Working across themes

A theme is cheap. You’re meant to have several running, including two that disagree with each other, and this chapter is how you get them and how you clear up afterwards.

Start a variant from one you have

When a theme is nearly right, you don’t have to choose between keeping it and changing it. Ask for a new theme with that one as its source: it starts from the same client evidence, appears in the sidebar beside the original, and both stay live.

Combine two into a third

Two lines of thinking that each solve half of something can become one that solves it. Ask for a theme combining them and what comes back carries evidence forward from both parents, and you confirm which of their moves come with it. It’s a reframing rather than a merge.

Sidebar · + Theme

Nuovo tema

Temi di origine

Opzionalmente inizializza da temi esistenti

The Quiet CoreWeekend Gathering KitchenStorage That Works

Detail panel · what it inherited

ThemesTheme

One House, Two Saturdays

Both parents wanted the same six hours of the same day. This one starts from that rather than from either room.

From The Quiet Core

From Weekend Gathering Kitchen

Evidence

Rename or remove one

Themes accumulate. Some turn out to be the same theme under two names, and some turn out to be nothing. Rename or delete one from the chat. There’s no archive for themes; only projects archive.

Chat · Mitchell Residence

Delete the Storage That Works theme.

Before I do: deleting Storage That Works also removes the two decisions inside it, the theme-scoped constraint on the island depth, its links to eleven pieces of evidence, and the gap raised against it last week. None of that comes back.

The evidence itself stays. It lives at project level and this theme only ever pointed at it, so nothing anyone said is lost. Say the word and I will go ahead.

Why you’re meant to have several

All 12 parts

Committing early is how you end up defending a decision you made before you understood the problem. The expensive part isn’t drawing the alternative. It’s admitting six weeks in that you were wrong, when the evidence was there in week one. Themes are cheap so you needn’t.