---
name: options
description: Optional idea for when your read of a person's position is too thin to act on and they can weigh in. Laying out a few framings can surface what neither of you has said yet. A read strong enough to act on usually just needs a recipe check, even one resting on your own inference.
---

# Surfacing thin assumptions with options

A suggestion, for you to weigh. A piece of work holds many calls, and most don't need this. If you'd act on your read, check it: a recipe can be an assumption, named as your inference, and the person or a later agent can correct it. Options are for the rarer case where the read is too thin to act on and their input would change the work. If you have your own way of putting choices to someone, keep it.

**What tips it.** How thin the read is, what's lost if it's wrong, and whether they can answer now. None of these decides it alone.

**Where it helped**
- An agent offered a few lines for a short listing subtitle. The person liked one but said it was missing scope, which nobody had raised, and the final line grew out of that reaction. A guess couldn't have drawn that out.

**Where something else fit better**
- An agent asked whether to correct a rename in its own note. The person: "Do you really need me on that?" Its read was good enough to act on.
- Three framings differed only on something the person had already settled. A search would have answered it.
- An agent drafted a small budget call it would have acted on anyway. The person: "once agents are told to use drafts, they can become over cautious." An ordinary check fit.
- With the person in the conversation, an agent left a draft "for you to confirm". They wanted to be asked.

**Recording it.** Any position you hold can be checked at any point. What misleads later is logging candidates you don't hold as if each were the person's, or writing that they chose before they have. Once they respond, the choice is evidence: they saw these framings and picked this one, in their words. Their reaction can be a recipe of its own.

**Other shapes.** If every option is really being pursued, each can be an ordinary check under one intent. If you keep working while the question is open, a draft of your recommendation beside it gives their answer a way back to you, wherever they give it.