PSD.7:1 - Problem frame

Use this when participants need to work on a decision-support question but disagree about its meaning, evidence, consequences, or acceptable action. Also use it when a smooth workshop is producing an apparently unanimous answer that participants cannot recognize as their own.

Start by making the inquiry’s purpose, participation conditions, challenge route, and later choice boundary clear. Help participants state and test claims in terms their holders can recognize. Return useful common ground and material disagreement; agreement is one possible result, not a condition for an honest return.

The governed object is the bounded account of shared and contested claims for the receiving inquiry. Facilitation is the practical work of enabling that inquiry; the account is its result, not the conversation itself or a decision by the group. Shared wording, shared understanding, assent to a claim, consent to an action, and authority to choose remain different.

Do not use this pattern merely to circulate one clear qualified fact, record attendance, or administer an already-valid decision rule when no inquiry or interpretation problem remains. Direct mediation, adjudication, safeguarding, or emergency-command work retains its own remit. If the engagement has no recoverable receiving question or choice owner, return that missing premise.