1.2 · Define the outcome and boundary
Chapter 1: Welcome and Introduction
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Chapter 1 follow-along PDF · Development edition. This chapter’s PDF may be updated with future revisions.
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Start with the reasoning
Colabmo and your instructor
Colabmo is a consulting company that matches businesses with subject matter experts across disciplines, typically for interim or contract assignments. Matching starts with the knowledge, skills, tools and materials expertise the work requires.
Colabmo and its founder, Diggy Breiling, provide the process and infrastructure, oversee the work, and check input completeness and the quality of outputs against agreed requirements. Specialists bring their discipline-specific judgment. The delivery process makes scope, responsibilities, evidence and acceptance criteria explicit.
Process and product development experience
Diggy’s experience includes process and product development roles across aerospace, marine, land vehicle and medical applications. His quality and supply chain background informs the course’s emphasis on clear requirements, evidence, dependencies and reviewable decisions.
- Current: ASQ Certified Medical Device Auditor (CMDA).
- Previously held: ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB) and Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE).
- Previously held: APICS CPIM and CSCP certifications.
- Teaching: CPIM and CSCP instructor in Orange County, California.
The course applies first principles thinking to business-process redesign. Quality and supply chain tools support investigation where useful; the learning sequence remains outcome, parts and properties, evidence, constraints, principles, alternative mechanisms, testing and revision. Course completion records learning in this course and does not confer an ASQ or APICS certification.
Colabmo development course A-P15
Learning objective: Recognize a first principles redesign argument and identify the evidence needed to support it.
What is First Principles Thinking?
First Principles Thinking (FPT) is a way of solving problems by examining their foundations. You break a problem into its essential parts, identify what you know and what must be achieved, then build a solution from those foundations. Instead of accepting the current process as the starting blueprint, you ask: What is this process here to accomplish, and what is actually necessary to accomplish it?
In business, those foundations include supported facts, necessary functions and applicable obligations. Assumptions remain visible and open to testing. A familiar practice, a popular tool or a senior person’s opinion may be useful input, but each needs a reason to become part of the design.
Why is it powerful?
Processes accumulate forms, handoffs, approvals and workarounds. Improving each step can leave the underlying arrangement unchallenged. FPT gives a team permission—and a disciplined method—to examine that arrangement.
- It expands the options: separating the required outcome from today’s method reveals other ways to achieve it.
- It sharpens decisions: tracing a proposal to its evidence shows where the reasoning is strong and where it depends on an assumption.
- It focuses experimentation: identifying the assumption most likely to make a design fail helps the team choose a useful test before committing to a larger change.
- It creates shared understanding: experts from different functions can examine the same purpose, constraints and tradeoffs.
A simple example
Imagine a request waits for three approvals. The usual question is, “How can we get those approvals faster?” FPT adds, “What decision does each approval make, what risk does it address, and what evidence does it need?” The answers might support parallel reviews, delegated decisions for routine cases, or keeping an approval that protects an essential control. Each option must still satisfy the applicable requirements and be tested.
The power of FPT is making choices explainable and alternatives testable. It does not guarantee a breakthrough or remove uncertainty. In this course, you will practise turning “We have always done it this way” into a clear outcome, defensible reasoning and a reviewable experiment.
How to use this course
For process owners, subject-matter experts, team leaders and facilitators. Complete the lessons in sequence and use the participant worksheets. Core learning and practice totals 12 hours 40 minutes, including the ten-minute knowledge quiz. Four optional coaching sessions add four hours. Allow 30 minutes of preparation and additional breaks.
Preparation: read the companion article, choose a bounded process, and bring a non-sensitive standard transaction and exception. The later resource section contains eleven worksheets and a facilitator guide. The guide contains capstone model responses; complete your own reasoning before consulting them.
Read the companion article · Open the participant workbook
A team is asked to make customer onboarding faster. Its first suggestions are familiar: add reminders, buy a workflow tool, or remove an approval. Each might help, but none yet explains what onboarding must accomplish or why the existing steps are necessary. First Principles Thinking begins by examining that foundation.
In this course, FPT means decomposing a problem into defensible premises and necessary functions, questioning inherited assumptions, and constructing a solution whose reasoning can be examined. A business premise is often conditional and revisable. A measured fact about last month is not a permanent law; an executive preference is not a fact; a contractual obligation is binding within its scope even though people could negotiate a different contract.
Aristotle discusses demonstration from primary premises in Posterior Analytics, Book I, Part 2. Business redesign uses a practical adaptation of that reasoning discipline, with explicit uncertainty and empirical tests. Colabmo’s six-stage working method below is a teaching framework, not an internationally standardized FPT method or a promise that deduction alone will solve organizational problems.
- Frame: define the outcome, boundary and decision.
- Decompose: identify the information, decisions and functions required.
- Ground: establish evidence, constraints and conditional principles.
- Rebuild: create distinct arrangements from those foundations.
- Test: expose the assumptions that could make a design fail.
- Learn: revise the reasoning and decide the next action.
The stages are iterative. A failed test can send the team back to its premises. You will produce an outcome brief, an evidence ledger, a functional model, alternative designs and a testable recommendation. Subject-matter experts own the business content. The facilitator owns the quality of inquiry and participation.
| Approach | Typical starting question | How it can contribute |
|---|---|---|
| Process optimization | How can this flow perform better? | Improve a design whose foundations still fit. |
| Root cause analysis | What explains this observed failure? | Test causes; it does not by itself reconstruct the required process. |
| Brainstorming or benchmarking | What possibilities or examples can we find? | Supply candidate mechanisms, which still need justification. |
| First principles redesign | What must be true and what must be achieved for any workable design? | Make inherited architecture open to examination. |
These approaches can overlap. The course assesses reasoning rather than loyalty to labels. A familiar solution can be well grounded; an unusual solution can rest on weak assumptions.
Practice
Use W1 to write one process you want to examine. Individually describe what its customer receives. Then underline every word that names a current system, job title or procedure. Decide whether each word belongs in the outcome or merely describes today’s method.
Check your reasoning
A team recommends automation because a competitor uses it. Has it demonstrated first principles reasoning?
Worked response
No. The example may suggest an option, but the team still needs the outcome, necessary functions, supporting premises, constraints and a test. Automation could ultimately be the justified choice.
Sources and further reading
The lesson sequence, cases, worksheets and assessment are original Colabmo development material. The sources below support specific background points; they do not validate the course or establish a universal FPT workshop standard. Accessed 9 October 2026.
- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book I, Part 2, translated by G R G Mure — reasoning from primary premises; philosophical background.
- NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, Appendix C — assumptions and requirements separated from implementation specifics; an adjacent discipline.
- Edmondson, 1999, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams — empirical association between psychological safety and learning behavior, not proof of this course’s effectiveness.
- NIST SEMATECH e Handbook, Choosing an experimental design — planning experiments and recognizing confounding; an adjacent evidence discipline.
BrightPath Advisory: does the client need a meeting?
Fictional teaching case. BrightPath helps team leaders decide how to develop a workplace skill. Every client currently books a 45-minute video consultation before receiving guidance. The sponsor asks for a faster booking system. No client performance or achieved benefit is claimed.
Candidate outcome: the client receives relevant guidance, understands its limits and can identify an appropriate next step for the stated learning need. Validate the outcome with users. A completed meeting or sent email does not establish it.
Supplied case conditions
- Represent guidance as applicable only when its material basis and uncertainties are identified. A conditional answer, clarification or referral is permitted.
- Use client information only for the agreed advisory purpose; do not expose one client's information to another client.
- A person with relevant competence owns advice and unresolved clarification. Do not claim expertise beyond its established scope.
- The team can redesign intake, channel, scheduling and clarification. It cannot promise additional expertise or a new response-time guarantee without the service owner's decision.
These are invented conditions for this exercise. The case supplies no population demand rate, proven channel preference, target improvement or pilot result. Missing evidence stays visible.
Parts and properties
| Part | Relevant properties | Function | Evidence or check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Client question | Clarity, ambiguity, urgency | Understand the intended decision | Original question; client restatement |
| Supporting context | Relevance, accuracy, freshness | Establish applicability | Source/date; confirm material gaps |
| Adviser capability | Competence, scope, limits | Interpret and justify guidance | Relevant work samples; peer review |
| Communication channel | Access, privacy, clarification | Exchange enough meaning | Realistic user trial; assisted path |
| Recommendation | Fit, rationale, actionability | Support an informed next step | Review and client explanation |
| Follow-up commitment | Owner, trigger, completion | Recover from uncertainty or change | Recorded commitment and follow-through |
Label each property observed, assumed or required. Properties are attributes, not smaller physical parts. For people, examine relevant capabilities and interactions. Reconnect the parts and explain the dependencies.
The FIRST Framework
FIRST organizes the journey from a defined challenge to a supported change in everyday practice. Its five stages contain the course’s six reasoning steps: Frame, Decompose, Ground, Rebuild, Test and Learn. The map is iterative: learning can reopen the outcome, a claimed property, a constraint or a design choice.
| FIRST stage | Reasoning steps | Work and evidence to carry forward |
|---|---|---|
| F — Frame the Challenge | Frame | Define the recipient’s outcome, success criteria, boundary, decision owner and scope. Distinguish the required result from today’s delivery method. |
| I — Investigate Fundamentals | Decompose and Ground | Identify individual parts, their properties, required functions, interfaces and dependencies. Classify claims as evidence, assumptions, preferences or applicable requirements. Preserve sources, limits and open questions. |
| R — Reimagine Possibilities | Rebuild | Construct alternatives with different operating mechanisms. Explain how each uses relevant properties to preserve necessary functions and requirements. |
| S — Systematically Test and Iterate | Test and Learn | Choose a consequential uncertainty, a hypothesis, observations, guardrails and a decision rule. Compare results with the claim and revise the proposal or earlier reasoning. |
| T — Transform and Institutionalize | Apply learning and continue to review | When evidence and the authorized decision support implementation, assign ownership, confirm inputs and resources, update working instructions, build competence, handle exceptions and monitor outcomes. Record review and rollback conditions. If evidence is insufficient, continue investigation. |
How the reminders fit: FIRST is the overall route. FAFO—Frame and Assumptions, then Find Out—is Diggy’s short reminder: Frame, Decompose and Ground establish the basis; Rebuild, Test and Learn investigate possible changes. Use the specific step names while working. Memorizing the acronyms is not the learning objective.
Course map: Chapter 1 frames the challenge; Chapters 2–3 investigate fundamentals; Chapter 4 develops possibilities; Chapter 5 tests and iterates. Chapters 6–7 strengthen facilitation and application across the stages. Chapter 8 connects learning to implementation and continuing review.
FIRST Framework proposed by Deepak Chaudhury, Part III, 9 March 2025. The author presents it as his proposed methodology. The six-step mapping, exercises and implementation guidance here are Colabmo’s adaptation. This course does not present FIRST as an industry standard or imply author endorsement.
Learning time: 12 hours 40 minutes for the core course, including exercises and the knowledge check, excluding breaks. Optional coaching adds four hours. The planned spoken script is about 95 minutes; it is included in the core allocation, not additional.
Read-along slides and narration script
1.01 · Welcome and Introduction
Hi, I’m Diggy, founder of Colabmo. Welcome.
Colabmo is a consulting company that connects businesses and project teams with interim subject matter experts across disciplines. We help you bring in the knowledge, skills and experience a particular challenge requires—including expertise in processes, tools, technologies and materials.
Sometimes you need someone to help define the problem. Sometimes you need specialist knowledge to develop a product, improve a process or move a project forward. That expertise may be needed for a few focused hours or throughout a longer contract assignment.
1.02 · How Colabmo supports the work
Our role goes beyond making the introduction. At Colabmo, we provide the process and infrastructure that help specialists and businesses work effectively together. I stay involved in overseeing the work, making sure the necessary inputs are complete and checking that the outputs meet the agreed requirements. That means clear scope, defined responsibilities and a shared understanding of what a good result looks like.
This course brings that approach to learning.
Welcome to First Principles Thinking for Business Process Redesign. This is Chapter One: Welcome and Introduction.
We’ll explore how to break a problem into its individual parts, understand the properties of those parts, and use that understanding to build and test better ways of working.
1.03 · Experience, expertise and the pieces
Our first section is about the approach we’ll use, and where it comes from.
My work has focused on process and product development across aerospace, marine, land vehicle and medical applications. Those settings have different requirements, but I keep coming back to a few basic questions. What does this need to do? What are we working with? And how will we know whether it works?
Quality and supply chain education have also been a big part of my background. I currently hold ASQ’s Certified Medical Device Auditor certification. I previously held ASQ’s Certified Six Sigma Black Belt and Certified Manager of Quality and Organizational Excellence certifications, along with APICS CPIM and CSCP certifications. I also served as a CPIM and CSCP instructor in Orange County, California.
That experience shapes how I approach a problem. But my interest in taking things apart started much earlier.
As a kid, I encountered the puzzle with a box of matches, a candle and pins. I wanted to see what all the pieces were. Since then, I’ve tried to break things down into their basic pieces, and those pieces into their basic properties.
We’ll come back to that puzzle later, so I’ll leave the solution alone for now.
The habit is what matters here. A familiar name tells us how something is usually used. Looking at its properties helps us understand what else it might be able to do.
For a physical object, we might examine its shape, material or stiffness. For a service, we might examine how clear a question is, how reliable the information is, or what expertise a decision requires.
Then we have to put the pieces back together. How do they interact? Which properties help us achieve the result? What would we need to check before relying on the design?
As we work through the course, bring a process you know or use our fictional cases. The video guides you through the thinking. The written course gives you more detail, references and practice. Take your time with the exercises.
1.04 · First principles thinking
Let’s make the idea concrete.
Imagine a team has been asked to make customer onboarding faster. Someone suggests more reminders. Someone else wants a workflow tool. Another person wants to remove an approval.
Those ideas might help. But we haven’t yet established what onboarding must accomplish, or why the existing steps are there.
First principles thinking asks us to examine those foundations before we settle on a solution.
What does the customer need to be able to do? What information, decisions and capabilities make that possible? Which requirements are necessary, and which arrangements have we simply inherited?
1.05 · Does the client need a meeting?
Our next section introduces a service example we’ll follow through the course: BrightPath Advisory.
BrightPath is a fictional professional-learning service. It helps team leaders decide how to develop a workplace skill.
At the moment, every client has to book a forty-five-minute video consultation before receiving guidance. The sponsor asks us to make booking faster.
That sounds straightforward. But let’s step back. What does the client actually need to understand, decide or do?
A possible outcome is useful guidance that fits their learning need, with clear limits and an appropriate next step. We would check that with actual users before treating it as settled.
Booking an appointment tells us that something happened in the process. It doesn’t tell us whether the client received useful guidance.
The consultation may help clarify the question, establish context, apply expertise and check understanding. Which of those functions need a conversation? Which could happen another way?
We’ll keep that question open as we examine the parts of the service and consider different ways to deliver it.
1.06 · The FIRST Framework
Here’s how we’ll organize the work. We’ll use the FIRST Framework: Frame the Challenge, Investigate Fundamentals, Reimagine Possibilities, Systematically Test and Iterate, and Transform and Institutionalize.
Deepak Chaudhury proposed this framework. We’re connecting it here to Colabmo’s six reasoning steps.
That gives us a path from understanding a problem to putting a supported change into practice.
First, frame the challenge. Who needs the result? What should they be able to do when we’re finished? What’s inside our scope, and who can make the decision?
Then investigate the fundamentals. Take the problem apart. Identify the individual pieces, examine their properties, and look at how they depend on one another. A piece might be a physical component, information, a decision or someone’s expertise.
Now ask what we actually know about those pieces. Which claims have evidence behind them? Which are requirements? Which are assumptions, preferences or habits? This is where we decompose the problem and ground our reasoning.
Next, reimagine the possibilities. Use those properties and necessary functions to rebuild different ways of achieving the outcome. We’re looking for different mechanisms, not just a new name for the same process.
Then systematically test and iterate. Choose an uncertainty worth investigating. Decide what we’ll observe, what limits we need to protect, and what result would make us stop or change direction. Run the test, examine what happened, and revise the proposal.
Finally, transform and institutionalize. Once the evidence and the decision owner support a change, work out how to make it part of everyday practice. Who owns it? What inputs, instructions and skills does it need? How will we check whether it keeps working? If the evidence is still weak, the next decision may be another test.
Underneath FIRST, we’ll keep using our six reasoning steps: frame, decompose, ground, rebuild, test and learn. Learning runs through the whole process, including implementation.
My FAFO reminder still fits: Frame and Assumptions, then Find Out. FIRST gives us the fuller route through the work. Neither acronym replaces the reasoning. New evidence can send us back to any earlier step.
1.07 · What makes FPT useful
The value becomes clearer when a team gets stuck on the current way of working.
If we understand the result we need and the functions that make it possible, we can consider changing the method without losing the purpose.
At BrightPath, for example, we can question the requirement for a meeting while still preserving relevant expertise, clarification and an understandable next step.
Making our reasoning visible also helps us decide what to test. We can identify the assumption most likely to make a proposal fail and investigate it before committing to a larger change.
Through the course, you’ll build an outcome brief, a model of the necessary functions, an evidence ledger, alternative designs and a recommendation that can be tested.
The subject matter experts contribute their knowledge and develop the solutions. The facilitator helps the team examine its reasoning and makes room for useful challenge.
A familiar solution may still turn out to be the best choice. What matters is whether we can explain why it fits and what evidence supports it.
1.08 · W1: a process you know
Let’s try the first part of Worksheet One.
Choose a process you want to examine. Write down what its customer or recipient receives when the process works well.
Then underline any words that name a current system, job title or procedure.
For each one, ask yourself: does this describe something the recipient needs, or does it describe how we currently deliver it?
Before you continue, consider this question.
A team recommends automation because a competitor uses it. Has the team demonstrated first principles thinking?
Pause here and write down your reasoning.
[Pause for the exercise.]
The competitor’s approach may give us an option worth considering. But that comparison alone doesn’t establish that the option fits our situation.
We still need to understand the outcome, the necessary functions, the supporting evidence and the constraints. Then we need a useful test.
Automation could be the right choice. We just haven’t established the reasoning yet.
Chapter 1 · Page 2 of 2
Define the outcome and boundary
Learning objective: Write a measurable outcome without embedding an untested solution.
A useful brief specifies whose need matters, the triggering event, the end condition, quality requirements and the authority to make a decision. “Implement a portal” specifies a mechanism. “Give an eligible customer a usable service account and a confirmed start date” specifies an outcome. Even the latter needs definitions of eligible, usable and confirmed.
Start with a real transaction. Ask the recipient to explain what they could do after successful completion that they could not do before. Then identify other affected parties: the person maintaining the record, the team accepting the work, the control owner and people handling exceptions. A fast front door that transfers ambiguity downstream may make total service worse.
Write a boundary sentence: “From receipt of a complete service request to a communicated, authorized decision and an assigned next action.” Record incomplete requests separately rather than stopping the clock invisibly. Decide how withdrawn and rejected requests are represented. A speed target without a clear denominator invites misleading improvement claims.
Use four classes of measures: customer outcome, elapsed time, quality or risk, and staff effort. For each, record its definition, data source and review period. Choose targets as proposals until the relevant owner accepts them. If the baseline is unknown, plan measurement; do not invent a starting number.
The boundary is also a decision about scope. A team may redesign intake and routing while leaving pricing policy unchanged. It should record an outside dependency if pricing blocks the outcome. It should not silently expand into an enterprise pricing program.
Example: “For standard service requests with all required evidence, reduce time from complete receipt to an authorized disposition. Preserve the existing access-control rules, report missing-information time separately, and measure the proportion of decisions later reversed.” The actual target and baseline remain to be established.
Practice
In pairs, rewrite “move all approvals into a new workflow tool” as an outcome brief using W1. Define the start and end, one quality measure, one effort measure, three exclusions and the decision owner. Swap briefs; the reviewer circles language that prescribes a solution.
Check your reasoning
Why is “cut average handling time by half” an incomplete brief?
Worked response
It omits the customer outcome, measurement boundary, baseline, quality and risk conditions, and authority. Handling time may exclude waiting or shift work to someone else. A numerical target alone does not define success.
Read-along slides and narration script
1.09 · The outcome brief
We’re now moving into the section on the outcome and boundary.
An outcome brief helps us make the problem specific enough to work on.
Whose need are we addressing? What starts the process? What should be true when it finishes? What quality requirements apply, and who has authority to make the decision?
“Implement a portal” tells us what someone wants to build.
“Give an eligible customer a usable service account and a confirmed start date” tells us more about the result. But we still need to define eligible, usable and confirmed.
Start with one real request or transaction. Ask the recipient what they should be able to do after it is completed.
Then look at who else is affected. Someone may maintain the record, accept the work, check a control or handle an exception.
We want to understand the whole result. Making the first step faster won’t help much if it leaves the next person with missing information or extra work.
1.10 · A fair measurement boundary
Now decide where the process starts and ends.
For example: from receiving a complete service request to communicating an authorized decision and assigning the next action.
That gives us a boundary we can measure. But we also need to account for requests that arrive incomplete.
If we leave that waiting time out of the main measure, record it separately and make the distinction clear. Decide how you’ll represent withdrawn and rejected requests as well.
Otherwise, the numbers can look better while the customer’s experience stays the same.
Consider four kinds of measures: the customer’s outcome, elapsed time, quality or risk, and staff effort.
For each measure, define what you’re counting, where the information comes from and the period you’ll review. Be clear about which requests are included.
If you don’t know the starting performance, plan to measure it. Set proposed targets for discussion with the responsible owner rather than inventing a baseline.
1.11 · A bounded redesign
The boundary also tells us what this team can change.
You might have authority to redesign intake and routing while pricing policy stays outside your scope.
If pricing prevents the outcome, record that dependency and bring it to the person who can decide. You can make the issue visible without turning the assignment into a company-wide pricing project.
Here’s an example of a bounded brief.
For standard service requests with all required evidence, reduce the time from receiving a complete request to communicating an authorized decision.
Preserve the existing access-control requirements. Report time spent waiting for missing information separately. Track how often decisions later have to be reversed.
We would still need to establish the baseline and agree on a target. But we now have a clearer description of the work, its limits and the conditions the result must satisfy.
1.12 · W1: an outcome without a prescribed tool
Let’s finish Worksheet One with another example.
The request is: “Move all approvals into a new workflow tool.”
Rewrite that as an outcome brief.
Define the start and end of the process. Include one quality measure, one effort measure, three things outside the scope, and the person who owns the decision.
If you’re working with someone else, swap briefs. Ask your partner to circle any wording that already commits you to a particular solution. If you’re working alone, read your brief as though someone else had written it.
Then consider this question: why is “cut average handling time by half” an incomplete brief?
Pause here and work through both parts.
[Pause for the exercise.]
The target gives us a number, but leaves several questions unanswered.
What should improve for the customer? Where does the measurement start and end? What is the baseline? What quality and risk conditions must we preserve? Who has authority to approve the change?
Handling time may leave out waiting. It may also fall because work has moved to someone else. We need enough context to know whether the change actually improves the process.
Keep your outcome brief nearby. In Chapter Two, we’ll examine the individual pieces of a process, the properties of those pieces and the evidence behind our claims.
1.13 · Next: The Pieces and the Evidence
You’ve completed chapter one, Welcome and Introduction, in First Principles Thinking for Business Process Redesign.
Thank you for learning with Colabmo. Bring your expertise, keep your reasoning visible, and put what you’ve learned to work.
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