00 · Start with the reasoning
Colabmo development course A-P02 · Introduction A-P03
Learning objective: Recognize a first principles redesign argument and identify the evidence needed to support it.
What is First Principles Thinking?
First Principles Thinking (FPT) is a way of solving problems by examining their foundations. You break a problem into its essential parts, identify what you know and what must be achieved, then build a solution from those foundations. Instead of accepting the current process as the starting blueprint, you ask: What is this process here to accomplish, and what is actually necessary to accomplish it?
In business, those foundations include supported facts, necessary functions and applicable obligations. Assumptions remain visible and open to testing. A familiar practice, a popular tool or a senior person’s opinion may be useful input, but each needs a reason to become part of the design.
Why is it powerful?
Processes accumulate forms, handoffs, approvals and workarounds. Improving each step can leave the underlying arrangement unchallenged. FPT gives a team permission—and a disciplined method—to examine that arrangement.
- It expands the options: separating the required outcome from today’s method reveals other ways to achieve it.
- It sharpens decisions: tracing a proposal to its evidence shows where the reasoning is strong and where it depends on an assumption.
- It focuses experimentation: identifying the assumption most likely to make a design fail helps the team choose a useful test before committing to a larger change.
- It creates shared understanding: experts from different functions can examine the same purpose, constraints and tradeoffs.
A simple example
Imagine a request waits for three approvals. The usual question is, “How can we get those approvals faster?” FPT adds, “What decision does each approval make, what risk does it address, and what evidence does it need?” The answers might support parallel reviews, delegated decisions for routine cases, or keeping an approval that protects an essential control. Each option must still satisfy the applicable requirements and be tested.
The power of FPT is making choices explainable and alternatives testable. It does not guarantee a breakthrough or remove uncertainty. In this course, you will practise turning “We have always done it this way” into a clear outcome, defensible reasoning and a reviewable experiment.
How to use this course
For process owners, subject-matter experts, team leaders and facilitators. Complete the lessons in sequence and use the participant worksheets. Core learning and practice totals 11 hours 10 minutes, including the ten-minute knowledge quiz. Four optional coaching sessions add four hours. Allow 30 minutes of preparation and additional breaks.
Preparation: read the companion article, choose a bounded process, and bring a non-sensitive standard transaction and exception. The later resource section contains eleven worksheets and a facilitator guide. The guide contains capstone model responses; complete your own reasoning before consulting them.
Read the companion article · Open the participant workbook · Open the facilitator guide
A team is asked to make customer onboarding faster. Its first suggestions are familiar: add reminders, buy a workflow tool, or remove an approval. Each might help, but none yet explains what onboarding must accomplish or why the existing steps are necessary. First Principles Thinking begins by examining that foundation.
In this course, FPT means decomposing a problem into defensible premises and necessary functions, questioning inherited assumptions, and constructing a solution whose reasoning can be examined. A business premise is often conditional and revisable. A measured fact about last month is not a permanent law; an executive preference is not a fact; a contractual obligation is binding within its scope even though people could negotiate a different contract.
Aristotle discusses demonstration from primary premises in Posterior Analytics, Book I, Part 2. Business redesign uses a practical adaptation of that reasoning discipline, with explicit uncertainty and empirical tests. Colabmo’s six-stage working method below is a teaching framework, not an internationally standardized FPT method or a promise that deduction alone will solve organizational problems.
- Frame: define the outcome, boundary and decision.
- Decompose: identify the information, decisions and functions required.
- Ground: establish evidence, constraints and conditional principles.
- Rebuild: create distinct arrangements from those foundations.
- Test: expose the assumptions that could make a design fail.
- Learn: revise the reasoning and decide the next action.
The stages are iterative. A failed test can send the team back to its premises. You will produce an outcome brief, an evidence ledger, a functional model, alternative designs and a testable recommendation. Subject-matter experts own the business content. The facilitator owns the quality of inquiry and participation.
| Approach | Typical starting question | How it can contribute |
|---|---|---|
| Process optimization | How can this flow perform better? | Improve a design whose foundations still fit. |
| Root cause analysis | What explains this observed failure? | Test causes; it does not by itself reconstruct the required process. |
| Brainstorming or benchmarking | What possibilities or examples can we find? | Supply candidate mechanisms, which still need justification. |
| First principles redesign | What must be true and what must be achieved for any workable design? | Make inherited architecture open to examination. |
These approaches can overlap. The course assesses reasoning rather than loyalty to labels. A familiar solution can be well grounded; an unusual solution can rest on weak assumptions.
Practice
Use W1 to write one process you want to examine. Individually describe what its customer receives. Then underline every word that names a current system, job title or procedure. Decide whether each word belongs in the outcome or merely describes today’s method.
Check your reasoning
A team recommends automation because a competitor uses it. Has it demonstrated first principles reasoning?
Worked response
No. The example may suggest an option, but the team still needs the outcome, necessary functions, supporting premises, constraints and a test. Automation could ultimately be the justified choice.
Sources and further reading
The lesson sequence, cases, worksheets and assessment are original Colabmo development material. The sources below support specific background points; they do not validate the course or establish a universal FPT workshop standard. Accessed 9 October 2026.
- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book I, Part 2, translated by G R G Mure — reasoning from primary premises; philosophical background.
- NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, Appendix C — assumptions and requirements separated from implementation specifics; an adjacent discipline.
- Edmondson, 1999, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams — empirical association between psychological safety and learning behavior, not proof of this course’s effectiveness.
- NIST SEMATECH e Handbook, Choosing an experimental design — planning experiments and recognizing confounding; an adjacent evidence discipline.
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