A Thought Partner for Wicked Problems
Build up the visibility you need to circumscribe your situation, and the language to describe—and therefore advocate—for your agenda.
A few hours a month of outside perspective will measurably sharpen yours.
Method & Structure Also Does Projects
For when a targeted burst of concentration is what you need to move forward.
Stockpile Rhetorical Ammunition
You have a great idea, but to make your case, you'll need receipts.
- Together we'll chart the contours of risk and reward.
- The data is out there; we'll put it in your hands.
- You know pushback is coming; we'll map it out together.
Render your Situation Legible
Navigating threats from the outside—and hazards from within—both reduce to a puzzle. Everybody knows that to solve a puzzle, your first move is to find the edges.
- Let's plot out your business ecosystem and its dynamics—so that if it isn't on the map, it doesn't exist.
- Teams using different words to mean the same thing—or the same words to mean different things? Let's sort them out once and for all.
- Does a vendor you depend on also happen to get in the way of progress? Let's figure out what it'll take to deep-six them.
- There's a door you haven't opened in a while. You know which one it is. Let's get in there and measure it before it really gets too big.
Call In a Technical Ringer
Not everybody can read every spec, but some of us get close. Get that expertise on tap.
- Domain modeling and ontology design
- Application security and privacy strategy
- Open protocols and open-source strategy
- Web standards arcana
Training Seminars & Workshops
Home-grown technique to kit out your team. 90-minute seminars to change a paradigm, or half-day workshops to put it into action.
Pivot to Protocols
Learn how open data standards protect your organization from the caprice of vendors, foster durable information systems, and even project soft power.
The Specificity Gradient
Master how to frame your situation, projects, and business in terms of increasing detail and sensitivity to time.
Fermi Scoping
Stop estimating effort, and start estimating value, with this One Weird Trick™.
Semantic REST
Go beyond APIs and unlock the full power of this profound and elegant software architectural style.
In the Lab
Method & Structure is not just another pretty thought leader. Here's a selection from the portfolio of original processes, conceptual structures, and software to prove it.
The Specificity Gradient
If you've spent any time in the product design space, you've probably heard of pace layers. The Specificity Gradient takes Brand's framework and applies it to product development, extending it with a simple observation, and its ramifications: perishability increases with detail.
Fermi Scoping
How long will it take?
and how much will it cost?
are the wrong questions for software and digital media projects, because getting an answer depends on adding and multiplying, where errors accumulate in the bad direction. This scoping technique does the same work—or better—by starting where the others finish.
Intertwingler
Hypertext has the potential to help us understand more per unit of reading, by eliding what we've already read. The Web is nominally hypertext, but it behaves more like old-fashioned documents due to its abysmal handling of links: unidirectional, untyped, and prone to breaking. The answer was a custom application server that treats links as first-class citizens, and pages like structured data objects, affording a densely-connected thicket of highly-reusable semantic Lego, and the elimination of link rot. The name, if you're familiar with the lore, was a no-brainer.
Sense Atlas
There's a veritable profusion of mind-mapping tools, but few consider what to do with the proceeds—once said minds have been mapped. Sense Atlas is a tool that says make it into something durable, findable, addressable, and reusable: a shared resource that can promote situation awareness and conceptual integrity, and drive downstream processes in your organization in extremely concrete ways.