The Belief · What you think is true
“Independent restaurant owners will pay to reduce scheduling no-shows.”
Make it specific enough to test, consequential if wrong, and honest about what is still uncertain.
Getting started · A 5-minute read
Build a shared model of the world.
Test it. Change it.
Your Team has a theory about how the world works. CoDEQ makes it visible—and helps you improve it through learning.
Make assumptions explicit. Reach out proactively, learn from people, and turn Evidence into better choices about what to do next.
Start your first session01 / Your first session
Start with someone’s experience.
Open Model together and begin with a Journey. A concrete experience gives you something to reason about before tackling the broader Mission or Business Model.
Choose a stakeholder and an experience.
Whose world do you need to understand? Pick a real situation: a restaurant manager covering a shift, or a student finding an event. Create that Journey.
Sketch Stages, then Moments.
Stages are the main phases of the experience. Moments are specific situations within them. Map what the person is trying to do, where friction appears, and what you don’t yet understand.
Make your assumptions visible.
Ask: “What are we acting as if it is true here?” Add 3–5 consequential Beliefs and connect them to the Moments they inform. Your first sketch is a hypothesis to investigate.
Choose the uncertainty that matters.
Ask: “Which Belief would hurt us most if we are wrong?” Prepare research from Journey’s + Add interaction or in Planner.
Start reaching out today.
Identify people who live this experience. Send targeted invitations, divide outreach across the Team, and follow up. Build enough conversations to hear different perspectives.
Stop before over-modeling. Start with a useful Journey sketch. Connect what you learn to the Mission or Business Model as the broader picture develops; you do not need to fill every box first.
02 / Know what counts
An interview is activity.
An observation is Evidence.
The Evidence · What you observed
“Four of six restaurant managers said shift-callouts, not no-shows, were their largest scheduling problem.”
Record who or what it came from and the Interaction that produced it. “We did six interviews” is not Evidence.
Now ask: Does this support, challenge, or change our Belief? Capturing Evidence does not automatically revise it. Your Team makes that judgment and records why.
- Interaction
- A research activity: an interview, observation, conversation, or investigation.
- Journey → Stage → Moment
- An experience, its phases, and the specific situations where behavior, friction, or value matters.
- Bet
- A commitment of resources under uncertainty, grounded in what you believe and have learned.
- Decision
- A durable Team choice: what you chose, why, and who decided.
The discovery flywheel
Keep the loop moving.
Each round sharpens your shared model—and helps you ask better questions in the next.
Outreach gives learning momentum.
Keep a steady volume of targeted invitations and follow-ups going. Many people won’t reply; one promising conversation is only a start. Build a pipeline that brings in different perspectives.
Agree on a weekly outreach commitment. Share the work, follow up, and keep the next conversations booked. If the calendar is thin, increase outreach now.
Move freely through the loop. Your Team decides what the Evidence warrants.
03 / One shared picture
Out of individual heads.
Into the Team’s working model.
Model
Make assumptions visible.
Bring your Team’s thinking into one place. Connect Beliefs to the parts of your model they affect, then revisit them as Evidence changes your understanding.
An empty section is an invitation to think—not a box you must fill.
Focus
Come back to what matters.
Once your Team has state, Focus surfaces what deserves attention and shows your research pace against the Discovery Cycle target. A gap is a prompt to step up outreach and book conversations.
Pace counts activity, not proof of learning. Keep research moving, then process what you hear.
Planner
Give uncertainty a place on the calendar.
Plan an Interaction with a clear learning objective. Who can help you understand this? What would change your mind? Then prepare and schedule it.
Screenshots: real TEST_TEAM_1 demo data. Examples in this guide are illustrative, not research findings.
04 / The recurring field guide
If you have…
10 minutes
Open Focus. Process a recent interview, send targeted outreach, or follow up with someone who hasn’t replied. Advance the highest-value item you can.
Keep learning and the conversation pipeline moving.
30 minutes
Review uncertain Beliefs and poorly understood Moments. Prepare research, build your contact list, and send the next batch of invitations. Update the Model when Evidence warrants it.
Turn important unknowns into upcoming conversations.
60 minutes as a Team
Review Focus. Compare Beliefs with recent Evidence. Ask what changed; update the Model. Resolve important Review Items and make explicit Bets or Decisions where you’re ready.
Agree on the next important uncertainty.
Before an interview
Open the relevant Journey Moment and Beliefs. Know which uncertainty the conversation should reduce. Prepare the Interaction.
Right after an interview
Use Capture Learning while it’s fresh. Record attributable observations, connect them to Beliefs, and ask: “What should we believe differently now?”
Before a Team meeting
Review Focus + Model. Begin with shared current state, not everyone’s private recollection.
Keep this nearby
Where do I go?
- Focus
- What deserves my attention now?
- Model
- What does our Team currently believe about the world?
- Planner
- Who are we learning from next, and when?
- Capture Learning
- What did we just learn?
- Explore
- Show me the full record and context.
- Agent Coming next
- Future capability—not part of today’s workflow.
Four operating rules
Learning is the work.
Write Beliefs before you prove them.
An explicit untested assumption is more useful than a hidden one.
Evidence is not activity.
Interview count is not learning. Capture what you observed.
Update the model when understanding changes.
The goal is not more records. It is a more accurate shared model.
Reach out consistently. Learn deliberately.
Build volume through targeted outreach and follow-ups. Aim each conversation at important uncertainty.
Your success check
Can everyone explain
what you need to learn next?
That’s a better sign than a full canvas.
- Important assumptions are visible as Beliefs.
- Consequential Beliefs are examined with Evidence.
- Steady outreach keeps research aimed at important uncertainty.
- Completed interviews are processed.
- Evidence changes the Model when warranted.
- Bets and Decisions reflect what you’ve learned.
Start with your Team’s current model.
Make the important unknowns visible.