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 — a prediction written without observation. The most common Discovery failure.
• A brief written from the solution backwards — the prediction reverse-engineered to fit a chosen feature.
• A story without a state — empty / loading / error left to "common sense"; production shipped them as defects.
• An ADR with one option — a decision dressed as MADR; one option listed; the precedent fragments architecture.
• A flag that never got cleaned up — flags outlive their cycles and become the architecture's hidden ghosts.
• A retro that listed — eleven sticky notes; five action items; three cycles later, zero landed. Lists do not compound.
• A postmortem that produced a feeling — no timeline, no chain-level walk, fixes were feelings. The incident recurred two weeks later.
• An SLA review that became a sales conversation — the review was scheduled; the conversation drifted; three weeks later, a threshold breached without warning.
• A runbook that doesn't run — the runbook described a system that had drifted; the on-call solved on instinct, the runbook stayed unchanged.
• An initiative without a goal — the Initiative Brief was signed but never could be killed; nine months and 40% of capacity later, nobody could remember when stopping had stopped being an option.

Coming next

• A retro that listed instead of compounded — Cluster 5
• A postmortem that produced a feeling — Cluster 6
• An initiative without a goal — planned
• A runbook that doesn't run — Cluster 4
• An SLA review that became a sales conversation — planned