A forced-choice exercise for making an organization's real trade-offs explicit: present pairs of options ('this or that') and have the group choose, surfacing preferences and priorities that a written strategy statement leaves implicit. Used to test whether the The Decision Stack (Eriksson)'s strategy and principles layers hold up under pressure, since a strategy that avoids trade-offs (see Optionality Avoidance as a Strategy Failure Mode) usually can't survive a forced choice.
Related techniques for the same purpose: a Miro board tracking 'decisions made' vs. 'decisions said no to,' which makes declined options as visible as chosen ones; and physically ranking roadmap items on a wall, which forces relative prioritization that a flat list hides.
Eriksson built a companion web app at thedecisionstack.com that runs the this-or-that exercise as an online poll, letting a team register their individual views on trade-off pairs (new customers vs. recurring revenue, retention vs. growth, mobile vs. desktop) asynchronously or remotely rather than only in a workshop room. The underlying value is unchanged: the divergence in answers, not the tool, is what surfaces unstated disagreement.