra orders. Capacity was not the constraint, which is part of why the decision looked easy.
- Risk
- A price cut is quick to make and slow to undo. Once the market had seen the lower number, going back would have read as a price rise.
- People
- The sales team would have learned to close on price rather than on value, the opposite of the habit corporate selling needs.
- Customer
- Corporate buyers were reading the price as a signal of quality. Cheaper would have made the product easier to buy and harder to take seriously.
The discount would have worked on its own terms, and undercut the premium positioning central to the company's corporate-market goal. The company held its price.
Six readings of your decision, and one verdict you can defend.
Put the framework on your decision