B.1.5.EW:1 - Problem frame

Use this pattern when you need to understand, perform, teach, divide or change a way of working and cannot yet explain how its constituent actions perform the encompassing work. A person knows each movement but loses the partnered dance. A team improves a calculation but no longer obtains a usable engineering answer. A description lists stages, yet the reader cannot tell what larger work is being done through the present action.

Start with one action and ask: “What am I doing through this action now, and what makes it part of that work?” Then recover the constituents needed to perform it and the conditions of the encompassing work that affect it.

The first useful result is an explanation you can use: the selected action, its relevant constituents and encompassing work, the connections that make the whole possible, and any difference that requires changing the action or its organization. A short demonstration can supply this result. A retained diagram or record is useful only when someone needs it later.

Use an already understood connection directly. This pattern does not require reanalysing every familiar act or finding the smallest possible action and largest conceivable whole. Stop where further detail would not change the present performance, learning, division of work or correction. Use B.1.5 when the separate question is whether identified Methods qualify as one composite Method; use C.32.MWA when several structures need to be synthesized into a practice architecture.