Opportunity-Cost Prompt¶

Decision ritual — instantiates Sufficiency-Bounded Work Containment

Inserts one required question into a decision — "what is the best thing we won't do if we say yes to this?" — so the forgone alternative is named before resource is committed.

An Opportunity-Cost Prompt is a single mandatory question wired into a decision point: what is the best thing we will not do if we choose this? Its defining move is that it forces the decider to name a specific forgone alternative at the moment resource is committed — converting an invisible tradeoff into a spoken one. It measures nothing and decides nothing; it is the cheapest possible meter, and its whole job is to move attention from "is this use of the resource good?" (almost anything looks good in isolation) to "is it better than the best thing it displaces?" That reframing is what makes a container feel like a container instead of a blank cheque.

Example¶

A community foundation is deciding whether to fund a new after-school program out of a fixed annual pool. Reviewed on its own, the proposal is compelling — clear need, motivated staff, reasonable budget — and the committee is drifting toward yes. The Opportunity-Cost Prompt is the required question on the decision sheet: what is the best thing we won't fund if we fund this? Forced to name it, someone points to a job-training initiative with unusually strong placement outcomes that would otherwise be next in line. The choice is no longer "fund a good program or not"; it is "this program versus that one," and the committee either funds the higher-yield option or at least commits knowing exactly what it is giving up — instead of discovering the sacrifice only in hindsight.

How it works¶

The question is required, not optional — it fires every time at the commitment point, so it can't be skipped precisely when the stakes are highest.
It demands a named alternative — a concrete rival use, not a hand-waving "we could do other things." Naming is what gives the prompt teeth.
It stays qualitative and instant — no model, no number; its job is to redirect attention, not to compute a figure.
It sits where the resource is actually committed — approval, sizing, sign-off — the last point at which surfacing the tradeoff can still change the answer.

Tuning parameters¶

Trigger threshold — whether it fires on every decision or only on commitments above a size. Too frequent and it becomes noise the room learns to ignore; too rare and it misses the routine over-spend.
Specificity demanded — a concretely named alternative versus a vague gesture. Requiring a real rival is the difference between a live check and a shrug.
Who must answer — the proposer (self-check) versus a second party (adversarial). A second party resists the proposer's motivated reasoning.
Consequence of the answer — merely recorded, or weighed on the record. An answer that is captured and then ignored is theatre.

When it helps, and when it misleads¶

Its strength is that it costs almost nothing and counters the deep habit of judging a use of resource in isolation rather than against its best alternative — the whole meaning of opportunity cost, the seen choice measured against the unseen one it displaces.^[1] Its failure mode is ritual theatre: asked and reflexively shrugged off, or gamed by naming a deliberately feeble "alternative" so the pet option always wins. It also only raises the tradeoff — it neither quantifies it nor tracks how it changes as work continues. The discipline that keeps it honest is to require a genuinely strong named alternative and to record how it was weighed, so the prompt actually bites rather than decorates.

How it implements the components¶

opportunity_cost_meter — the prompt is the lightweight meter itself: it renders the forgone best alternative visible at the moment of commitment, which is the one reading the archetype needs to keep a container from being spent by default.

It fills only that surface. It does not state the resource container (resource_container_statement — Budget Ceiling with Returned-Funds Path) or pull an actual stop (stop_short_trigger — Done-at-Eighty-Percent Demo). Its quantitative counterpart — tracking the falling value of continuing the current work — is Marginal Value Burn-Down.

Instantiates: Sufficiency-Bounded Work Containment — the prompt supplies the opportunity-cost reading that makes the container's remaining capacity feel spendable-elsewhere.
Sibling mechanisms: Marginal Value Burn-Down · Budget Ceiling with Returned-Funds Path · Acceptance Criteria Checklist · Definition of Done · Agenda Exit Gate · Done-at-Eighty-Percent Demo · Scope Change Ticket · Timebox with Early Exit Rule

References¶

[1] Frédéric Bastiat's essay That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen (1850) names the core error the prompt attacks: we weigh the visible thing we are buying and ignore the invisible thing we forgo to buy it. The prompt simply forces the unseen alternative to be said out loud. ↩