1: Integrate Key Decisions (to simplify success)
Every decision you ever make answers one of three basic questions (type A, B, or C) within one of three basic contexts (past, present, or future). Together, those nine fundamental, mutually dependent, core questions form a universal framework for success, on any given task or sub-task. Those questions are hard, if not impossible to answer when isolated from each other or when ill defined. They are simpler and more productive when viewed as integral parts of one concise and simple whole.

Everyone is born with that same decision framework. Nature gave it to you too. Unfortunately, that natural framework is semi­conscious and easily hijacked by stray notions, personal philosophies, misconceptions, and vague words. It can also be obscured by countless competing tactics, personal styles, and even best practices. Discover, simplify, and take control of your own natural decision / leadership framework! Then, everything you already know, or will ever learn, becomes more useful and productive.

A concise checklist of ordered requirements is called a strategy. Nature's strategy for success tries to combine your mind's rational and intuitive strengths to negotiate the best overall answers for that required and ordered set of nine core questions. The mind demands and supplies every answer, if only by unchecked assumption, belief, or habit. It is safer and simpler to join Nature than to fight it. Learn how to consciously answer those key questions faster, smarter, and more effectively.

•	Break down complex decisions	•	Crosscheck important points
•	Expose blind assumptions and pitfalls	•	Turbo-charge innovation and planning

Warning: None of those nine questions is exactly what you might guess, but each will seem somewhat familiar. Only when each is clearly, precisely, and correctly defined and connected will you be able to explicitly harness their combined simplicity and power.

2: Coordinate Key Decisions
Coordination is allowed only by consent. No amount of coercion or intimidation can force another's will. People choose to cooperate for their own reasons, after considering their available options. Then, people interact or cooperate correctly only if their leaders and teammates give them enough information to lead themselves in the right direction.

People need to understand the decisions of their leaders and teammates so they can make decisions consistently for their own tasks and fit them together within that larger context. As a leader you must help your teammates adopt or buy into all relevant decisions for the current situation, as if they had made those decisions themselves, which they actually do by their acceptance or adoption of those decisions. Likewise, your boss must ratify your decisions.

You need to be able to sell your decisions upwards while avoiding mental traps pushed downward or sideward (e.g., gaps, overlaps, and inconsistencies). You should get cooperation and commitment through a full framework of transparent, open, logical decisions.

To do all this well, you must trust in and communicate with each other. Nearly everyone extols good communication skills. Few have them or can help you gain them. The lack of a shared, precise, strategic vocabulary and matching decision framework is perhaps the single biggest reason for miscommunication and misunderstanding. We cure that lack.

•	Speak the same teamwork language	•	Unify team vision, mission, and route
•	Share one decision framework	•	Evaluate and fix teamwork issues
•	Take the guesswork out of teamwork

3: Improve Key Decisions
It is truly amazing how effective and efficient leadership and teamwork can become when everyone on the team knows how to focus on the same core checkpoints, in the same right sequence, and with the same vocabulary and definitions. Sharing one concise and precise decision framework and its matching vocabulary allows team members to understand all those common checkpoints and their own related assignments better. It also allows them to constructively contribute and communicate, or to clarify any questions they may have.

Sharing one common decision framework gives everyone involved the rights and responsibility to ask those questions and to insist on answers. It identifies questions they should but may never have asked. And, no one has to reject or dismiss any past experience, skills, or tools.

All personal mental models easily map onto Nature's decision framework. Everyone can use their own mental model but still communicate and cooperate effectively using Nature's mental model. Having a concise, consistent, time-proven framework and crystal clear vocabulary also helps you to integrate and enhance everything you already know. With these new powerful tools and clearer perspectives, you get better answers.

You can improve your own individual decisions too. Any specific decision is vitally interdependent with at least eight other sibling decisions. No decision ever really stands alone. When you consider a decision within its full natural context, it does not just improve that decision. The decision itself becomes easier to make.

The NineDecisions framework establishes a reliable, sharable success strategy for leaders, teammates, and individuals. To the degree that you can guarantee that all of Nature's key decisions are made completely and correctly, you can also guarantee success.

•	Synergize your rationality and intuition	•	Resolve issues on merit, not politics
•	Safeguard survivability and longevity	•	Get more out of great books and practices
•	Set better goals, strategies, and tactics	•	Integrate, align, and improve all your skills