Framing

Framing a recommendation with SCQA so executives can decide

Analysts lose decisions they have already won, because the write-up walks the reader through the investigation instead of the conclusion. SCQA — Situation, Complication, Question, Answer — reverses that order and takes about thirty minutes to apply.

5 min read

Situation: only what everyone already accepts

Two or three sentences of uncontested context. If a reader could dispute a sentence here, it belongs in Complication. The purpose of the Situation is agreement, not information.

Complication: the change that forces a decision

Something happened — a mandate, a volume increase, a failed audit, a contract expiry — that makes the current path untenable. Name it precisely and quantify it. Most weak memos have a vague Complication, which is why they read as optional.

Question: the one thing being asked

State the decision as a question with the options implied: “Do we extend the current engine to Brazil, or split determination by region?” One question per memo. If there are three, you have three memos, or a sequencing problem you have not resolved yet.

Answer: the recommendation, with its conditions

Lead with the recommendation in one sentence, then the two or three reasons, then what would have to be true for it to be wrong. That last part is what earns trust — a recommendation that names its own failure conditions reads as analysis, not advocacy.

Everything else is appendix

The model, the scenarios, the vendor scores, the interview notes: all valuable, all behind the one page. Executives who want the detail will ask; those who do not should still be able to decide correctly from the front page alone.

Where this comes from

This note condenses Frame the decision with SCQA and pairs with the SCQA one-pager working tool.

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Diagnosis