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The framework

Actual State

Start wide. Land certain.

How I get from a goal to an answer I can defend.

Actual state is where you land: the version of a decision that survives contact with evidence. Name the target first. That is what bounds the search and makes going wide affordable. Then open it wider than feels efficient and let the data close it. The width is what makes the answer defensible rather than merely first.

The same loop whether the object is a fault, an architecture, a company, or a song. Each move below carries the incident that taught it, a version for leading people, and a version you can bet a company on. I don’t think those are three different skills.

How a decision gets made Four stages left to right. One target state on the left opens into nine candidates, more than feels efficient. Evidence eliminates five of them. The four that survive converge on a single answer at the right. wider than is efficient 01 Goal 02 Breadth 03 Evidence 04 Convergence
Name the target, open the search wider than feels efficient, then let evidence close it. The eliminated options stay on the page, because knowing what you ruled out is most of what makes the answer defensible.

01

Goal

Aim for the end

Straight lines come from watching where you want to finish, not what is right in front of you.

Betting the business

For a venture it is the next raise, the next quarter, the loudest feature request. The finish is the position you intend to hold in ten years. Few companies die of one bad decision; they die of compromises that were each defensible and collectively fatal.

Where it comes from

My dad taught me this behind a mower: for straight rows, watch the end of the row, not the ground ahead of the blade.

Thoughts from behind a mower, 2018 →

Leading people

The quarter is what is right in front of you. Architecture, hiring and reputation are the finish. A bad quarter you correct in the next one; a direction you drift in you never correct at all. Most technical debt is the second kind.

In practice

A goal you cannot use to reject an option is a wish. The target is what makes going wide affordable: it tells you where to stop looking.

02

Breadth first

Draw it before you commit

Think it through in detail. Write it more than once, wide first and narrower each pass. Then draw it, which reinforces the writing and exposes what you left out.

Betting the business

Before you commit capital or headcount to a market, draw how value actually moves through it: who pays, who decides, who profits from the confusion. Most business plans are a diagram of the industry's story about itself.

Where it comes from

Diagramming a system I already ran taught me more in ten minutes than the year I had spent operating it.

Diagram Your Service, 2018 →

Leading people

Before a re-org, a re-platform or a re-prioritization, draw the real dependency map, including the dependencies nobody owns. The drawing is not documentation. It is the diagnosis: coupling nobody meant to create, ownership gaps nobody meant to leave.

Worked examples

The tell

If nobody can whiteboard it in five minutes, nobody understands it, and every estimate, plan and commitment downstream of that is fiction.

03

Evidence

Get closer than is comfortable

Aggregates tell you that something is real. They will never tell you what it is. Use real data and results to refine and improve.

Betting the business

You do not find product-market fit in a market report. You find it with the person holding the bill and the doctor having the conversation about what it costs. Market data never tells you what someone would pay to make it stop.

Where it comes from

Capture as close to the suffering client as you can get. Everything else is a summary, and summaries are where the anomaly hides.

Preparing for the Capture, 2017 →

Leading people

The truth about a product lives with the person suffering it, not in the rollup dashboard. Go one hop closer than is comfortable: the support queue, the on-call channel, the customer's screen.

Worked examples

The caveat

Measurement perturbs the system. The act of asking changes the answer you get, so how you observe is a design decision, not a neutral one.

04

Convergence

Check the gaps nobody owns

Every part checks out, every owner is doing their job, and the thing still fails in the handoff that neither of them owns. So does the opportunity.

Betting the business

Every broken industry has a villain everybody agrees on. That agreement is the warning sign: if the cause were that legible, it would be fixed. The opportunity is in the operational gap: the incentive nobody owns, the cost nobody is accountable for.

Where it comes from

Mail stopped after exactly three messages, repeatably. Every component the customer managed was clean. The answer was a platform default nobody owned.

Case Study: SMTP Limits, 2019 →

Leading people

An org chart assigns systems, not the gaps between them, which is why the gaps are where work drops. Blame finds a person; the unowned gap finds a cause. Discount your own specialty first: that is the bias you cannot see.

Worked examples

The correction

A website kept locking up. I am a network person, so I looked at the network. It was a 1 GB instance with no swap file. It is never necessarily the network, least of all when that is your favourite answer.

Worked example · Healthcare

What nobody can see is what somebody will pay to see.

Healthcare is the clearest case, because the distance is wide enough to measure. Every line below is publicly observable, and every one of them is a question somebody would pay to have answered.

  1. Declared

    Patients choose their care on price and quality.

    Actual

    Almost nobody is shown a price before they consent to a procedure, and quality data arrives long after the decision, if at all.

    A number quoted before consent is a product, and nothing about the system prevents one.

  2. Declared

    A list price is a price.

    Actual

    List prices bear little relationship to what any payer settles for. The same procedure can differ several-fold between two hospitals in one city.

    The settled number exists and is increasingly published. Whoever reads it first is negotiating with better information than the person billing them.

  3. Declared

    Insurance protects you from catastrophic cost.

    Actual

    With a high enough deductible, an insured patient is functionally paying cash, while often being billed against a negotiated rate they had no part in negotiating.

    That patient is not an edge case. They are a large and growing group being served as though they were somebody else.

  4. Declared

    Somebody in this system is accountable for total cost.

    Actual

    Costs spread across payer, provider, employer and patient. Each can account for their own share. None of them owns the total.

    The total is a real number that nobody currently assembles. Whoever assembles it holds the only complete view in the room.

Four gaps, four openings, and none of them require anyone to be a villain. That is what move 04 is for: the value collects where the accountability does not.

All of this is publicly observable about how healthcare pricing works. None of it describes what we are building at Cowboy Christian.

Why this gets more important, not less

Which makes this the least optional it has ever been.

Organizations increasingly act on what a model tells them: a forecast, a risk score, a generated answer. Each is a declared state: a confident account of a system, produced without anybody going to look at it.

And a model is least reliable exactly where it is most fluent, because fluency is what it optimizes. Every argument for reading the source rather than the summary applies double to a system that can explain its own output persuasively on request.

So the discipline appreciates rather than depreciates. The scarce skill was never running the tool. It was knowing, when the answer sounds right, how to go and check.

I am doing the reading rather than the commentating: AWS AI Practitioner, Anthropic’s Claude Certified Architect, and a company built on this stack rather than a deck about it.

The posture

The same habit, pointed at people.

Four moves are how I read a system. These three are what I have decided about being responsible for the people inside one.

Leave the imprint on purpose

There are two imprints worn into the pillow my wife uses for our twins, from months of the same small heads in the same place. A leader is pressing a shape into people whether or not they mean to. So mean to.

Imprints, 2019

Relentless, not frantic

Relentless means no abatement of intensity or pace. It does not mean frantic. Compounding beats heroics: sustainable intensity is built into a team's operating rhythm, not hired for as a personality trait.

Relentless, 2019

Teach it away

Six years of tutorials, shared Wireshark profiles, years mentoring Solutions Architects, and a stretch writing certification exam questions. The job is to make your judgment reproducible by other people. Expertise that only works when you are in the room is a single point of failure with a salary.

AWS, and six years of writing

Where this is worth the most

Where this is useful.

Where this is going

Actual State is becoming a longer thing.

Four moves is the spine, not the whole argument. Each has a chapter in it. I am writing that out in public and testing every claim against a company I am building with it.

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Every claim here traces back to something I published while still figuring it out.

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