Frameworks
The methods I keep returning to, and where each one is set out.
This page is a directory, not an explanation. Each entry names a method that already appears in the writing, says what it is for in a line or two, and points at the piece where I work through it properly.
01 / Why this page exists
A method is only worth naming if it survives a bad week.
Most of these started as a habit rather than a framework. A sorting rule I used on a Sunday evening, a set of questions I kept putting to vendors, four lines I wrote down because I did not trust my memory of a decision. They became named methods only after they had been used enough times to be worth defending.
Nothing new is explained here. If an entry interests you, the link takes you to the place where the reasoning, the limits and the failure modes are written out in full. The list grows as the writing does.
The five parts of an instruction
Every step of a written procedure answers the same five questions: trigger, owner, action, proof, escalation. When one of them is missing, people build a shortcut, and the shortcut is usually a fair verdict on the document.
The handoff as a controlled event
Ready, transferred, accepted, recovered. Most operating failures do not live inside a task, they live between roles, so a handoff needs an acceptance signal and a recovery path rather than only a sender.
Invariants and local choices
The split that tells a network what must never vary from what a local team is expected to decide for itself. Local freedom without a boundary produces drift, and central rules without a reason produce workarounds.
The seven handoffs
The seven points between a first enquiry and a completed treatment where responsibility for a patient moves from one person to another. Each one named in order, with what fails there and what costs nothing to fix.
The context packet
The minimum context that must travel with a patient at every handoff, defined once and then audited the way calls are audited. A handoff that arrives without its packet did not really happen.
Five kinds of gap
Knowledge, judgement, process, resource, documentation. Naming which kind a review finding belongs to decides who owns the fix, and stops every problem receiving the same instruction to be more careful.
Observation, interpretation, action
Feedback written in three separate layers, in that order, with the confidence stated on the middle one. When someone pushes back you can find which layer the disagreement actually lives in.
Four kinds of training time
Instruction, observation, supervised application, review. A calendar that treats every hour as interchangeable hides the different work each of the four is doing.
The automation control ladder
Assist, recommend, execute, escalate. Four levels of authority for an automated step, chosen by describing the worst plausible wrong action, how fast it would be noticed, and whether it can be reversed.
Claim, fact, signal, inference
A label attached to every item in a research file. It stops confident language outrunning its source, which is the commonest failure in vendor reviews and competitor work.
The one-page organisation map
Every domain a business runs on, listed on a single page and marked for how well it is actually held rather than how well it is described. Then the discipline of touching only the three weakest first.
The decision journal
Four lines written at the moment a decision is made: what was chosen, what is expected, what would show it was wrong, and when to look again. The third line does most of the work.
The pre-mortem
Before a launch, assume it is six months later and the thing failed, then write down why. Nobody wants to run the meeting. Everybody who has run it has found something.
Detect, evidence, prioritise
Brand protection run as a standing loop rather than an occasional emergency: detection on a schedule, evidence captured in the form a lawyer would need it, and cases ranked by patient harm before annoyance.
The five commitments
What a cross-border care operator has to promise and then prove: the named doctor performing the work, accreditation that means something, one written price, records that travel home, and aftercare with a name attached.