Great handle, lagrange77. You may find "Cracked It!: How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants" useful: https://link.springer.

Great handle, lagrange77. You may find "Cracked It!: How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants" useful: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-89375-4 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-89375-4 I haven't read it but only skimmed the contents and it looks close to the process we converged toward through systematic and continuous refining. Related reading and concepts: "Design Thinking", "The Complete Problem Solver", Clayton Christensen et al. work, "job to be done", "non-consumption", etc. What I call "inverse framing": a client asks you to predict something 48h before it happens. 48h sounds arbitrary and you ask "Why 48h? Why not 30h" and get a reply, then you ask "At what point a prediction is useless to you? What is too late?" and they say "Even if you predict it 2 minutes before, there are still things we can do to mitigate damages and we have processes for that", so now you helped your colleagues by going from a 48h prediction to a 2 minute prediction, but even more useful, you have a better understanding of the constraints and the people impacted by that. You also ask "What's the cost/impact of a false positive? What's the cost/impact of a false negative?". Possible answers: human loss, environmental catastrophe, $100MM in loss, a $9B piece of infrastructure blows up, or a combination of these. or you wake up an engineer or attract the attention of someone on duty.