PSD.16:1 - Problem frame

Use this when useful activities in a decision-support engagement obstruct one another. An analyst needs stable assumptions while participants are still correcting the question. A facilitator cannot both handle a consequential objection and rebuild the displayed model. An evidence team qualifies one configuration while the advice recipient changes the configuration to be considered.

Start with the result at risk and the interference: “If we close this comparison now, this still-material contribution cannot enter it.” Recover only the relationships needed to understand that conflict, compare genuinely different arrangements, and decide the smallest warranted change within the applicable remit.

Problem structuring and decision support is the wider practice. This pattern governs a narrower subject: the arrangement through which a named engagement’s different kinds of work contribute to its result. Here facilitation architecture means that arrangement of participation, modelling, inquiry, challenge and return—not a workshop agenda or a new institutional hierarchy. A diagram describes the arrangement; a reusable Method guides action; actual work enacts it.

The gain is a usable local decision without losing the value, evidence, participation or authority condition that made the conflict consequential. The result may retain the present arrangement with a stated limit, change it, or return the exact blocker to a competent owner. “Reconcile” does not require everyone to agree.

Do not use this pattern merely because two activities overlap in time. If they have no decision-relevant interference, continue them. Use PSD.6 when the question is which Method fits, and PSD.7 when a claim needs facilitated inquiry but the arrangement itself remains workable. Routine scheduling, specialist mediation, emergency command and decisions about the affected System retain their own Methods and authority.