Method — TKD advisory

The analogy trap

Faced with a hard problem, most people and organisations do something entirely reasonable: they look at how a similar problem has been solved elsewhere, and apply the solutions to their problem. In some cases this can work when the complexity is not too high.

It is also the reason problems often do not get solved, because the solution has been selected based on superficial similarities, instead of a fundamental understanding of the problem. The borrowed solution quietly fails, and it's rarely clear why — because nobody checked whether the assumptions behind it actually held here.

First Principles Thinking starts from a different question. Instead of what's worked before?, it asks what do we actually know to be true about this situation? From these First Principles it reasons towards a custom-made solution, which is much more likely to be durable.

Where this shows up

The stuck problem. An issue that's been worked on for years, through a series of reasonable, well-resourced efforts, none of which quite seem to move it. Each attempt addresses the problem as it has been described. But the problem, as described, may not be the real one.
The untested assumption. A strategy or program built on a premise about funding, stakeholders, capacity, or politics that felt obvious, but was never actually checked against evidence.
The imported solution. A model, program or policy that worked well somewhere else, applied here on the assumption that similar-looking problems will respond to the same fix. When it doesn't, the reason is rarely visible until much later — and by then, the assumption behind the failure has usually gone unexamined.

How we work

TKD advisory starts with the problem, not the framework. Before any solution is on the table, it examines what's actually being assumed about the situation, and separates what's genuinely true from what's simply familiar or generally accepted.

The specific activities vary with the problem — what's relevant to test in a policy review looks different from what's relevant in a program redesign. What stays constant is the structure: evidence is gathered specifically to test the assumptions the current approach is standing on, not simply to inform a solution that's already been half-decided.

Only once what's actually true about a problem is established — in contrast to what's assumed, inherited, or simply how things have always functioned — does TKD advisory start building toward a solution. It's a structured process, by design, specific to the problem at hand: a genuinely first-principles answer to your problem won't look like the answer to anyone else's.