Tradeoffs Are the Message: How to Present Hard Choices to Decision Makers
Technical professionals usually do a good job of developing options. They are less effective at explaining what each option costs the people who have to live with it.
A business case tells decision makers which option scores best. Decision makers still have to decide what they are willing to accept, and who else has to accept it. That second question is where most presentations come up short.
Background on Developing Business Cases
The mechanics of building a business case are covered in Building Better Business Cases for Reliability. This piece picks up where the analysis ends: communicating the tradeoffs so decision makers understand what they are signing up for.
From the Real World
I served as interim town manager for a town of about 20,000 people. A major four-lane US highway ran through the middle of town, and the town was responsible for mowing its medians.
The mowing contractor was performing poorly. The issue first came to me as a simple question: should we fire the contractor and have town staff do the work? I wrote about how that first staff meeting went sideways in Structure Business Writing to Be More Effective with Decision Makers. The decision itself deserves its own discussion.
We took four options to the town council:
Status quo. Keep the current contractor and keep managing the poor performance.
Renegotiate with the previous contractor. He did excellent work. However, he refused to carry the insurance the town required and did not bid the last time.
Terminate and re-advertise. Fire the current contractor and rebid the work.
Bring the work in-house. Have town staff mow the highway.
The cost was small relative to the overall town budget. It was large relative to the maintenance budget. Still, money was not the real issue.
The real risk was that someone could get hurt or killed. Our grass cutters mowed around public buildings and along greenways. They were not trained to work next to high-speed traffic, and they had no experience keeping a mower from throwing a rock into a passing car.
Option 4 looked reasonable on a spreadsheet because the town already had the people and the mowers. The tradeoff was hidden. We would be putting our own employees, and the traveling public, at risk.
Option 2 carried a quieter version of the same problem. Excellent work from an uninsured contractor in a highway median shifts the liability to the town. The mowing budget would look fine right up to the first accident.
We recommended Option 3. This time, we did something we had not done the first time. We called neighboring towns, asked which contractors they were satisfied with in their own US highway medians, and invited those firms to bid.
Frame the Problem, Not the Budget
Impacts should stay inside the problem frame. If they show up somewhere else later, the problem was not framed properly.
The town’s problem was how to maintain the medians of a US highway safely and reliably. Framed that way, worker safety and liability are part of the decision from the start.
In practice, decisions are usually made based on where they fall in the existing or new budget. They are seldom made by thinking through the values involved and then expanding, or contracting, the budget if that is best.
Business cases for operations and maintenance (O&M) are just as important as business cases for major capital projects. Mowing a median is an O&M decision, and the risk to our employees was as real as on any capital project. Deferred maintenance follows the same pattern. Cutting it saves this year’s operating budget, and the cost returns later as capital replacement and lost reliability.
Decision makers are accountable for the whole system. The problem frame has to be wide enough to hold the impacts.
Options Are Cheap
Generating options has never been easier. Any AI tool can produce five alternatives in seconds. Some research and advisory firms such as Gartner expect AI to augment or automate half of business decisions by 2027.
That changes where technical professionals add value. Listing options is no longer the hard part. Judging the tradeoffs in each one, and stating them plainly, is the work decision makers still need from people who understand the system.
Tell Them the Tradeoffs
For each option, answer five questions:
What do we gain?
What do we give up?
Who carries the risk?
When does it show up?
Can we undo it?
Try to put the answers in one table and on one slide. It becomes the “money slide” for the decision. Include relative costs, but order-of-magnitude numbers are enough at this stage. The main point is to show cost, but visually keep it in proportion to the other tradeoffs.
Why Decision Makers Choose the Middle
In my experience, decision makers rarely choose the status quo when there is a known problem. They also rarely choose the do-everything option. They want to do something, and they want an affordable reason to do it.
The bookend options matter but are easy to treat as throwaways. The status quo puts a price on doing nothing. The do-everything option shows what each middle option leaves on the table. Without status quo and do everything, decision makers cannot see what the middle option is being traded against.
The bookends must be genuine options with honest numbers. An option built only to make the preferred one look good is steering, and experienced board members usually recognize it.
Reduce the Risk Before You Ask
Tradeoffs are not always fixed. Sometimes the best move is to reduce the risk before asking decision makers to accept it.
The first time, the town advertised the work and took what came in. The second time, the references from neighboring towns reduced the biggest risk of re-bidding, which was hiring another poor performer. The recommendation was easier to accept because the risk was smaller.
State Your Conclusion(s)
Showing options and tradeoffs does not replace a recommendation. It is what makes the recommendation credible.
The strongest recommendations are conditional. Tell decision makers what you recommend and what would change your mind. For the town, it sounded like this: “We recommend re-bidding with references from neighboring towns. If we cannot attract a qualified, insured bidder, we will come back with the remaining options.”
Engineers can calculate a switching point. Decision makers can act on one. It also tells them which assumption to watch after the vote.
In FINESSE terms, this is Ethics. Hiding or minimizing a tradeoff steers the decision. Stating it plainly lets decision makers own it.
Tradeoffs Are the Message
The business case makes the preferred option— the option the organization needs, even if it's not what certain individuals want—obvious to all. The tradeoff is what decision makers sign up for, and it is often a cost someone else pays. Keep the impacts in the problem frame and reduce the risk where you can. Then recommend clearly and let them decide.
First published as: Solomon, J. D. (2026, October 21). Tradeoffs are the message: How to present hard choices to decision makers. Substack. https://communicatingwithfinesse.substack.com/p/tradeoffs-are-the-message-how-to?r=1g8fml
JD Solomon champions practical communication skills that help technical professionals convey complex ideas clearly and confidently. Learn more at www.jdsolomonsolutions.com and www.communicatingwithfinesse.com.
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