A question is the smallest useful unit of the framework. Asked on purpose, it changes what the situation looks like. Each comes from one of the three strands, and all of them work on the same kind of problem. The longer methods, with timings and worksheets, are the moves inside each strand.
Published September 2026
There are ten here. My instinct is that a framework people can hold in their heads stops at about seven, so some of these will merge or go. Which ones is part of the testing.
Each question is tried on the same situation: a school that wants its students to become more independent learners, and starts by turning its library into a learning commons.
What must currently be believed for the present arrangement to make sense?
The plan assumes students will work on their own once the room allows it. Say that out loud and it stops being obvious.
Does the problem look different at the learner, classroom, school, system, or societal level?
For a learner it is a question about where to work after the last lesson. For the school it is a question about how much unsupervised time it is willing to give.
What consequence of an action later changes the conditions that produced the action?
If the room gets noisy, staff add rules. The students who came to work together stop coming, and the room settles back into a quiet library with new chairs.
What would the opposite assumption reveal?
Ask where the school should keep a silent room. The answer names what the old library did well.
What happens when we include actors, effects, or timescales currently treated as outside the problem?
Draw the boundary around the room and it is a furniture question. Draw it to include the timetable and the homework load and it becomes a question about when students are free to use it.
What is this situation already inclined to do, without us?
One librarian supervises the room and classes are timetabled into it, so it was always going to drift back to quiet rows. Independence, the slow variable, will not show for a year or two.
Which options is this plan spending, and did anyone decide to spend them?
Built-in booths and wall screens look finished, and they spend the option to rearrange. Loose tables can be moved next term. Joinery cannot.
If a preferable future existed, what conditions would need to have become true before it?
Picture students who choose to work there in their free periods. Before that, someone gave them free periods, and set work worth doing without a teacher.
What happens if a condition currently treated as stable changes abruptly?
Suppose the librarian’s post is cut, or the room is taken for examinations six weeks a year. What of the plan still stands?
If the intervention disappeared tomorrow, what capability, practice, or knowledge would remain?
The furniture will date within five years. What should students still be able to do on their own when it has?
Where next
Operationalise it
The seven stepsPage
Related argument
The Atlas & Loom frameworkTool
See it in practice
One problem, four ways of seeing itTool
Challenge it
The most durable output of an innovation may be the capability the organisation develops while implementing it.Working proposition