Know what kind of problem you have before you buy a solution for it.

Known cause and effect. Configuration hygiene, standard properties, native integrations. We apply the checklist and move on. No workshop needed.

Cause and effect exist but need expertise to see. Data models, pipeline design, migrations, integrations. This is where the audit and solution design earn their keep: analyse, then build.

Cause and effect only visible in hindsight. Adoption, new sales motions, pricing behaviour, cross-sell. We run safe-to-fail probes, watch the signals, and amplify what works instead of designing the end state up front.

Something is actively breaking: abandoned checkouts not captured, a workflow rewriting thousands of records. We act first to stabilise, then work out why, then move the problem to a calmer domain.

The centre. Confused is not knowing which domain you are in and acting anyway, usually with whatever worked last time. Aporetic is knowing that you do not yet know, and holding the question open long enough to find out. Every engagement starts here on purpose.

The baseline. HubSpot Academy's implementation, onboarding, data migration, data governance and reporting practices, encoded into the checklists and skills we run every audit and build against, so the routine parts are done the same way every time and the thinking goes where it is needed.

The structure. Bowtie stages, definitions, conversion and velocity metrics across marketing, sales and customer success, implemented as HubSpot objects, stages and reports. The framework at Winning by Design.

Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision. How we run discovery calls and how we teach sales teams to run theirs, so the CRM captures what matters instead of notes nobody reads.

Cynefin tells us which kind of problem we are in and therefore how to act. Estuarine mapping lays out the constraints and constructors on an energy and time grid, so we work on what can move rather than on abstract goals.

For tech-stack and build-versus-buy decisions: what in your stack is becoming a commodity, what is genuinely differentiating, and where custom code is a liability rather than an asset.

Before committing a scope we assume the project has already failed and work backwards to why. It surfaces the risks a normal review is too polite to name, and it changes the plan before the plan costs money.

Artefacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience, Natural talent. Snowden's knowledge-mapping lens for the moment a client says “only Linda knows how that works”. It turns key-person dependency into something you can document, train and design around, which is most of what a HubSpot handover is.

Actants, Interactions, Monitors, Scaffolding: what you can actually manage in a complex system. We change interactions and scaffolding (routing, SLAs, stage gates), put monitors in place, and amplify or dampen what emerges instead of trying to change people directly.

Not a framework, a rule. Bulk changes are logged to a manifest before they run, records are re-read before every write, and deletions are proposals until you approve them. It is how we keep the cost of being wrong small.