Product
Scores you can inspect, and the reasons beneath them
A weighted score is the oldest honest tool in decision making, and the easiest to bend without anyone noticing. Argumont keeps the tool and closes the usual ways it goes wrong: criteria borrowed from another problem, weights adjusted after the favorite is known, and numbers that rise on hope.
How a weighted score works
Each criterion receives a weight, the weights together total 100, and each option is scored on each criterion from 0 to 100. Multiply every score by its weight, add the results, divide by 100, and the highest total leads.
The arithmetic is trivial. Everything difficult happens before it, in deciding what to measure and how much each measure should count.
Criteria written for the question
A supplier choice might turn on unit cost, defect rate, lead time and minimum order quantity. A software choice might turn on security, migration effort and the cost of leaving later. Argumont writes criteria for the question in front of it and avoids stock labels such as strategic fit unless they truly decide the matter.
Weights are whole numbers set before any option is scored, and they are equal only when the issues are genuinely equal. More weight goes where a difference between the options would change the answer, which is rarely where a team first expects.
What is allowed to move a score
A score can rise only on a claim tied to a source the record holds, or on a private fact you have confirmed. Assumptions, estimates, predictions and opinions never lift a score, however confidently they are stated.
A fact that is true of every option cannot separate them, so it is left out of the comparison: two cars with no open safety investigations are equal on that point, not both ahead. Where the evidence for a criterion is thin, its scores stay conservative and the stated reason says so.
The mistake scoring is meant to catch
The classic failure is to see the options first, then adjust the weights until the favorite wins. Setting weights before scoring makes that move visible, because any later change shows up as a change to the criteria rather than a quiet shift in someone's head.
The Verdict also states its sensitivity: whether it holds across reasonable changes to the weights, or turns on how you weight the Decision Hinges that remain open. When a Challenge the Verdict pass moves a score, the record shows the criterion and the score before and after.
What the Judge does with the totals
The Judge reads the whole record and never crowns an option on its total alone, nor on how many Participants spoke for it. A narrow lead that rests on one doubtful figure is reported as exactly that, with the figure named as the condition to settle. The totals inform the Verdict, and the Human Decision stays with the person who owns the call.
Two suppliers, scored in the open
The weights are set first: unit cost 40, defect rate 30, lead time 20, minimum order 10. Supplier A scores 80, 60, 50 and 90, for a total of 69. Supplier B scores 60, 90, 70 and 60, for a total of 71. B leads by two points, a margin one score could erase. Inspector then finds that B's defect figure of 90 rests on the supplier's own estimate rather than an inspection report, and an estimate cannot lift a score. Held at 70 until a sample is tested, B's total falls to 65 and A leads. The Verdict says so, and names an independent defect test on B as the condition that would reverse it.
Questions
- Can I see the criteria and weights?
- Yes. They are listed on the Decision, each weight shown as a percentage, and together they always total 100.
- Why whole numbers rather than decimals?
- Because the evidence rarely supports more precision than that. A score with three decimal places suggests a measurement nobody actually made.
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