Initiatives

An Initiative is the growing record of a change being explored. It starts with an original change request and preserves the reasoning from the observed situation to desired outcomes, considered interventions, selected interventions, and any later design workspaces.

Modeller is the whole platform. System Design is the technology-specific workspace within it. An Initiative reaches System Design only when the team selects a technology intervention.

To run one, open modeller.website and start an Initiative there — it needs no install and no account. Start a Discovery Session walks through the whole session step by step.

The journey

Discover

Discover establishes what is happening before the requested implementation is treated as the answer. A live Discovery Session progresses through:

1. Capture Request: retain the original Change Request.
2. Clarify Problem: describe the problem, affected people, and pain points.
3. Identify Impact: make the current impact and evidence visible.

Frame

Frame agrees what better means and where the Initiative is bounded:

4. Define Outcomes: record desired outcomes and success criteria.
5. Set Boundaries: record non-goals, constraints, assumptions, open questions, and risks.

The Discovery Gate sits between Frame and Shape. It reports gaps in the Initiative, but it is advisory: it never blocks or forces a Facilitator action. An override can be recorded with an optional reason.

Shape

Shape compares possible responses against the framed outcomes and constraints. The fixed intervention taxonomy is:

• Process
• People
• Organisation
• Policy
• Information
• Technology
• Experiment
• No action

An Initiative can select several interventions. This supports mixed change, such as removing an approval step, delegating authority, and automating a document check against one shared outcome. Each selected intervention independently records whether it continues into a design workspace.

The Shape Gate is advisory too. It can surface concerns such as a technology intervention without a rationale, or no-action never being considered, without taking the decision away from the Facilitator.

One record, three human roles

Discover, Frame, and Shape update the same structured Initiative record. There is no separate Business Problem Brief artifact. A human-readable document is a projection of the machine-readable record, not a second source of truth.

The smallest useful session has three roles:

• Facilitator: guides the session, curates questions and proposals, and accepts durable changes.
• Domain Expert: supplies knowledge about the situation through focused responses.
• Agent Participant: optionally proposes questions or candidate interventions for people to dispose of.

The core loop is a Prompted Question followed by a Domain Expert Response, which the Facilitator can draft into a structured field. The workflow works fully human-only. AI is a pluggable adapter and never a hard dependency.

Handoff to System Design

Selecting a technology intervention may add a cross-reference to a System Design workspace. The link carries the reason for the design forward. It deliberately does not generate model content from the intervention wording.

Non-technology interventions remain legitimate selected responses. Modeller does not imply that every Initiative ends in software.

Current scope

The Initiative domain module, optional Agent Advisor seam, JSON-backed session repository, HTTP API, realtime session updates, Facilitator cockpit, and focused Domain Expert response view are implemented. The end-to-end experience still needs validation through a real facilitated Initiative before it should be treated as a hardened production workflow.

Deferred capabilities include additional participant roles, teaching and replay mechanics, load-bearing-assumption tagging, automatic System Design scaffolding, authentication, and production persistence hardening.

The settled direction comes from the Initiative Shaping decision, the Discover and Frame decision, and the implementation epic.