Draw Before Explain

When dependencies are hard to hold in words, draw nodes and typed arrows first, and delete any edge you cannot define.

Planning a kitchen renovation, you keep trying to explain the plan to your spouse in words: the electrician has to come after demolition but before drywall, and the countertop people need cabinets installed first, but cabinet delivery depends on the measurements, which... and by the third dependency, both of you are lost. Some structures simply exceed what sentences can hold.

Draw Before Explain is a 30-second externalization for exactly this cue: dependencies too tangled to hold verbally. The procedure: before writing or saying the explanation, draw nodes and typed arrows. Nodes are the work items: demolition, electrical, drywall, cabinets, measurement, countertops. Arrows are typed relationships, and typing them is the discipline: "must finish before," not just a line. Then the enforcement rule that gives the heuristic its teeth: delete any edge you cannot define. If you can't say precisely why cabinets block countertops, the arrow comes off until you can. What emerges is usually clarifying in both directions: the true critical path stands out, and two arrows you'd have sworn existed turn out to be undefinable habit. It works when the conversation shifts from re-explaining to pointing. The spec's warning: a diagram is not evidence. Drawing a confident arrow doesn't make the dependency real; the picture organizes your claims but doesn't verify them.