I co-instruct with a mentor, and there is a line he has always emphasized. “You cannot possibly know everything from the start.” Every time it comes up, it brings me back to the double diamond that is… was… taught in my lessons.
His lesson carries the statement. Mine carries the model. Over time I have come to see them as one idea split between two instructors.
The double diamond is a design process model from the British Design Council. It draws the work as two diamonds set side by side, and each one widens before it narrows. The widening is divergent thinking, where you open the space and gather more than you will end up using. The narrowing is convergent thinking, where you commit.
Each diamond widens to explore, then narrows to commit. Select a phase to see what happens in it.
The first diamond is the problem. Its phases are Discover and Define. You discover by going wide, then you define by pulling what you found into a single clear statement of what needs solving. The second diamond is the solution. You develop by generating many possible answers, then you deliver by testing them down to the one that holds up.
The reason his line brings me back to this model is that the first diamond is built on it. The entire left half exists because you cannot know everything from the start. If you could, there would be no reason to discover anything. You would walk in certain and go straight to building. The diamond opens wide first because the honest starting position is incomplete, and the discipline is to stay in that wide space long enough to learn before you converge.
This is also the shape of working requirements from a customer. The ask arrives already defined, or stated as though it were. The job of the first diamond is to discover the requirement’s working parts, the pieces underneath the ask that the customer did not spell out and often did not know to. Then you build something out and demonstrate it back to them, because the demonstration is where you learn whether what you discovered matches what they actually needed.
The common planning mistake is to collapse that first diamond. The opening framing gets treated as the answer. A charter gets written as settled fact rather than a best current guess. A team converges on the first plausible solution because uncertainty is uncomfortable and reads, to an impatient stakeholder, like a lack of progress. The diamond flattens into a straight line from assumption to delivery, and the cost surfaces later when the wrong problem turns out to have been solved very well.
The model does not remove the discomfort of not knowing. It gives that discomfort a structure and an endpoint. Diverge, then define. Diverge again, then deliver. The not knowing becomes a phase you pass through with purpose.
So the line and the model travel together for me now. His sentence gives a room permission to begin before they are certain. The diamond gives them a way to spend that uncertainty well. You will not know everything at the start. You were never going to. What matters is what you do with the space between not knowing and knowing.
- Jeff