how we work · principles

Principles

Beneath every practice is a stance. The corpus is opinionated, and the opinions are nameable. These six essays carry the worldview the rest of the corpus operates inside.

A new practitioner can read these in an hour. A senior practitioner returns to them when something feels off — usually one of the principles is being violated quietly.

Principle	Why it matters in one sentence
Person-first	Naming a person is the single discipline that prevents most product disasters.
Witnessed, not described	The chain runs on observation; survey is downstream of seeing.
Predictions over plans	A plan describes what we'll do. A prediction commits to what will change — and gets checked.
Chain-level thinking	Defects trace to a level, not a person. Structural fixes, not blame.
Not checked is the only worthless outcome	The cycle that never ran the check ran blind.
Compounding small changes	One owned, dated, testable change per cycle compounds. Lists of ten do not.

Why these six

These are not the only principles in the corpus — they are the ones the corpus cannot operate without. Remove person-first and discovery becomes survey. Remove witnessed-not-described and observation becomes interview. Remove predictions-over-plans and the cycle's check has nothing to read. Remove chain-level thinking and the postmortem becomes blame. Remove the not-checked rule and the model never updates. Remove compounding and the team's improvement is theatre.

Every other practice — every brief, every story, every ADR, every retro — is downstream of these six.