Environment

Ask what ambient conditions the whole system sits in: rules, incentives, tooling, budgets, physical setting, market pressure. These aren't people or handoffs, they're the background that shapes every actor's behavior at once and usually goes unnamed because it never changes during the analysis.

Ask what ambient conditions the whole system sits in: rules, incentives, tooling, budgets, physical setting, market pressure. These aren't people or handoffs, they're the background that shapes every actor's behavior at once and usually goes unnamed because it never changes during the analysis.

Example

On the slipping project, you note that a company-wide hiring freeze started nine months ago and that a new security policy added a mandatory scan to every release. Neither shows up in any retrospective, yet both add roughly two weeks to every cycle.