Sharing something before it's ready

I sent a full system walkthrough to Daniel's team at the Estonian Government last week. They are a prior client. And always hungry for more behavioural tools. So I sent them Drive Patterns, Change Patterns, the connection chain, the interactive prototype. Everything I've built over the past two years, in one document.

I wrote a note at the top: "You are the first team to see the system as a whole, so feedback you have would be really valued."

I drafted that line in about four seconds. It took me considerably longer to press send.

Sharing unfinished work carries a specific kind of discomfort. You know the rough edges are there. You can see the parts where the thinking is still soft. The prototype has a bug where clicking a node highlights the route backwards instead of forwards, which is precisely the wrong direction. You're aware of all of this, and you're sharing it anyway, because the work has reached a point where it needs to meet someone else's brain.

What I wanted to find out was straightforward: does this system make sense to someone who didn't build it?

I can navigate the connection chain without thinking, because I assembled it over hundreds of hours. I know that Heart & Mind routes through Mental Models to Persuade, through Focus, to Highlight Outcomes. I know that because I've lived inside this architecture. The question is whether someone arriving fresh can follow the same logic without me standing beside them narrating the journey.

The bootcamp is forming around the system now. I've started teaching the full thing to practitioners. Not just the cards and canvases. The complete flow: diagnose with the Drive Grid, identify the mechanisms at work, connect through the chain to strategies and tactics, select a pattern, design a test, learn from the result.

The workshop moments are extraordinary. People light up at the point where the diagnosis connects to the recommendation. They say things like, "Oh. So that's why the training programme didn't work. We were trying to educate when the problem was in Pathways." Or: "We kept pushing motivation, but the real issue was Flux. The group had just been restructured and nobody knew the new norms yet."

Those moments are the reason I'm building this. The click of recognition. The transition from "we don't know what's going on" to "we can see the mechanism" to "here's what we should try." That chain of understanding is what BehaviourKit is for.

And it works beautifully, reliably, and consistently. When I'm in the room.

The design community has been talking a lot recently about "expert dependency" in tools. The concern that some tools only work when wielded by someone with significant background knowledge. It's a valid concern in any field, and I'm staring at it in my own work. The Drive Grid is simple enough that anyone can fill it in. The patterns are accessible enough that anyone can browse them. But the connection between them, the chain that says "given this diagnosis, try this pattern," requires facilitation. Specifically, it requires my facilitation.

This means the system has clear value and an equally clear bottleneck, and they're the same thing. My expertise makes the system work for the people in the room. My expertise also prevents the system from working for the people who aren't.

I've been turning this over for weeks. The commercial version of the observation is that I have a consulting model, where my time is the product and the toolkit is the supporting material. That works. It pays well. But it has a ceiling, which is the number of hours I have available to sell.

The product version of the observation is more uncomfortable: BehaviourKit in its current form is a tool that requires an operator. Like a lathe, or a scanning electron microscope, or a very complicated Italian coffee machine. Technically available to anyone. Practically useful only to someone who's been trained.

If I want BehaviourKit to reach beyond the people I can personally train, the system needs to carry more of the intelligence itself. The routing. The narrowing. The reasoning. The guardrails. All the things I currently do by instinct need to become explicit, codified, and available to someone sitting at their desk at 10pm wondering why their change programme isn't working.

That's a different kind of product from a card deck. I'm starting to understand what it might look like. But I'm not ready to build it yet.

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