Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions by hand
The method runs on paper.
DDS is a sequence of questions. The DDS Engine automates the questions. It does not own them. These four worksheets carry the same questions in full, so a person, a family, a classroom, or a town meeting can run the method with a pen, with no AI and no data center involved.
The terms on every sheet
A blueprint is one problem run through all eight phases. A driver is something that causes a problem or keeps it going. A tension is a choice between two things that both matter. A mechanism is how the plan works in practice.
The four sheets
One complete run, and three of its hardest parts.
The full blueprint sheet holds every required field of all eight phases. The other three go deeper on the moves most of us rush: finding the driver, naming the tension, and following a solution past its first success.
01 · All eight phases · 17 pages
The DDS Blueprint by Hand
The complete sequence in order, from naming the umbrella problem to choosing what happens next. Each phase produces something the next one needs, so the order is the method. It opens with the four rules we agree to before we begin.
Worked through with the San Francisco encampments blueprint, carried across every page so a complete run is visible.
Download the PDF →02 · Phase 2 · 10 pages
Deconstruction to a Viable Entry Point
From the symptom people see to the driver underneath it, and from the driver to the one part we can actually change. Each driver has to pass a four-part test: an actor, the incentive or constraint pressing on that actor, the behavior that results, and the loop that keeps it stable.
Encampments throughout, sewer spills on the driver test, and the abortion ladder on the climb upstream.
Download the PDF →03 · Phase 3 · 10 pages
Finding the Dialectic Tension
From “we keep arguing” to a named tension with a position inside it. A tension does not count as named until both poles have been stated as something worth protecting. The sheet ends with the room: where the people who have to carry the solution already sit.
Worked through with the immigration blueprint, from the argument as it arrives to the first step the room can hear.
Download the PDF →04 · Phases 5, 7 and 8 · 10 pages
The Fractal Map by Hand
What one solution sets in motion in the domains beside it, what one problem drags down with it, and what new problem a good solution leaves behind. Every link is written as a mechanism and given a confidence tier, never a percentage.
Farming to education, one missing bus route, and the elk blueprint’s two loops.
Download the PDF →How to use them
Print them, or fill them on screen.
Every sheet is a fillable PDF. The lines and checkboxes take typing as well as ink.
Each page stands alone. A page carries its own heading and a line of direction, so pages can be printed singly, handed around a table, and worked by different people at once.
A few words per line is the expectation. We write in phrases on the lines and keep full sentences for the boxes that ask for them.
The quality tests are on the page. The checks the Engine runs on itself appear as checklists we run on our own answers: the driver test, the threshold for naming a tension, the kill switch that has to be decided before the work starts.
The worked examples come from published blueprints. They show the depth we are after, not the answer. Where a page cannot be finished, that is information about the problem, not about us.
Paper is slower. The questions are the same.
What the Engine adds. It holds all eight phases at once, reads more than a group with a pen can, and catches a skipped field. That is cognitive load carried for us.
What paper keeps. Every answer is written by someone who will live with it. A tension weighed at a kitchen table or in a council chamber carries the weighting of the people in that room, and that weighting decides whether a solution can hold.
What both require. The opposing view stated fairly, costs named concretely, a mechanism someone can actually carry out, and no evidence invented to fill a gap.