Chapter 4: Step 1 — Identifying What's Really Happening (D')

The Three Pages in Her Notebook

A Tuesday morning leadership meeting. Seven people around a glass table on the fourteenth floor. The CEO, the CFO, the COO, the Head of Technology, the Head of Operations, the Head of People — and Sarah, who runs Customer Experience.

The agenda item is a proposed restructure of the customer-facing teams. The COO has just finished walking the group through it.

Sarah has reservations. Two of them are serious. She's been thinking about this since the pre-read landed in her inbox on Sunday evening, and she has, open on her lap, three pages of structured concerns in her own handwriting.

The CEO looks around the table. "What do we think?"

The CFO speaks first — broadly supportive, one question about cost. The Head of Operations follows — supportive with caveats. The Head of Technology has a specific objection, which the COO addresses cleanly.

Then a pause.

The CEO looks at Sarah. "Sarah?"

She glances down at her notebook and ignores her notes.

"It looks well thought through. I think we should proceed."

The meeting moves on.

When Sarah and I went through her week in our session that Friday, this was the meeting she wanted to talk about. Not because anything went wrong — by every visible measure, it went well. The restructure was approved. Sarah was, by every observable measure, a constructive presence at the table.

But three pages of concerns had gone home with her on Sunday evening, sat in her notebook through the meeting, and gone home with her again on Tuesday afternoon. None of them were spoken.

"This keeps happening," she said. "Every leadership meeting. I have things to say. I don't say them. I leave feeling like I wasn't really there."

In Chapter 3 we worked through Sarah's complete cloud. We named her current state — staying quiet in leadership meetings to maintain harmony — and walked from there all the way through to her breakthrough. That walk-through showed you the method at full speed.

This chapter slows down to the first step of that walk-through and looks at it properly. Because how you arrive at D' shapes everything that follows.

Why the Starting Point Matters

In the Perry Approach, we call the current state D' (pronounced "D-prime"). It's the behaviour, pattern, or situation you want to change. And it's always where we begin.

This might seem obvious. Of course you start with where you are. But watch what most people do.

They start with where they want to be.

"I want to be confident."

"I want work-life balance."

"I want to delegate more."

"I want to stop procrastinating."

These are all future states — versions of D, not D'. And starting with them creates a subtle but devastating problem: it treats your current reality as simply wrong.

When Sarah says "I want to speak up in leadership meetings", she's implicitly saying my current way of being is a problem to be eliminated. But as we discovered in Chapter 1, your current behaviour isn't random. It's not weakness or failure. It's a solution — a sophisticated, intelligently-designed solution to needs you aren’t fully acknowledging.

This is what Goldratt called a policy constraint. Policies and rules in organisations are rarely arbitrary. Each one was, at the time it was written, an intelligent solution to a real problem. The problem is long forgotten. The rule lives on. And what was once protection becomes constraint.

Late in his career, Goldratt himself looked past the policy manual. In Isn't It Obvious? — his business novel set in retail — he wrote:

"What I have tried to show in this book is that the formal system is not really the most important thing in the company. The informal system is even more strong in terms of what makes a company. The friendship, the relationships, the harmony, that is what makes the company into a big company or a small company."

The formal system is the written rules. The informal system is the unwritten ones. Goldratt named the territory and ranked it correctly — the unwritten rules matter more — but the tools he left us, including the policy-constraint idea, were still pointed at the written layer. The unwritten ones need a different instrument.

The unwritten rules are harder to see and far more powerful. Nobody documented them. Nobody trained anyone on them. They were absorbed, not taught. And once absorbed, they govern behaviour with a force no written policy can match — because they live inside the person, not inside a document.

This is where most continuous improvement methodologies go quiet. They'll map a value stream, identify a bottleneck in a process, apply the focusing steps — but the moment the constraint is an unwritten rule living inside someone's head, they have no tool for it. They cannot map what was never written. They cannot reform what was never declared.

The Perry Approach does not work on the written rules. It works on the unwritten ones.

Sarah's unwritten rule — senior people's views are the room's view, and disagreeing breaks the room — is not in any policy document. No one ever taught it to her. No induction module covered it. And yet she has obeyed it in every leadership meeting for three years. David's unwritten rule — the standard isn't really met until I've personally checked it — is not in any role description. Nobody told him to believe it. And yet he has reclaimed every delegated piece of work he has ever attempted, for fifteen years.

A person is a system of rules — some written, most unwritten. Behaviours, policies, beliefs, habits, procedures — they all begin as answers. They become problems when the circumstances change and we stop asking what they were originally protecting.

D' is where we start because D' is where the unwritten rule is doing its work. We can see the behaviour. We cannot yet see the rule. The rest of the cloud is the route from one to the other.

Starting with D' says something different. It says: Where I am makes sense. I've arrived here for good reasons. Now let's understand those reasons — so I can choose something different.

The Art of Seeing What's Actually There

Sarah didn't have a "confidence problem" or an "assertiveness problem." She had a set of specific behaviours:

• Staying silent when the room moves on after her name has been called
• Hedging her contributions when she does speak ("It might just be me, but…")
• Agreeing with the position the most senior person in the room has already expressed
• Bringing written concerns into meetings and ignoring them
• Checking informally with one or two people after a meeting to test whether her reservations would have been welcome

Each of these is observable. Each is concrete. And each, as we'll discover, is serving a purpose.

This distinction matters enormously.

"Lack of confidence" is a judgement — it explains nothing and changes nothing. But "agreeing with the position the most senior person has expressed" is a behaviour we can work with. I can ask: When did this start? What happens if you disagree? What are you afraid will happen in that exchange?

The first rule of identifying D' is this: describe behaviour, not character.

Character labels feel true. They become part of our identity story. But they're useless for transformation because they're too abstract to change and too total to challenge. I lack confidence applies to everything. I defer to whoever spoke last is something you can actually do differently.

The Three Questions

When helping someone identify their D', I ask three questions in sequence.

Question 1: "What would I see?"

If I followed you around with a camera, what behaviour would I observe? Not what you think, feel, or believe — what you do.

This forces concrete, observable description. "I'm anxious" becomes "I check my phone every few minutes." "I'm overwhelmed" becomes "I say yes to requests without checking my calendar." "I'm stuck" becomes "I open the document, stare at it for ten minutes, then switch to something else."

For Sarah, "I lack a voice in leadership meetings" became "When the CEO calls my name, I look at my notebook, ignore it, then I agree with what's already been said, and then the meeting moves on."

Question 2: "When does it happen?"

Behaviours have contexts. Sarah doesn't stay quiet everywhere — she's articulate in one-to-ones, decisive with her own team, comfortable with customers. She stays quiet specifically in leadership meetings, and most particularly when the CEO is in the room and an opinion is being formed in real time.

Understanding the context reveals the pattern. And patterns contain intelligence.

Question 3: "What's the pattern over time?"

Is this new, or have you been doing it for years? Is it consistent, or does it come and go? Does it happen more under certain conditions?

Sarah had been doing this since she was promoted to her current role three years earlier. The pattern intensified when stakes were highest — restructures, budget conversations, anything where she would be visibly disagreeing with the COO or the CEO.

These three questions transform vague dissatisfaction into precise description. And precise description, clarity, is the foundation for everything that follows.

The Symptom Trap

Here's where many people go wrong: they mistake symptoms for D'.

A symptom is something you experience — a feeling, a result, a consequence. In the Perry Approach D' is something you do — a behaviour, an action, a pattern.

Consider these:

• "I'm exhausted" (symptom) vs. "I work until midnight most nights" (D')
• "I feel disconnected from my team" (symptom) vs. "I eat lunch at my desk" (D')
• "My inbox is overwhelming" (symptom) vs. "I respond to every email the moment it arrives" (D')
• "I leave meetings feeling like I wasn't really there" (symptom) vs. "I stay quiet when I disagree" (D')

Symptoms are useful — they signal that something needs attention. But they're not where you start the cloud. If you build your cloud around "I leave meetings feeling like I wasn't really there", you'll get nowhere. Build it around "I stay quiet when I disagree" and suddenly you can ask: What does staying quiet give me? What would I lose if I spoke?

David, the Other Side of the Same Step

You met David in Chapter 1. The COO of a major airline, 7:30 PM in his London office, "I know I should delegate more, but…" You watched him discover that his D' wasn't "failing to delegate" — it was something more specific:

I set delegation up cleanly. I brief my people. I get everything ready. And then I take it back.

Notice how different that is from where he started. Failing to delegate is the absence of a behaviour. Setting delegation up and then taking it back is two actions in sequence — an active, repeating, observable pattern.

That's the same step Sarah is making in this chapter, with a different texture. Where Sarah's D' is about naming the absence — what she isn't doing in the meeting — David's is about naming the contradiction: the action and its undoing.

Different textures, same step.

In David's case, the three questions surfaced the pattern within a few minutes of conversation:

• What would I see? "I brief my team. I set everything up. They start the work. I start thinking about how it could go wrong. I take it back."
• When does it happen? "Anything that goes to the board. Anything that's externally visible. Anything where my name is attached."
• What's the pattern over time? "Every project I've delegated. Every time. For years."

What stops most people identifying a D' this clean isn't the lack of information. David had all of it. What stopped him was that he had been calling this pattern "my delegation problem" — and the label was protecting him from seeing the behaviour underneath. Once we stripped the label off, the pattern was visible immediately.

David's first-pass D': I take back work after setting up delegation.

It's a behaviour you could film.

One Behaviour, Many Faces

Sometimes when I ask about D', people give me a list.

"I check email constantly. I say yes to everything. I don't take lunch breaks. I work weekends. I never fully switch off."

These aren't five separate problems. They're manifestations of the same underlying pattern. And we need to find the essence.

"If you could only pick one of these — the behaviour that's most central, most characteristic, most you — which would it be?"

Often, after reflection: "Saying yes to everything. That's where it all starts. The email checking is because I've said yes to too much. The weekends are catching up on what I've agreed to. The no-lunch is trying to fit it all in."

D': I say yes to requests as soon as they're made.

Now we have a cloud we can work with. The other behaviours aren't ignored — they'll show up as we explore benefits and assumptions. But we start with the core pattern.

This doesn't mean you can never work on multiple D's. If you truly have separate patterns serving different needs, build separate clouds. More often, what looks like multiple problems is one pattern expressing itself in different ways.

The Specificity Spectrum

D' needs to be specific enough to work with, but not so specific it misses the pattern.

Too vague: "I'm bad at speaking up"

• This is a character judgement, not a behaviour
• What specifically do you do (or not do)?

Too specific: "Last Tuesday in the 9 AM leadership meeting I had three pages of notes on the restructure proposal and said 'It looks well thought through' instead"

• This is an incident, not a pattern
• What's the repeated behaviour this represents?

Just right: "I stay quiet in leadership meetings, particularly when I disagree"

• Observable behaviour ✓
• Repeated pattern ✓
• Specific enough to explore ✓
• General enough to represent other instances ✓

Finding this level takes practice. The test is simple: Does this description capture what you repeatedly do? Could you observe yourself doing this multiple times?

The Positive Phrasing Principle

Here's a subtlety that matters more than it seems: phrase D' as what you do, not what you don't do.

Consider the difference:

• "I don't speak up in meetings" vs. "I stay quiet in meetings"
• "I don't take breaks" vs. "I work continuously"
• "I don't set boundaries" vs. "I say yes to requests"
• "I don't delegate" vs. "I take work back from my team"

Both versions describe the same reality. But "I stay quiet" is something you actively do. "I don't speak up" is an absence, a void, a failure.

This distinction matters because you can only explore benefits of something you're doing. What benefits does not speaking up provide? The question barely makes sense. What benefits does staying quiet provide? Now we can investigate.

When you phrase D' positively, you're acknowledging: I am doing something. It's purposeful. It's intelligent. Now let's understand it.

The Purpose-Smuggling Check

Sarah's first-pass D' from Chapter 3 was staying quiet in leadership meetings to maintain harmony. It's behavioural, observable, a single pattern, positively phrased. Four disciplines met. But there's a fifth — and it's the one that catches even experienced practitioners.

When we describe our own behaviour, we want to explain why we do it. So we slip the reason inside the D' statement itself:

• "I stay quiet to maintain harmony"
• "I take work back because I want the standard met"
• "I say yes to keep things running smoothly"
• "I take on more than I can sustain regardless of personal cost"

Each italicised clause is the purpose behind the behaviour — and purpose belongs in C (the hidden benefit of D'), not in D' itself. When you smuggle C into D', three things go wrong:

1. The cloud collapses into tautology. D' explains itself, so there's nothing left to explore.
2. You pre-empt the discovery. The whole point of building C carefully is to surface what the behaviour is actually protecting. If you've already named it, you've cut off the inquiry before it starts.
3. You miss alternative benefits. A behaviour usually serves more than one need. Naming the obvious purpose blinds you to the others.

The discipline is simple: describe what you do, not why you do it.

Save the why for C. Let D' be a clean description of behaviour — the what, never the why.

Common D' Patterns

In my work, certain D' patterns appear again and again. Perhaps you'll recognise yourself.

The Over-Deliverer

D': I accept new work whenever it's offered.

Symptoms: Exhaustion, resentment, health issues, deteriorating relationships

The Silent Expert

D': I stay silent in discussions until I'm directly invited to speak.

Symptoms: Feeling undervalued, watching less capable people get promoted, frustration

The Rescuer

D': I step into my team's work in progress and take it over.

Symptoms: Team dependency, resentment of being needed, inability to focus on strategic work

The Perfectionist

D': I revise and refine my work repeatedly before submitting it.

Symptoms: Missed deadlines, last-minute stress, opportunities passing by

The Pleaser

D': I agree with the person in front of me, adjusting my position to match theirs.

Symptoms: Losing sense of self, being walked over, quiet resentment

The Controller

D': I reclaim my team's work before it goes out.

Symptoms: Bottlenecks, underdeveloped team, exhaustion, inability to scale

The Avoider

D': I find reasons to postpone hard conversations.

Symptoms: Problems escalating, crisis management, damaged relationships

David's pattern is a variant of The Controller. Sarah's sits between The Silent Expert and The Pleaser — she has the expertise to contribute and the disposition to defer. Most real D's don't fit one archetype cleanly; they live at the meeting point of two or three.

If you see yourself in these patterns, you're not alone. They're common because they work — each protects something valuable. The question isn't whether the pattern is "bad", but whether it's still serving you. We'll explore that in Chapter 7.

Where Sarah and David Land

Through the rest of our session, Sarah and I refined her D' against the five disciplines. The starting point was the Chapter 3 version:

Staying quiet in leadership meetings to maintain harmony.

Two refinements. First, to maintain harmony is the purpose, not the behaviour. We strip it off — it'll come back later when we build C.

Staying quiet in leadership meetings.

Closer. But it's an absence, not an action. What is Sarah actually doing when she's "staying quiet"? Looking at her notebook. Agreeing with what's been said. Letting the meeting move on. The active version:

Sarah's clean D': I stay quiet in leadership meetings and defer to whoever spoke last.

That's behavioural, observable, a single core pattern, positively phrased, free of purpose. A reader could picture exactly what this looks like. Sarah could mark days on a calendar by it.

David's refinement runs the same way. His Chapter 1 first pass — I set delegation up cleanly, then take the work back — passes all five disciplines. What's missing is one piece of specificity from earlier in the chapter: when does this end? A small addition resolves it:

David's clean D': I set up delegation cleanly, then take the work back before completion.

The before completion is what makes it observable as a pattern — David's team can name the moment when he reclaimed each piece of work. That moment is the D' in action. This still needs work but it is good enough to move forward.

Two clean (ish) D's. Different shapes — Sarah's about deferring, David's about reclaiming — but the same five disciplines met. Either could now hold the rest of a cloud.

What Good Looks Like

You now have five disciplines for crafting a clean D':

1. Behaviour, not character — describe what you do, not who you are.
2. Observable, not internal — describable as action, not interpretation.
3. Single core pattern — one D', not a list.
4. Positively phrased — what you do, not what you don't do.
5. Free of purpose — the what, never the why.

Hold a candidate D' against all five before moving on. Most people get the first three right on the first pass. The fourth and fifth are where the craft lives.

The cloud can now do its work.

Chapter Reflection

Before moving to Chapter 5, take time to identify your D':

1. What pattern or behaviour have you been trying to change without success? Write down the first answer that comes to mind, even if it's vague.
2. Apply the three questions:
• What would someone see if they watched you?
• When and where does this happen?
• What's the pattern over time?
3. Run your draft against the five disciplines from What Good Looks Like.
4. Write your D' statement:

"I [observable, repeated behaviour]…"

Don't worry about getting it perfect. D' often refines as you work through the cloud. What matters is starting with concrete behaviour rather than abstract aspiration.

What's Next

In Chapter 5, you'll learn to define D — the future state that sits opposite your D'. Getting this right keeps the door open for whatever breakthrough the process reveals. Everything you need is in the next chapter. You can work through it on your own, at your own pace.

Support for this step

Crafting a clean D' — behavioural, observable, positively phrased, free of purpose — is the foundation everything else rests on. Most people get close on the first pass and then discover the fifth discipline is harder than it looks. This is the step where a second pair of eyes makes the difference between a D' that holds and one that quietly smuggles in the answer.

RIC — the Rapid Improvement Coach is an AI agent built specifically to support you through the process. RIC scrutinises your D' against all five disciplines, catches purpose-smuggling before it takes root, and asks the three questions — What would I see? When does it happen? What's the pattern? — until the behaviour underneath the label becomes visible. You choose which formulation rings true; RIC holds the disciplines and does not let you settle too early.

The Rising Above the Clouds course includes RIC, chapter assignments that coach you through each step with your own cloud, and weekly Conflict Club sessions where the method comes alive with real conflicts and real people.

Rising Above the Clouds - The Course