People Define Objectives

Every objective needs a human owner to ensure people remain accountable for outcomes. When AI makes a mistake on results, safety, or human welfare, it's not the machine's fault - it's the person who defined the goal. Name the responsible individual before you build anything.

Deception Destroys Trust

People cannot collaborate effectively with what they don't recognize as artificial. When AI mimics human behavior without disclosure, it eliminates informed consent and creates false relationships. Trust requires transparency - hidden AI inevitably becomes manipulative AI.

Prevent What Can't Be Fixed

Some risks destroy projects entirely. Security vulnerabilities, compliance violations, and data breaches require prevention, not iteration. Build regulatory and technical safeguards into architecture decisions from day one.

Uncertainty Cultivates Wisdom

People instinctively demand definitive answers, but ranges and probabilities contain useful information. Forcing complex realities into simple yes/no responses destroys important nuance. Build systems that show the 'maybe' instead of hiding behind false certainty.

Requirements Demand Skepticism

Challenge every assumption, especially 'that's how we've always done it.' Question until those doing the work can defend it with current logic. Principles applied dogmatically become obstacles (including these). When a requirement conflicts with reality, trust reality.

Discovery Before Disruption

Systems reveal their true purpose when people actually use them. Seemingly pointless redundancies may reveal hidden logic. Unwritten rules only surface when engaging with the actual work. Always understand why things exist before you change them.

Reveal the Invisible

Visual representations reveal complexity that written descriptions hide. A diagram shows bottlenecks, a journey map exposes human pain, a wireframe reveals confusion. Visuals become the instrument panel for navigating reality from the human perspective.

Embrace Necessary Complexity

Some complexity creates competitive advantage, other complexity just creates work. A sophisticated fraud detection creates an edge; a five-approval purchase process does not. Delete what slows people down, invest in complexity that eliminates customer pain.

Time Costs More Than Money

Every delay costs opportunity. The longer work sits between steps, the more context gets lost and people lose momentum. Leverage AI to optimize for speed of completion while maintaining quality of output.

Iterate Towards What Works

The best requirements emerge through building, not planning sessions. Real understanding comes from making, testing, and failing in rapid cycles. Improvement cycles reveal what meetings will not. Build to discover.

Earn the Right to Rebuild

People naturally want to rebuild broken systems from scratch rather than improve them incrementally. Total rebuilds without earned understanding create elegant solutions to misunderstood problems. Prove systems can be improved before attempting to replace them entirely.