Innovation.

The framework

1. 01

   Discover — widen past the brief you were handed.

   The brief is already somebody's answer, narrowed before you arrived: we need a referrals feature is a solution wearing a problem's clothes. The first movement exists to open it back up — watch people doing the actual job, read the complaints, pull the numbers, talk to the ones who left. Hold one rule in the room while you do it, which is that no solutions are allowed, because the moment a good idea appears everybody stops looking and you're now running a project about that idea rather than about the problem underneath it.

2. 02

   Define is the neck, and the neck is where projects are lost.

   Everything the first diamond gathered has to close into one written problem statement: who struggles with what, and what it costs them. Done well, that sentence is the crux from Day 89 — the one challenge both critical and crackable — reached by process rather than by insight. It's the entire output of half the work, so give it an afternoon, not a line in the minutes. Watch for the version everyone agrees to instantly: a problem statement that rules nothing out hasn't narrowed anything, and instant agreement usually means it's still wide enough to hold whatever each person already wanted to do.

3. 03

   How many options did you genuinely have?

   Develop reopens the shape on the answer side, and the count is the measure. Two options isn't a choice, it's a ratification with a runner-up attached; the useful ones tend to arrive fourth or later, once the obvious has been used up. So generate before you judge, keep those two behaviours in separate sessions with different rules, and force variety on purpose — the cheapest version, the version a competitor would build, the version that solves it without your product involved at all.

4. 04

   The fourth movement, and the one everybody starts in.

   Deliver narrows on evidence: prototype, test, cut, ship — and you converge because a result came back, not because the most senior person in the room has a preference. Then treat the whole shape as something you re-run rather than complete, since delivery routinely turns up a problem the first diamond missed. Most teams don't skip the diamonds out of ignorance. They skip them because the answer arrived early, felt obvious, and made the widening look like a delay nobody had time to defend.