CODER: Five Questions That Turn Any Problem Into a Plan
🔍 What Is It? It’s a five-step thinking loop that helps you understand what’s going on, decide what to do, see what happens, and get a little smarter every time you repeat it. CODER is a five-step thinking tool that grown-ups use whenever they face a problem, make a decision, or run a project. Each letter stands for one question you answer in order: What is the situation? Who is responsible? What are we going to do? What happened when we did it? What did we learn? Working through them in order stops people from jumping straight to solutions before they even understand the problem. The first two steps — Context and Ownership — are all about setting up clearly before anyone acts. Context means reading the room: what is already true, what is missing, and why this matters right now. Ownership means naming who is in charge of each piece, so nothing slips and nobody can say “I thought they were handling that.” The last step, Reflection, is what turns CODER from a simple checklist into a loop. After you see the Effect of your decision, you sit down honestly and ask: what worked, what did not, and what would we change? That answer becomes the new Context at the very start of the next cycle, so the team gets a little wiser every single time around. ...