First Principles Thinking Workshop
A structured day in which your team takes a real problem apart, tests what it has been assuming, and rebuilds it from what is actually true, so the solution that follows is aimed at the right thing. A shared language for the problem comes with it.
Free, 45 minutes: we work out together which problem your team should bring.
Meetings go round in circles, because each person is quietly solving a slightly different version of it.
It made sense on paper, and it did not hold here. Nobody is quite sure which assumption was wrong.
By the time the evidence arrives, the program is designed, funded and hard to turn around.
This is where the cost sits. A team that can reason from first principles notices much earlier when a solution is heading in the wrong direction — before the budget is committed, not after the evaluation comes back. That skill does not expire when the workshop ends. It pays back on every problem the team takes on after it.
Faced with a hard problem, most teams do something entirely reasonable: they look at how a similar problem was solved somewhere else and adapt it. That is reasoning by analogy. It is fast, familiar, and in complex situations it is frequently the reason the problem does not get solved — because the borrowed solution rests on assumptions nobody checked against this context. This workshop is a day spent building the other habit.
Leadership teams and boards at an inflection point, where the current direction needs interrogating rather than refining.
Program teams designing or redesigning something under funding pressure, where the temptation to import a model that worked elsewhere is strongest.
Cross-sector and multi-agency groups — place-based collaborations, peak body working groups, partnerships between government and not-for-profits — where each party arrives with a different framing of the same problem and no shared method for reconciling them.
It suits organisations that have already tried the obvious answer, found it did not hold, and have the institutional honesty to ask whether the problem might be different from how they have been describing it.
First Principles Thinking has a long history. Aristotle argued that understanding begins with identifying the core of a problem before proposing any solution; the discipline has since been applied across science, engineering and philosophy, and more recently popularised by people who describe it as a physics way of looking at the world.
What is less well understood is that the same habit of thought is precisely what complex social and public sector challenges require, and rarely receive. An engineer who assumes gravity works differently fails immediately and visibly. An organisation that assumes a social problem cannot be addressed without a particular funding model or stakeholder alignment may never discover the assumption was wrong, because the failure is slow and easy to attribute to something else.
TKD advisory's founder co-founded the Factory for Innovative Policy Solutions in 2018, where this approach was developed into a working methodology for social innovation and public policy. More on the method →
The day moves from understanding the method to using it. The morning builds the foundation; the afternoon puts it to work on problems that matter to the people in the room.
The method. What First Principles Thinking is for, and where its limits lie. Where it comes from, from Socrates to the people who use it today, and how it compares to reasoning by analogy and to design thinking.
Socratic questioning. The five types of questions that expose hidden assumptions, practised in pairs before they are used on anything real.
The seven steps. From a rough problem description to a selected solution: the problem, the objective, the obstacles, questioning the assumptions, uncovering the first principles, generating ideas, and refining and selecting.
Putting it to work. In small groups, the team takes a problem through all seven steps, ending with one solution built on no more than three first principles. Each participant then does the same on their own, so everyone leaves having run the method once without help.
The problems come from the room. Participants bring a problem of their own, one that matters to them and their organisation. It does not need to be fully formed: working out which problem suits the day is a conversation we have beforehand, and one I am glad to help with.
Something else happens along the way. Because everyone works through the same steps, the team ends the day describing its problems in the same words. That shared language tends to outlast the session itself.
A redefined problem statement, built by the team rather than handed to them — which is why it survives contact with the rest of the organisation.
A documented set of assumptions, marked according to whether they held.
Options reasoned from the ground up, with the reasoning attached, so the choice between them can be argued rather than asserted.
A shared language for the problem. Colleagues who had been describing the same issue in different words leave describing it in the same ones — which is what makes the decisions that follow easier to take together.
A method they can run again. The most durable outcome is not the day's output. It is a team that approaches the next problem differently, without needing an external facilitator to do it.
$9,500 for a full day, for a group of up to ten people. All prices in AUD, exclusive of GST. Ten is the limit for the current set-up. Form and prices can be discussed to alter to your needs.
Sessions are generally run on site. Delivery interstate and internationally is possible by arrangement; travel and accommodation outside Greater Sydney are charged at cost and agreed in writing before anything is booked.
You bring a real one. Teaching the method on a case study produces people who can do the method on case studies. Working it through on a problem your organisation actually has produces both the capability and a result you can use, and it is the reason the day holds up afterwards.
That is normal, and it is not something you have to resolve on your own beforehand. What matters is that the case genuinely matters to the people in the room — a problem nobody in the group cares about produces a polite day and nothing else.
Finding the right one is part of the preparation. In a conversation before the session we look at what is currently on the table and work out which question is both live enough to hold the group's attention and open enough to be worth reasoning through. Narrowing it into something a day can actually take on is the last step, and I do that with you.
It is free and takes 45 minutes. We look at what is currently on the table for your team and choose the problem worth bringing to the day.
Sometimes that conversation shows the question needs something else first — a scoping review, for example, when nobody is yet sure what the problem is. If so, you will hear that before anything is booked.
Up to ten. Ten is the limit for the current set-up. Form and prices can be discussed to alter to your needs.
For the method itself, yes. One structured day is enough to take a team through questioning its assumptions, rebuilding the problem definition and reasoning towards options from there. What one day does not do is finish the analysis on a genuinely complex problem — it gets you far enough to see where the real leverage sits and to keep going yourselves.
It usually does, and that is not a sign the process is failing. Examining assumptions means asking about decisions that have already been made and strategies leadership has committed to publicly. Managing that discomfort — holding a room in a process that is temporarily destabilising in the interest of arriving somewhere more solid — is a core part of what the facilitation is for.
Yes. Boards are often the most useful group to run it with, because the assumptions that most need testing are frequently the ones held at governance level rather than in delivery. A board session is usually framed around a strategic question the board is already carrying.
$9,500 for a full day with a group of up to ten people, in AUD and exclusive of GST. Travel and accommodation outside Greater Sydney are charged at cost and agreed before booking.
For larger groups the session needs a different design, so the fee is discussed rather than fixed.
If your team has worked on something for years through a series of reasonable efforts that never quite moved it, that is usually a sign the problem itself has not been properly defined yet. That is the problem to bring.
Plan your workshop or call +61 475 923 987