Working draft.

The iteration cycle, worked through five real cases

The Capability Pipeline

Eight steps, one loop: understand → map → design → build → instrument → deploy → evaluate → refine — where refine can send you all the way back to understand, not just back to adjusting what you built. The same eight questions, asked of a hospital screening workflow, a federal insurance marketplace, an airliner, a math-tutoring program at scale, and a self-driving car. What changes case to case isn't the shape of the loop — it's which single step the story actually turns on.

The cycle in use

Follow the eight numbered steps, then use evidence to revisit the problem. Adoption and use adds a feedback path from real operation back to Understand.

The capability cycle, with adoption and useThe eight numbered steps form the core cycle. Dotted arrows show both the direct Refine to Understand return and the additional Refine to Adoption and use to Understand feedback path. Adoption and useExperience informs the next cycle Capability through iteration 1Understand 2Map 3Design 4Build 5Instrument 6Deploy 7Evaluate 8Refine
Refine → UnderstandThe direct dotted return keeps the core cycle revisitable.Refine → Adoption and use → UnderstandThe additional dotted path brings experience of adoption and use into the next understanding of the challenge. Adoption and use is unnumbered; the core cycle still has eight steps.

The step that decides the story is rarely evaluate. It's usually earlier — design, build, or instrument — because those steps determine what evaluate is even able to see. A system instrumented to track only its own headline metric cannot evaluate a cost that metric doesn't measure.

Below, five cases — one apiece from government services, aviation, healthcare, education, and autonomous vehicles — are walked through all eight steps. Each carries one clearly marked point where a different upstream decision would plausibly have produced a different downstream result.

Learning guide. Open a step for why it matters, a decision cue and a question to apply to this case. Teaching commentary is an interpretation of the presented narrative, not new historical evidence. In Find the turn and Predict first, the decision-specific explanation appears only after your guess or reveal.

Pick a case

Same eight steps, five different systems. Each card names the domain, the real frame, and how the case actually turned out. Three ways to work a case are below the picker — study it worked out, find where it turns yourself, or commit to a call before you're shown what happened.

Mode

Integrative Practice

Learners and systems develop together

The eight steps support linked cycles of learner development and system evolution. Joint practice couples them at every step: people influence the system, and experience with the system shapes learning.

Development, contributions and evidence Feedback and revision
Learner development and system evolution coupled through joint practice A shared challenge guides two parallel loops. Learner development creates learning conditions, implements teaching and practice, and investigates knowledge, skill and agency. System evolution creates requirements and designs, implements deployment and operation, and investigates performance. Each loop revises its creation step. Both contribute continuously to joint practice, which couples their work during creation, implementation and investigation. Joint-practice findings revise learning and systems. Evidence of collective capability, effective use and learner flourishing feeds back to shared goals, resources and conditions.
Read down the solid arrows for contributions and evidence, and follow the dashed arrows back for revision. Joint practice is continuous throughout both loops. Its position below them shows their connection; it does not add a later step.
Understand & Map — agree on the challenge

Bring learner goals, existing knowledge, system needs and operating conditions into the same picture. Learners help define success and influence choices.

Ask: whose goals and requirements shape the work?
Design & Build — create together

Co-design learning conditions and system behavior. Make roles, control and opportunities for creative partnership explicit, then test how they work together.

Ask: what should people learn, and what should the system enable?
Instrument & Deploy — support effective use

Plan measurement of learning, system quality and joint performance. Deployment makes a system available; adoption, effective use and sustainable support require attention in real practice.

Ask: what can we observe, and what makes successful use possible?
Evaluate & Refine — revise both loops

Examine learner knowledge, capability and flourishing alongside technical requirements and collective results. Joint performance alone does not establish independent learner competence.

Ask: what evidence calls for a change to teaching, the system, or the shared challenge?

Integrative Practice keeps the loops coherent. Connect each choice to its rationale, evidence needs and subsequent revisions. Use findings from authentic practice to revisit goals, resources, roles and learning conditions.

This is a conceptual view of how the eight-step cycle fits together. Learner development, system evolution and collective capability each need their own evidence.