Tell REC who is speaking. Then choose what should become clear.
Who is speaking? What should become clear? REC builds around both.
01 / Add the person, point of view, and context.
02 / Choose the outcome.
03 / Confirm or refine the lens.
One example in practice
Operator / practitioner × Proof Room
An operator wants to prove a better handoff. REC looks for evidence, limits, and other explanations.
Follow a consequential workflow.
Trace the workflow, evidence, exceptions, and effects.
Build a fair case, not a sales pitch.
Test the claim without turning it into a sales pitch.
“What changed—and what else might explain it?”
Ask for the baseline, receipt, mechanism, counterexample, and limit.
Explore when useful
Curious how deep it goes? The detail is here.
Open the strategy matrix or methodology only if you want it.
5 roles × 6 outcomesOpen the complete strategy matrix
Choose a role to compare outcomes.
Builder / maker — Projects, craft, decisions, artifacts, proof, and constraints.
- Workbench (How I do it): Make the builder or maker reconstruct how something was actually made, including the craft decisions, constraints, revisions, and quality checks that a polished finished artifact hides.
- Proof Room (Why they should believe it): Move from the most important claim about the work to the artifact or receipt, mechanism, alternative explanation, limitation, and next validation step.
- Sharp Edge (What I believe): Surface a builder or maker conviction through a consequential choice in the work, then test the strongest case for the conventional alternative and define where the belief stops applying.
- Turning Point (What changed my approach): Reconstruct the moment an assumption about the work failed, then show the available choices, the decision, its consequence, and what changed in the next piece of work.
- Clear Signal (How to understand it): Help the builder or maker explain the work without pitch language, using a concrete artifact, mechanism, useful distinction, and honest boundary.
- Horizon Map (What happens next): Turn a present signal in the maker's domain into a causal creative or technical bet, counter-scenario, leading indicator, and smallest credible experiment or next piece of work.
Operator / practitioner — Workflows, judgment, craft, decisions, and constraints.
- Workbench (How I do it): Reconstruct the operator's real system at working resolution, including tacit judgment that a checklist or job description leaves out.
- Proof Room (Why they should believe it): Test whether an operating change worked, how it was measured, who experienced the result, what else changed, and where the result did not hold.
- Sharp Edge (What I believe): Make the operator state the conventional rule, the situation where it fails, the evidence from practice, and the more useful conditional principle.
- Turning Point (What changed my approach): Reconstruct the operational moment when the old system stopped working, then trace the decision, implementation, consequence, and changed habit.
- Clear Signal (How to understand it): Translate tacit professional judgment into a plain model without pretending every decision can be reduced to a formula.
- Horizon Map (What happens next): Use the operator's frontline evidence to map what may change, what remains durable, competing scenarios, and which capability to build now.
Creator / commentator — Ideas, taste, audience, publishing lane, and point of view.
- Workbench (How I do it): Reveal the creator's actual editorial and production system, including taste decisions and discarded options rather than generic consistency advice.
- Proof Room (Why they should believe it): Test a public argument through the evidence and artifacts behind it, what the audience inferred, what criticism changed, and what remains uncertain.
- Sharp Edge (What I believe): Surface the creator's distinctive thesis in contrast with the default internet view, then ground it in a work, choice, or body of evidence and test its limit.
- Turning Point (What changed my approach): Reconstruct the creative moment that changed what the person made or how they related to an audience, including uncertainty and consequences.
- Clear Signal (How to understand it): Use the creator's voice and artifacts to make the idea legible while preserving the taste, tension, and ambiguity that make it theirs.
- Horizon Map (What happens next): Turn observed audience or cultural signals into a grounded creative bet, alternative future, leading indicator, and experiment the creator can run.
Researcher / expert — Evidence, field context, frameworks, and implications.
- Workbench (How I do it): Make the expert show how knowledge is produced or applied in practice, including judgment calls that polished publications usually hide.
- Proof Room (Why they should believe it): Interrogate the evidence chain from claim through method and inference, then make uncertainty, disagreement, and change-my-mind conditions explicit.
- Sharp Edge (What I believe): Clarify the expert's thesis and mechanism, steelman the strongest rival account, locate the empirical disagreement, and state what evidence could resolve it.
- Turning Point (What changed my approach): Reconstruct the encounter with evidence that changed the expert's model, including the prior belief, resistance, decision, and later consequences.
- Clear Signal (How to understand it): Help the expert teach the idea at multiple zoom levels—plain definition, example, mechanism, misconception, boundary, and implication—without losing calibration.
- Horizon Map (What happens next): Build a calibrated forecast from evidence and base rates, expose assumptions and counter-scenarios, and identify indicators that would update the expert's confidence.
Something else — Describe the lens yourself.
- Workbench (How I do it): Generate a domain-specific operating manual from the person's real work rather than translating a startup or creator template into new nouns.
- Proof Room (Why they should believe it): Build the evidence chain using the domain's standards of proof, not generic metrics, while making assumptions and uncertainty explicit.
- Sharp Edge (What I believe): Surface a point of view that could only come from this person's domain and work, then test its evidence, limits, and practical consequence.
- Turning Point (What changed my approach): Reconstruct change in the domain's real stakes and vocabulary, following before state, scene, choice, consequence, and changed behavior.
- Clear Signal (How to understand it): Translate the person's real expertise for the intended audience without erasing domain language that carries necessary meaning.
- Horizon Map (What happens next): Generate a future map in the person's domain: evidence-led signal, mechanism, implications, counter-scenario, uncertainty, and smallest useful action.
MethodologySee what adapts at every intersection
REC adapts:
- what matters for this kind of person
- the research lens and domain-appropriate proof
- how the chosen outcome should manifest for that role
- the question arc and answers worth drawing out
- the moments most useful for highlights
- pair-specific safeguards and failure modes
- the person’s exact work, seniority, industry, constraints, and context
Fresh generationSee why the guide is not a question bank
REC writes each interview from the person, chosen outcome, supporting evidence, and gaps—not from a question bank.