KAN › The method · lesson 2 of 7

Frame it with 6W

Before anyone estimates or builds, the work is framed: what result matters, to whom, where and when, and what it is worth. KAN asks the questions in a fixed order and stores six of the answers.

Teaches from kan/6w-sdmr.md, “Frame the result: 5W1H + Value”, and kan/rung-delivery.md, “Start from value: 6W”.

The rule

“The frame is 5W1H + Value, five Ws, one H, plus Value, answered in this order.” The six stored answers, the 6W, are:

1. What: the observable outcome and its boundary, distinguished from implementation activity.
2. Why: the need and its evidence.
3. Who: requester, consumer, executor, decision owner and acceptance owner, named without inventing current assignments.
4. Where: the affected paths and systems, the authoritative story, the decision record and where the evidence will be.
5. When: dependencies, sequence, the next checkpoint, and dates where they mean something.
6. Value: the capability gained, loss avoided or uncertainty resolved for the consumer, and how they will see it.

How is answered too, but it is not stored in the story: “a contract names the result, not the method, so the story stays valid when a better approach is found.” It starts as a first idea and is decided in SYNTHESIZE; the decision goes in the implementing commit or the story's decisions section.

Value comes last “because the other answers establish its recipient and delivery conditions.” And when the Value is a guess, “say so: proceed with small, reversible work and show the guess; ask before large or irreversible work.”

Try it

In the EchoEdu delivery

Open specs/edu/stories/edu.19.aus.md, the Agile Agent Workflow migration story. Its story table has exactly the six rows, in order. Its Who row names the lane, the lead, the gate and the reviewer. Its Value row says what a learner and an agent can do afterwards: “A learner can finish this entire course on the new host, and an agent can obtain grounded learning guidance for every same page without losing course content or design.” There is no How row. The approach, building the repository edition and listing every page changed against the live site, sits in the story's separate decisions section, where a better approach could replace it without rewriting the promise.

Check yourself

1. Why is Value answered last rather than first?
2. Where does the chosen approach go, if not in the 6W table?
3. A request asks you to ship it. What should the frame do with a word that can be read two ways?

Previous: A rung delivers one consumer value · Next: Expose the uncertainty

Teaches ecd/kan at 2d1b5c8e, 25 October 2026.