How I work · Stage 2 of 3
Design
What’s standing in the way, and what you will try first. This is where the real work hides.
Once we know where you are and where you want to be, the gap between them is the work. Design is naming what’s actually in the gap and choosing the first moves. Not all the moves. The first ones.
Most of what fills that gap isn’t strategy or tools. It’s people who need to do something differently and aren’t, and the reasons are specific and personal. Design is where I stop treating a team as a unit and start asking who’s stuck where.
The questions in this stage
Barriers
What’s standing in the way? Gaps in profitability, skills, time, luck. Name what’s stopping you.
Barriers are never generic. Something specific is stopping specific people from doing the new thing. Name the thing and name the people, or you will design a fix for a problem nobody has.
Choices
What steps will you take now, next and later? What will you try first?
Now, next, later. Small and certain beats big and someday. The first move should be one you can start this week and one that tells us something either way.
How it runs
I map the barriers with you, then I map the people. For each person who has to change, I want to know where they’re stuck, how resistant they’re, and how much they move everyone else. That last one decides more than any plan does. If the most influential person in the room is the most resistant, we design for that first, or nothing else lands.
Then we choose. Not everything, and not the biggest thing. The first move that’s small enough to start and honest enough to teach us something.
The thing I always reach for here
Where it gets stuck
Every change I have helped land got stuck on one of five questions, in order. Do they know what the change is and why now? Do they know what’s in it for them? Do they know how? Do they have the room? What holds it in place after week one? Ask them top to bottom; the first one that fails is where you’re stuck, and fixing anything below it is wasted effort.
Most people skip the first two and go straight to training. That’s why most change fails. I use these five questions on everything. AI adoption in a resistant team, a checkout that won’t convert, a product launch, my own career.