The Field Guide
Seven domains. One mechanism.
The Field Guide is the operational surface of the book: the five Frustration Architectures the team is most likely to be living inside, plus the two practices — the Cross-Functional Listen and the Three Doors — that turn what they name into decisions.
Each domain has a public preview here. The diagnostic itself runs inside a workspace.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Architecture One
Decision Bottlenecks That Stall the Work
Decisions circulate through meetings and inboxes without resolution. The work waits for an owner who never quite emerges.
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Architecture Two
Approval Loops That Reset the Work
Work is reviewed by overlapping authorities; feedback contradicts earlier guidance. Care becomes risky.
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Architecture Three
Priority Churn That Looks Like Agility
Strategic priorities shift frequently and teams are told to remain flexible. The trade-offs go unnamed.
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Architecture Four
Role Ambiguity That Forces Informal Workarounds
Multiple roles believe they own the same outcome; other work falls between teams. Escalation becomes the operating model.
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Architecture Five
Unspoken Constraints That Invite Repeated Failure
Real constraints exist — capacity, budget, compliance — but no one is willing to name them. People stop asking.
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Practice
The Cross-Functional Listen
Thirty minutes. One visiting leader from another function. The same one question. The unvarnished version of the room.
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Decision discipline
The Three Doors
For each cluster of frustrations, commit to exactly one door — on the record, with a message back to the team.
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By Domain
Seven operational domains
The book organises frustration by the part of the business it lives in. Each domain page has a prose orientation and a diagnostic question.
People Practices
How hiring, performance, promotion, recognition, and exit work — and what they teach the rest of the team about whether good work is seen.
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Financial Processes
How budgets are set, defended, reforecast, and reallocated — and what those movements signal about whether finishing work matters.
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Technology
The systems, tools, and integrations the team uses to do their work — and the small, persistent friction that adds up to half a day a week.
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Operations and Quality
How the work is planned, sequenced, measured, and corrected — and whether quality is something the team protects or something they ship around.
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Customer-Facing Work
How the team is asked to interact with customers — and the gap between the customer the script imagines and the customer actually on the line.
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Legal and Compliance
How risk, contracts, and regulation shape the day-to-day — and whether the legal lens shows up at the start of the work or only at the end.
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Innovation
How new ideas are surfaced, funded, killed, and restarted — and whether the team experiences innovation as permission or as performance.
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The diagnostic itself runs inside a workspace.
Public preview ends here; the live tagging, clustering, and Three Doors decisions happen once you stand up a workspace.
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.