The Three Questions
The whole system is organised around three questions asked in a specific order. The order matters because each one builds on the answer before it.
1. What to change?
Section titled “1. What to change?”Before you improve anything, you have to know what is actually limiting you.
Not what you think is limiting you. Not what your broker says. Not what the last conference speaker said. What your business reality shows when you trace the cause-and-effect chain from daily symptoms back to their root.
That is what the diagnostic does — five rounds of questions that collectively surface your market clarity, your challenges, the barriers preventing resolution, and the pattern in what you have already tried.
The tool is the Current Reality Tree. Formally it maps cause-and-effect between undesirable effects and their root causes. In your system it happens through conversation rather than a diagram, but the logic is identical.
2. What to change to?
Section titled “2. What to change to?”Once you know the constraint, you validate the direction before acting. This is where most people — and most AI tools — skip ahead. Identify a problem, immediately start solving it.
But what if the direction is wrong? What if the solution creates new problems? Three tools work together here.
The Evaporating Cloud surfaces the conflict underneath. Every constraint persists because of a conflict — two things you believe you need that appear mutually exclusive. “I need to be available to clients AND I need to create marketing content, and I cannot do both.” The cloud makes that explicit and finds the hidden assumption sustaining it. Break the assumption and the conflict dissolves. That is your direction.
The Future Reality Tree traces forward: if you do this, what happens? Does the constraint actually resolve? With your real numbers, not hypotheticals.
The Negative Branch Reservation asks what could go wrong, and finds a way to prevent each problem without abandoning the direction. If something cannot be prevented, the direction may need to change — that is the system protecting you from a flawed plan.
3. How to make change happen?
Section titled “3. How to make change happen?”Only after the direction is validated does the system build a plan.
The Strategy & Tactics Tree breaks the objective into intermediate steps, each with a strategy (the approach), a tactic (the specific action), and a necessary condition (what must be true before you start).
Before that, it generates an activation inventory — everything you need in order to execute. Assets, resources, skills, prerequisites. Anything you do not have becomes a step. Anything overwhelming gets cut to a minimum viable version.