Main idea

A framing document split by discipline — a business part, a design part, a technical part — distributes the material according to who writes it. Each contributor fills in their section, and nothing in the structure says what threatens the opportunity.

The split changes nature when each section is tied to the risk it serves to investigate: business context carries the viability risk, customer context the value risk on the buyer side, user context the value and usability risks, technical context the feasibility risk. The remaining sections — business rules, standards, field culture, competition, history of decisions — specify the constraints within which those risks play out.

The document then stops being a file to complete and becomes an instrument of assessment: an empty section no longer signals a contributor running late, it signals a risk nobody has investigated.

Why it matters

It makes incompleteness legible. In a plan by discipline, a gap reads as work left to finish; in a plan by risk, it reads as exposure — and it becomes possible to decide to move forward despite that hole, knowing which one it is.

It also gives an order of treatment when time is short: investigate first the risk that would kill the opportunity, rather than filling in from top to bottom.

Nuances and limits

The attachment is not clean everywhere: one piece of information — a regulatory constraint, say — feeds both feasibility and value at once, and forcing it into a single slot loses one of the two.

And a document organized this way does not state the level of a risk, only its nature: it orders the investigation, it does not replace it.

Open questions

• How do you record information that informs two risks at once without duplicating it or losing it?