Every named concept the book introduces lives here. Search by term, or browse by section — the lexicon and the seven delivery phases.
AFD Lexicon
Adaptive Capacity
The organisation's ability to absorb scope changes, pivot direction, and respond to new information without derailing delivery timelines or quality standards.
Adaptive Planning
A planning approach that acknowledges uncertainty by producing detailed plans for the near term and directional plans for later phases, refining as confidence grows.
Bolted Intelligence
AI dropped on top of broken processes — copilots, chatbots, agents — without changing the underlying delivery. The default failure mode of 2025-era AI adoption.
Confidence Gates
Phase transitions that check understanding rather than the existence of documents. Six gates, one between each adjacent pair of phases; each asks a single question that must be answered with evidence before the phase is finished.
Continuous Alignment
The practice of maintaining stakeholder consensus through regular touchpoints, preventing the accumulation of misunderstandings that surface as late-stage change requests.
Decision Debt
The accumulated cost of deferred, unclear, or undocumented decisions that compound over time, creating ambiguity and rework in later phases.
Delivery Confidence
A measurable indicator of the team's certainty that the current trajectory will produce the intended outcome, tracked at each phase gate.
Delivery Velocity
The sustainable rate at which a team converts validated requirements into production-ready increments, measured not by speed alone but by the ratio of value delivered to rework incurred.
Discovery Tax
The hidden cost organisations pay when they skip structured discovery and proceed directly to building, resulting in rework, misalignment, and wasted investment.
Flow State
The optimal delivery condition where work progresses through phases without blockages, handoff delays, or context-switching overhead.
Phase-Gate Quality
The minimum quality threshold that must be met before work transitions from one phase to the next, ensuring each phase builds on a solid foundation.
Progressive Elaboration
The controlled refinement of requirements and designs as understanding deepens, governed by confidence gates rather than arbitrary deadlines.
Requirements Drift
The gradual divergence between documented requirements and actual stakeholder needs, typically caused by insufficient validation cadence or poor change control.
Scope Integrity
The discipline of maintaining alignment between agreed scope, available capacity, and delivery timeline — adjusting one when another changes.
Stakeholder Cadence
The rhythm of structured engagement with stakeholders, calibrated to each phase's needs — frequent during discovery and validation, focused during build.
Structured Discovery
A disciplined approach to research and stakeholder engagement that produces actionable insights rather than open-ended exploration.
The AFD Cycle
The complete seven-phase delivery lifecycle — Discover, Define, Design, Build, Validate, Deliver, Continuous — with confidence gates between each phase.
The Analysis Dividend
The compounding return on hours invested in understanding before committing to a solution. Programmes that pay the dividend up front spend twenty-eight person-months where unstructured ones spend a hundred and twenty.
The Build Trap
The tendency to measure progress by features shipped rather than problems solved, leading teams to prioritise output over outcome.
The Quiet Build
The condition where build is the least dramatic phase of a delivery — calm because the analysis upstream did its job. Drift is recorded, not absorbed; the team grows briefly, executes against decisions already taken, and shrinks again.
The Staffing Wave
The intentional team-shape pattern that bulges and contracts as work passes through phases — analysts lead discovery, architects lead design, builders lead build — rather than maintaining a fixed team throughout.
Validation Gap
The disconnect between what was built and what stakeholders expected, arising when validation is treated as a phase-end activity rather than a continuous practice.
Woven Intelligence
AI threaded into every phase of delivery, observed at every gate, owned by every persona. The state AFD points programmes towards.
AFD Phases
Build
Phase 4 — disciplined construction following the validated design, with flow-based task management and daily rhythm.
Continuous
Phase 7 — ongoing improvement, monitoring, and enhancement that feeds insights back into future delivery cycles.
Define
Phase 2 — convergent analysis that distils discovery findings into a clear problem statement, success criteria, and scoped requirements.
Deliver
Phase 6 — structured handover ensuring the solution reaches its intended users with proper documentation, training, and support.
Design
Phase 3 — solution exploration evaluating at least three approaches before selecting the architecture and documenting decisions.
Discover
Phase 1 — divergent research and stakeholder engagement to understand the problem space, context, and constraints before committing to a direction.
Validate
Phase 5 — verification that what was built matches what was designed and meets the defined success criteria.