Part I — Engagement, Participation, Formulation and Boundary

PSD.1 - Bound the Decision-Support Engagement and Authority Boundary

Type: DPF pattern body Status: Candidate

Primary working result: a bounded engagement question that names the decision-support return, its recipient, the holder or subject, the horizon, the receiving decision or Work, the choice owner and authority boundary, the current scope, the smallest missing value, and an observable condition for reopening.

PSD.1:0 - Use This When

Use this pattern when someone asks a decision-support performer to “help decide”, “structure the problem”, “recommend what to do”, or “say what should develop next”, but the engagement is not yet bounded well enough to produce a responsible result. The missing value may be the recipient, holder or subject, horizon, receiving decision, receiving Work, choice owner, authority, consequence, or kind of return expected.

Begin with the later decision or use that the decision-support result is meant to inform. Separate the performer who prepares decision support from the person or arrangement that receives it and from the Agent that owns the later choice. Then return one bounded engagement question or the exact value that is still missing.

The practical gain is an affordable start that works both before overt contest and inside a disputed situation. It prevents a workshop, model, score, or recommendation from silently becoming the decision, and it gives later problem-structuring or analytical Work a recoverable subject and stop.

Do not use PSD.1 merely because a chooser must select among an already-qualified live option set; use C.11 or the applicable domain choice rule directly. Use one holder-specific practice directly when it owns the whole question and no decision-support composition remains. A scientific, legal, ethical, safety, governance, or other specialist question stays with that practice unless its result must be returned into a separately governed decision-support engagement.

PSD.1:0.1 - Working Distinctions

PSD.1:1 - Problem frame

Decision-support practice often begins before there is a stable “problem”. One engagement opens with several participant groups arguing about causes and values. Another opens with a calm request for advice whose recipient, subject, horizon, or later authority is still vague. Both can be prematurely forced into a workshop brief, model boundary, criteria table, or option set.

The primary concern here is the boundary of one decision-support engagement for one receiving use. The first useful result is not a complete problem formulation, alternative set, comparison, recommendation, plan, or decision. It is a question and authority boundary precise enough to say what result can be prepared now, what remains outside, and where a missing value must return.

Recognition is deliberately cheap: one unclear decision-bearing value is enough to open the pattern. Consequential use adds direct evidence for identity, assignment, permission, authority, source reliance, safety, law, ethics, and other claims that the engagement actually consumes. The short opening does not lower those assurance burdens.

PSD.1:2 - Problem

An unbounded engagement can expand into every concern, participant, model, consequence, and possible future. The performer gathers material without knowing which later action it can change. A premature boundary creates the opposite failure: the sponsor’s wording becomes the only formulation, the visible recipient is treated as the choice owner, or an analytical result is presented as authorization.

These failures compound. A favourite problem-structuring Method can be selected before the decision-support use is known. A list of stakeholders can stand in for affected Systems and material concerns. A model can hide excluded consequences. A recommendation can absorb holder-specific conclusions or take a choice that belongs elsewhere.

The missing discipline is to bind the engagement to one intended return and separately governed later use while keeping the boundary explicitly provisional. Contestation, plural formulations, affected participants, models, alternatives, values, uncertainty, and follow-up open only when they can change that return.

PSD.1:3 - Forces

PSD.1:4 - Solution

Bind the engagement to the smallest receiving decision or Work that can use a decision-support return. Name the distinct participant positions, subject, horizon, expected return, current scope, and authority boundary. Return the bounded engagement question when those values are adequate; otherwise return the exact missing value instead of inventing it.

PSD.1:4.1 - Name the receiving use before the problem statement

Start with one ordinary sentence:

Make [kind of decision-support return] available to [recipient] about [holder or subject] for [receiving decision or Work] within [horizon]; [choice owner] retains the later choice.

Ask what action can change because of the return and what consequence makes delay, error, or omission material. If no receiving decision or Work can be named, distinguish exploratory inquiry, research, learning, communication, or another direct use rather than manufacturing a decision-support engagement.

The requested return can initially be a bounded question, participant-and-concern account, plural formulation set, model or Method-selection result, alternative gap, comparison, recommendation, blocker, or abstention. Do not require a recommendation when an earlier honest result is more useful.

PSD.1:4.2 - Separate performer, recipient, holder, and choice owner

Name each position separately even when one System may occupy two positions:

1. who is expected to prepare the decision-support return;
2. who will receive it and for what use;
3. which exact holder or subject is under consideration; and
4. who owns the later choice, deferral, probe, or reroute.

State any coincidence explicitly. A manager can receive advice without owning the board’s later decision. A team can perform analysis for its own authorized choice, but the analysis Work, recommendation result, and later ChoiceResult remain distinct. A tool, document, score, model, department, job title, or meeting creates none of these positions by visibility alone.

Recover assignment, capability, permission, responsibility, conflict, commitment, or authority only to the extent that the current use relies on it. Use their direct patterns for consequential claims. If the required choice owner or authority basis cannot be recovered, return that exact gap.

PSD.1:4.3 - Bound the subject, horizon, receiving Work, and consequence

State the holder or subject at the grain whose alternatives or consequences can change. Add the relevant configuration, place, population, operating condition, and interval only when they change the answer. State the receiving decision or Work and the horizon over which the return is expected to remain useful.

Name at least one consequence of getting the boundary wrong. This is a recognition cue, not a complete consequence analysis. When affected Systems, missing participants, duties, interests, or representation can change the engagement, continue with PSD.2. When several problem formulations imply materially different actions, continue with PSD.3. When included and excluded concerns need a deliberate scope decision, continue with PSD.4.

PSD.1:4.4 - Choose a provisional boundary and the next truthful branch

Record what is inside the engagement now, what remains outside, and what observation would move that boundary. Do not treat package order or the numbering of patterns as a practitioner sequence. Choose the next branch from the missing result:

Several branches may be live together. Their results can proceed concurrently when their subjects and returns are clear. Co-occurrence does not turn the table into a workflow or make the engagement one Method.

PSD.1:4.5 - Record the bounded engagement question or exact stop

Use the smallest account that another participant or later use must recover:

A compact result may be one sentence and one stop:

For [recipient] and [receiving decision], prepare [return] about [subject] within [horizon]; [choice owner] retains the later choice. The engagement is blocked until [exact missing value] is recovered.

Do not add a role register, stage model, workshop plan, evidence pack, or account field merely because a larger case might need it.

PSD.1:4.6 - Reopen locally and preserve the later choice

Name the event that can invalidate the current boundary: a changed recipient, holder, horizon, receiving Work, authority relation, participant or concern, formulation, source, alternative family, evidence condition, consequence, or later decision. Reopen only the affected position and its dependent results.

A returned recommendation may inform the later decision, and follow-up may observe that later decision, but neither retroactively turns the decision-support performer into the choice owner. If the later choice changes the problem structure, use PSD.14 to determine which follow-up or reframing question is current.

PSD.1:4.7 - What changes in practice

The practitioner stops accepting “the problem” as a sufficient start. Within the first exchange, they can name the return, recipient, subject, horizon, later use, and choice owner—or return the exact missing value. Method selection, modeling, participation, alternative generation, and recommendation Work begin from that result instead of being used to discover silently what the engagement was supposed to accomplish.

PSD.1:5 - Archetypal Grounding

PSD.1:5.1 - Contested flood-pump decision

A municipal resilience office asks a decision-support team to “solve the pump problem” before the next flood season. Operations staff prefer another permanent pump; finance questions capital exposure; residents contest which districts and harms count; and the emergency investment board owns the later funding and deployment decision.

The team does not begin with a pump model or consensus workshop. It first returns this bounded engagement question:

For the municipal resilience office, prepare a recommendation for the emergency investment board’s pre-season funding and deployment decision about the district flood-pumping arrangement over the next flood season. Compare permanent, mobile, staged, and no-new-purchase branches only after affected districts, operating conditions, safety limits, and material dissent are recoverable; the board retains the later choice.

The boundary is useful but incomplete. PSD.2 is next because affected residents, operating groups, concerns, and consequence-bearing Systems can change the engagement. PSD.3 is also live because “insufficient capacity”, “unequal protection”, “maintenance fragility”, and “unsafe deployment” imply different interventions. The team stops before model or option selection if the board’s authority, the decision horizon, or an affected district remains unrecoverable.

PSD.1:5.2 - Development-direction advice without taking the choice

An engineering executive asks an advisory team, “What should we develop next for AI-assisted incident response?” The phrase does not yet say whether the holder is a person, team, organization capability, model, agent arrangement, or operating platform; whether the recipient or an investment committee owns the choice; or whether the horizon is the next release or the next two quarters.

After one clarification, the holder is the organization’s AI-assisted incident-response arrangement, the executive is the recipient, the investment committee owns the later portfolio choice, the horizon is two quarters, and the requested return is a source-qualified development-direction recommendation. The first result is:

For the executive’s two-quarter investment proposal, prepare a bounded recommendation about development directions for the AI-assisted incident-response arrangement; the investment committee retains the later choice. Return the exact missing human-capability, organization, operations, model-evaluation, safety, or authority result before using it as a premise.

No contest is assumed. With the engagement bounded, the practitioner may inspect external results through A.15.9 and begin with the first missing result among PSD.8–PSD.13. PSD.1 authorizes no training programme, organization change, model modification, purchase, WorkPlan, or choice.

PSD.1:5.3 - Cheap non-use when the choice is already local

A procurement board is the authorized chooser, has three qualified pump options, a current comparison basis, and no unresolved participant, formulation, scope, authority, or outside-practice premise. The live question is which option to select. Use C.11 or the board’s direct choice rule. Repeating PSD.1 would add no useful boundary.

PSD.1:6 - Bias-Annotation

Scope: decision-support engagements for a named receiving decision or Work. Lenses: Gov concerns participation and decision authority; Arch, the engagement boundary and dependent contributions; Onto/Epist, keeping the subject, claims, recommendation, and later choice distinct; Prag, a useful return at proportionate effort; Did, plain entry cues that preserve the distinction between cheap recognition and consequential assurance.

PSD.1:7 - Conformance Checklist

• The opening names a recognizable receiving decision or Work and the smallest useful decision-support return.
• Decision-support performer, recipient, holder or subject, and choice owner are separately recoverable.
• Any coincidence among those positions is explicit and does not transfer authority by wording alone.
• The holder or subject, horizon, relevant configuration, and at least one consequence of a wrong boundary are visible at the grain needed by the current use.
• The current included and excluded scope and one observable reopen condition are stated.
• Contestation opens PSD.2–PSD.4 only when participants, formulations, or scope can change the return; it is not a membership requirement for PSD.1.
• A bounded direct-advice case can proceed to the first missing PSD.8–PSD.13 or external-result branch without a compulsory problem-structuring sequence.
• Missing authority, subject, horizon, source, or receiving use produces an exact return rather than an invented value.
• The result does not claim that a recommendation is the later choice, that planned Work occurred, or that an effect obtained.
• The body supports both a contested-situation entry and development-direction advising without giving either entry a different meaning of engagement or authority.

PSD.1:8 - Common Anti-Patterns and How to Avoid Them

PSD.1:9 - Consequences

A decision-support engagement gains a usable first result before it gains heavy apparatus. Practitioners can stop on one missing value, route contestation to participation and plural-formulation Work, or proceed directly to alternatives and recommendation when the question is already bounded. Recommendations become easier to inspect because their recipient, subject, horizon, authority boundary, and next use were not reconstructed after the analysis.

The cost is explicit clarification at the start and occasional reopening later. Some requests will stop before analysis because no receiving decision, choice owner, horizon, or subject can be supported. Others will widen after affected participants or rival formulations become visible. Those are useful returns, not failed stages.

PSD.1:10 - Rationale

The engagement boundary is the smallest professional decision-support result that can coordinate problem structuring and later analysis without pretending that either has already occurred. Starting from a fixed problem statement is too narrow for contested or revisable framing. Starting from an unlimited situation is too broad to guide a return. Starting from a Method confuses the means with the receiving use.

Generic FPF patterns already govern outside-practice results, evidence, permission, agency, and choice. PSD.1 does not reproduce them. It contributes the field-specific opening that connects a separately governed later decision to a provisional problem-structuring and decision-support boundary, and it tells the practitioner which exact downstream question is now live.

PSD.1:11 - SoTA-Echoing

PSD.1:12 - Relations

• PSD.2 receives a bounded receiving inquiry when participants, concerns, affected Systems, duties, interests, representation, or dissent can change the return.
• PSD.3 receives the case when materially different problem formulations imply different boundaries, evidence, values, or interventions. PSD.4 receives the deliberate included/excluded scope and reopen decision.
• PSD.5–PSD.7 receive model, PSM-selection, and facilitation questions only when those results are current. PSD.8–PSD.12 receive alternatives and comparison questions after the engagement is bounded.
• PSD.13 prepares and returns a recommendation without authorizing the later decision. PSD.14 relates changed premises and later observations to continuation, adjustment, evidence refresh, or reframing.
• A.15.9 supplies the inspect-reuse-or-request boundary for one outside-practice result. A.10 governs any evidence, source, currentness, or bounded reliance claim actually used.
• C.11 governs the later choice over an already-available option set. A.13, assignment, capability, permission, responsibility, and authority patterns govern those actual claims when the engagement relies on them.
• Both PSD-CARD-01 and PSD-CARD-02 begin from this same engagement and authority meaning. The entries add unlike extended-use examples; they neither redefine PSD.1 nor impose a traversal order.

PSD.1:End

PSD.2 - Recover Participants, Concerns, and Affected Systems for a Decision-Support Inquiry

Type: DPF pattern body Status: Candidate

Primary working result: an explicit participation and concern account for one bounded receiving inquiry: who is participating or represented, which affected Systems and possible consequences remain material, which concerns, duties, interests, and dissent are recoverable, what is missing or uncertain, and what would reopen the account.

PSD.2:0 - Use This When

Use this pattern when a bounded decision-support inquiry may be shaped mainly by its loudest, most available, or formally powerful participants, while quieter participants, represented people, consequence-bearing Systems, or material concerns can still change the formulation or return.

Begin from the bounded engagement question in PSD.1 when it is current. Recover possible consequence bearers through A.1.CSD, then recover the participation conditions and concerns needed by this particular inquiry. Return an explicit account rather than treating attendance, a stakeholder list, or one facilitated conversation as proof of completeness.

The practical gain is a visible basis for whose situations and concerns can change the inquiry without requiring universal inclusion or pretending that participation transfers decision authority. Do not use PSD.2 for a generic contact list, public-relations audience map, or organization chart. Use A.1.CSD directly when the only live question is which Systems may undergo a material change. Use the direct governance, legal, ethical, safety, representation, conflict, or authority practice when that practice owns the whole question.

PSD.2:0.1 - Working Distinctions

PSD.2:1 - Problem frame

Contested situations rarely present a neutral list of stakeholders. Sponsors, operators, specialists, residents, customers, regulators, future users, and consequence bearers enter through different channels and with unequal time, language, safety, information, and formal power. Some affected Systems cannot speak; some people speak without a supported representative relation; some participants hold duties or authority without bearing the largest consequences.

The primary concern here is not universal participation. It is whether the current inquiry has enough explicit participation and concern recovery to avoid a materially misleading formulation, model, alternative set, comparison, or recommendation. Recognition can begin with one plausible missing bearer or one silenced concern. Consequential claims about harm, duty, representation, evidence, law, safety, or authority still require their direct assurance.

PSD.2:2 - Problem

A stakeholder list collapses several different questions: who attends, who contributes evidence, who may be affected, who holds a duty or interest, who represents whom, and who decides. The most visible contributors then define the concern set. Non-attendance is read as indifference; a representative’s statement is generalized beyond its basis; a possible consequence is reported as an observed one; or a facilitator’s synthesis becomes false consensus.

The opposite failure is exhaustive participation. Work stops until every possibly related person is present, even when the bounded receiving use needs only the smallest material account and an honest missing-participant stop. PSD.2 must expose consequential absence without claiming that every inquiry is a deliberative assembly.

PSD.2:3 - Forces

PSD.2:4 - Solution

Recover participants and concerns relative to one bounded inquiry and receiving use. Start from possible consequence bearers, not only invitees. Keep participation, affected-System status, concern attribution, representation, and decision authority as separate claims. Return the smallest account that can change the next problem-structuring or decision-support result.

PSD.2:4.1 - Bind the account to one inquiry

Name the PSD.1 bounded engagement question, or state the same subject, recipient, receiving decision or Work, horizon, and authority boundary directly. Do not import a participation account from another decision merely because the organization, place, or topic is similar. If the engagement identity or receiving use is missing, return that gap to PSD.1.

Ask: whose situation, contribution, duty, interest, or possible change could make the current return materially different? This question bounds discovery without assuming that every discovered bearer must attend.

PSD.2:4.2 - Discover affected Systems before equating them with participants

Use the smallest A.1.CSD pass that can challenge the current boundary. Name the focus, configuration, scope, horizon, receiver, examined possibilities, actual direct relations, modal paths, bearers, possible changed characteristics, evidence, uncertainty, and reopen trigger at the grain the inquiry needs.

An affected System may be a participant, be represented by a participant, or have no feasible participation channel. Participation can reveal a bearer or path, but it does not prove System construction, a relation occurrence, a consequence, or authority. Use the direct relation pattern for an obtaining claim. Open A.6.REL only when later work must distinguish this occurrence from another occurrence of the same relation kind, including another episode with the same participants; a readable current relation assertion is otherwise enough.

PSD.2:4.3 - Recover participation positions and conditions

For each materially distinct contribution, record who contributes, the basis of involvement, what knowledge or experience is being offered, the participation channel, and any condition that limits access or reliance. Name missing or unsafe participation explicitly.

Recover a representative relation only when the current use relies on it. State whom the participant represents, for what question, under which basis, and with what limit. Keep self-report, specialist evidence, advocacy, delegated representation, duty, interest, sponsorship, facilitation, and choice authority distinct.

PSD.2:4.4 - Attribute concerns, duties, interests, and dissent

Record each material concern in ordinary language with its holder or source and the consequence or receiving-use difference it could make.

Establish what the concern is about before joining it to another concern under the same word. Ask what is being done or changed, where that object or work begins and ends, and what would count as the relevant result. Participants saying “the trip is complete” may mean that the remote task is finished, the traveler has returned, or the expense case is closed. Those are different objects with different completion conditions. Recover how they are related and which result each participant needs. In other cases, participants do concern themselves with the same object: duration and cost can describe the same identified journey. Keep that common reference when it fits.

Use this recovery where ambiguity changes the inquiry; ordinary unambiguous concerns need no separate object inventory. Also identify who or what may bear the consequences; that bearer can be the object being discussed or another System. Distinguish:

• reported experience from externally supported evidence;
• duty from preference or interest;
• individual concern from a represented constituency claim;
• disagreement from an unresolved factual question; and
• absence of evidence from evidence of absence.

Keep minority and unresolved positions visible. Facilitation may make contributions usable; it does not establish consensus, truth, priority, permission, or authority.

PSD.2:4.5 - Return the smallest explicit account

Stop when the account is adequate for the named next use, not when every possible participant has been contacted. If a missing participant or concern can reverse that use, return the gap, narrow the claim, request the direct result, or abstain.

PSD.2:4.6 - Use the account without making it decide

Pass materially different concerns into PSD.3, boundary challenges into PSD.4, participation conditions into PSD.7, value inputs into PSD.9, and participation-related interference into PSD.16 when it obstructs the engagement result. Inclusion in the account does not settle a formulation, priority, model, alternative, recommendation, or later choice.

Reopen locally when a new bearer, consequence path, participant, concern, duty, interest, representation basis, dissent, participation condition, receiving use, horizon, or authority relation can change a dependent result.

PSD.2:4.7 - What changes in practice

The practitioner stops using an invitation list as the social boundary of the problem. They can show who and what may be affected, who contributed under which conditions, whose concerns are attributed rather than generalized, what remains missing, and exactly which next result could change.

PSD.2:5 - Archetypal Grounding

PSD.2:5.1 - Flood-pump participation and concern account

For the emergency investment board’s pre-season pump decision, the team begins with the PSD.1 engagement. Operations and finance staff are available, but district residents, emergency responders, maintenance contractors, downstream ecology staff, and people with limited mobility may bear different consequences.

An A.1.CSD pass distinguishes observed basement flooding and pump downtime from possible displacement, access failure, downstream transfer, and ecological change. Resident contributions are attributed by district and channel; one neighborhood association is not assumed to represent every resident. Emergency responders hold operational knowledge and duties but do not thereby own the investment choice. A no-new-purchase concern remains visible beside capacity, equity, maintenance, safety, and environmental concerns.

The returned account names inaccessible evening meetings and missing mobility-service evidence as participation gaps. It is adequate to open PSD.3, because the recovered concerns support materially different formulations. It does not declare consensus or recommend a pump.

PSD.2:5.2 - Affected System without a speaking participant

A service redesign may change response time for a machine-supported monitoring arrangement and for patients who cannot participate directly. The arrangement and patients can enter the affected-System account through supported paths even when no direct participant is available. A clinician, advocate, or family member contributes only under the stated evidence or representation basis. The practitioner returns the unresolved representation or consequence gap rather than inventing a voice.

PSD.2:5.3 - Cheap non-use

A current, low-consequence internal choice has one authorized team, one directly affected workcell, an already-supported consequence account, no representation question, and no material dissent. The live question is comparison among three qualified settings. Repeating PSD.2 adds no value; use the comparison or choice pattern directly.

PSD.2:5.4 - A completed trip with an unfinished task

A sponsor asks why business trips are failing. An employee has returned from a site visit, and administration has closed the expense case, but the equipment fault the employee was sent to repair remains unresolved. “Trip completed” therefore gives three different answers: journey complete, administrative case complete, remote repair incomplete.

The inquiry identifies the repair work and its intended result, the journey that enabled the visit, and the administrative provision and records. It examines their actual connections: timely travel and site access may enable the repair, while closing an expense case does not settle whether the repair is complete. The first result is a corrected question: what prevents completion of the remote repair, and which travel or administrative conditions contribute to that difficulty? Faster expense processing may be useful, but its completion cannot answer the repair question.

For an unlike case, “access granted” can mean that permission was issued while the account is still unable to open the needed system. Identify the permission, configured access and actual use before deciding what failed. Conversely, an employee and administrator discussing the duration and reimbursable cost of the same identified journey can retain one common object with different concerns. Roles and words alone do not decide object identity.

PSD.2:6 - Bias-Annotation

Scope: participation and concern recovery for one bounded decision-support inquiry. Lenses: Gov keeps contribution, representation, duty, and choice authority distinct; Arch tracks which participants and concerns can change dependent results; Onto/Epist separates Systems, reports, possible paths, and supported relations; Prag stops at a sufficient account; Did supplies plain recognition cues and an explicit assurance boundary.

PSD.2:7 - Conformance Checklist

• The account is bound to one receiving inquiry, subject, horizon, and authority boundary.
• Participants, affected Systems, represented people, duty or interest holders, and choice owner are not collapsed.
• Actual relations, modal paths, observed changes, and possible consequences remain distinguishable.
• Material concerns are attributed; recording them does not imply truth, priority, consensus, or authority.
• Any relied-upon representation and participation condition is supported and scoped.
• Missing participants, bearers, concerns, or assurance produce a visible gap, narrowed claim, request, blocker, or abstention.
• The stopping rule is adequacy for a named next use rather than exhaustive recruitment.
• Recognition is cheap, while legal, ethical, safety, harm, duty, representation, and authority claims retain their direct assurance.
• The result can feed plural formulation, boundary, facilitation, value, or inquiry Work without deciding any of them.

PSD.2:8 - Common Anti-Patterns and How to Avoid Them

PSD.2:9 - Consequences

Problem formulations and later recommendations gain a recoverable social and consequence basis. Quiet, represented, missing, and non-speaking bearers remain visible without requiring impossible universal participation. The cost is explicit attribution and occasional stopping when representation, access, or consequence evidence is inadequate.

PSD.2:10 - Rationale

Problem structuring needs more than generic affected-System discovery and more than a meeting roster. A.1.CSD supplies the shared discipline for finding consequence bearers and keeping actual and modal paths honest. PSD.2 adds the field-specific participation move: recover contribution conditions, concerns, duties, interests, representation, and dissent for a bounded receiving inquiry, then pass rather than decide them. Concern recovery also identifies what each material statement concerns. Otherwise a shared word can make completed support work appear to settle an unfinished task, or turn different objects into apparent disagreement about one object.

PSD.2:11 - SoTA-Echoing

PSD.2:12 - Relations

• PSD.1 supplies the bounded subject, receiving decision or Work, horizon, recipient, and authority boundary; absent or stale values return there rather than being inferred.
• A.1.CSD supplies affected-System consequence discovery. The relevant direct relation pattern governs each obtaining claim; A.6.REL applies only when the receiving use must distinguish occurrences of the same relation kind.
• PSD.3 receives materially different participants and concerns as formulation input without treating inclusion as settlement. PSD.4 receives boundary challenges.
• PSD.7 receives participation conditions for facilitation; PSD.9 receives attributed value inputs; PSD.16 receives the participants, concerns and work relations needed to resolve material interference in the engagement.
• Direct governance, conflict, representation, legal, ethical, safety, evidence, assignment, and authority patterns govern those claims. PSD.2 neither replaces them nor authorizes the later choice.

PSD.2:End

PSD.3 - Generate Plural Problem Formulations

Type: DPF pattern body Status: Candidate

Primary working result: a plural formulation set for one bounded receiving inquiry: materially different accounts of what warrants intervention, each with its subject, boundary, affected participants or Systems, value tension, evidence need, intervention logic, assumptions, and consequence for the receiving use.

PSD.3:0 - Use This When

Use this pattern when one wording of “the problem” is becoming naturalized even though materially different accounts would change what is included, what evidence matters, which interventions are plausible, whose values are exposed, or what the recipient should do next.

Begin from the bounded engagement question in PSD.1. Use the PSD.2 participation and concern account when affected participants, Systems, duties, interests, or dissent are material. Generate formulations that differ in decision-bearing structure, not merely vocabulary, and return them without selecting a winner.

The practical gain is an inspectable choice of frames before modeling, option generation, or comparison locks in the sponsor’s first account. Do not use PSD.3 for a thesaurus exercise, generic creativity session, alternative generation for an already-stable problem (PSD.8), or archive/front stewardship (C.18). If one formulation is already adequate and no credible rival could change the receiving use, proceed to the actual missing result.

PSD.3:0.1 - Working Distinctions

PSD.3:1 - Problem frame

Ill-structured situations do not arrive with one neutral problem object waiting to be described. “Insufficient capacity”, “unequal protection”, “maintenance fragility”, and “unsafe deployment” can concern the same pumping arrangement while selecting different bearers, boundaries, evidence, interventions, and consequences. The formulations may conflict, overlap, or remain jointly useful.

The primary concern is to make those decision-bearing differences recoverable before one model or Method absorbs them. Recognition is cheap: one credible rival intervention logic is enough to test plurality. Assurance remains direct for every factual, causal, evaluative, legal, ethical, safety, authority, or source claim used within a formulation.

PSD.3:2 - Problem

The sponsor’s first sentence often becomes the model title, data request, option space, and final recommendation. Its assumptions disappear because they are encoded as scope. A second failure produces many “perspectives” that differ only in wording and therefore add ceremony without changing any downstream work. A third treats plurality as permanent indecision and refuses to bound the inquiry.

The needed discipline is neither immediate convergence nor unlimited reframing. It is to construct a small set of materially different formulations, expose what each makes visible and suppresses, and stop when additional formulations no longer change the current receiving use.

PSD.3:3 - Forces

PSD.3:4 - Solution

Generate a bounded set of problem formulations whose differences are visible in their downstream consequences. Bind every formulation to the same receiving inquiry unless an identity change is explicitly returned to PSD.1. Preserve sources, assumptions, uncertainty, and conflicts; then hand the set to boundary, modeling, alternative, and inquiry patterns without declaring a chosen problem.

PSD.3:4.1 - Fix the receiving inquiry, not the problem answer

State the subject, recipient, receiving decision or Work, horizon, and retained choice owner from PSD.1. Import only those PSD.2 participants, affected Systems, concerns, duties, interests, and dissent that can change this inquiry. If the subject or receiving use differs, create or recover the other engagement rather than merging formulations across identities.

Write the current formulation in one sentence. Mark its source, factual support, assumptions, and important exclusions. This makes the default frame inspectable rather than privileged.

PSD.3:4.2 - Generate structural contrasts

Seek contrasts along the smallest productive set of questions:

• What condition or relation is treated as problematic, for whom or what?
• Which bearer, place, configuration, horizon, or consequence is central?
• Which value, duty, interest, or risk makes intervention worth considering?
• Which mechanism or dependency is hypothesized, and what evidence could challenge it?
• Which action families become plausible, and which disappear?
• Who can prepare, receive, authorize, or implement a response?

Do not require one formulation per question. Combine contrasts into coherent candidate formulations. If two formulations imply the same boundary, evidence, action family, and receiving-use consequence, merge them or state that their difference is rhetorical.

PSD.3:4.3 - Give every formulation a usable face

For each retained formulation, record: