how we work · clinics
Clinics
Anti-pattern teachers. Each clinic shows a corrupt artefact — a brief that didn't witness, a story missing a state, a postmortem that produced a feeling — and walks the diagnosis. The corpus's most direct way to teach what wrong looks like.
Clinics exist because the corpus otherwise only shows good shape. A new practitioner needs to see bad, examined honestly, more than they need another good. A senior practitioner uses clinics to catch themselves — fine-grained discrimination between almost right and right is what the senior years demand.
Shape
Every clinic follows the same shape:
| Section | What it is |
|---|---|
| The artefact | A real (or anonymised real) document the corpus has seen go wrong. Often a brief, a story, a postmortem, a runbook. |
| What's wrong? | One direct prompt. Reader pauses to look before reading the diagnosis. |
| Diagnosis | What's missing or broken, named at the right chain level. |
| The fix | What the artefact should look like. |
| Where this comes from in the chain | The level the failure traces to. |
Available
- A brief that didn't witness — predictions written without observation. The most common Volume II failure.
Coming next
- A story without a state
- A postmortem that produced a feeling
- An ADR with one option
- A runbook that doesn't run
- A retro that listed instead of compounded
- An initiative without a goal
- An SLA review that became a sales conversation
- A flag that never got cleaned up