Category

F01: Perspective

Definition
Every time someone presents you with three options, ask which one exists to make another look better.
The operator who receives a vendor proposal with three tiers — Basic, Professional, and Enterprise — is not being given three genuine choices. They are being given one recommended choice (Professional) and two anchors designed to make it feel inevitable. The Basic tier exists to make Professional look feature-complete. The Enterprise tier exists to make Professional look affordable. The decision was engineered before the operator opened the proposal.
The same mechanism runs inside the operator’s own thinking. The operator who frames a difficult decision as a choice between two extremes — “we either fire him or do nothing” — has created a decoy situation with no decoy visible. The extreme options make a third path feel moderate when it may not be the right path at all. The frame manufactured the obvious answer.
The Perspective discipline is to see option sets as constructed, not neutral. Every time a decision is presented with three or more options, two questions:
Which option was designed to make another look better — and what does the choice look like without it?
Who constructed this option set — and what outcome were they steering toward?
The operator who asks those two questions before deciding is not being paranoid. They are recognizing that [Decoy Effect] is immutable — it runs in every option set, whether the person who built the set intended it or not. The defense is not suspicion. It is the discipline of stripping the option set down to its genuine alternatives before evaluating.

Explanation
See Definition.