The Unofficial Ballot: Corporate Positioning Decision Worksheet

When a controversial issue reaches your organization, the worst time to decide what you believe is after the pressure has arrived.

This worksheet gives communications teams, executives, and advisors a disciplined way to work through that decision in writing, before any statement is drafted. The goal is not to reach a “yes” or a “no.” The goal is a decision you can defend six months from now. If a line is blank, you are not done.

PDF, 3 pages, US Letter. Fill it in on screen or print it. No sign-up required. Free to copy and share with attribution.

The ten questions

• 1What issue are you being asked to address?
• 2Why is your organization being asked to respond?
• 3Which stakeholders are affected?
• 4What happens if you speak?
• 5What happens if you don’t?
• 6Is this issue directly connected to your business?
• 7Have you previously established a position?
• 8Who has authority to make the decision?
• 9Would you make the same decision six months from now?
• 10Can you defend the decision without relying on partisan politics?

Each question on the worksheet includes a prompt drawn from the book, a space for the answer, and a final decision block: speak deliberately and back it with action, stay neutral on purpose, or recognize that you are not ready and do the work first.

Who it is for

Professionals use it as a pre-statement checklist for leadership, communications, legal, and HR. Educators use it as the in-class tool for the classroom exercise, in which students argue a hypothetical company’s decision before and after applying the framework.

Want the complete framework?

The worksheet condenses the decision process at the heart of The Unofficial Ballot: Trust, Risk, and Taking Sides in a Divided Era. The book’s six-step framework in Chapter 17, the worked examples, the statement and apology templates, and the playbooks for corporations, small businesses, creators, and individuals go much further.