The full methodology

How does Henry
actually work?

Henry is operational design software. It starts with a conversation, delivers a structural diagnosis, and then designs your operations at the atomic step level — across three planes of specification that make AI delegation possible.

Four phases, one cycle

Discover. Design. Specify.
Evolve.

Not a line with a beginning and an end. A cycle that deepens every time your business changes.

01

Discover

Talk to Henry. A few conversational exchanges map your challenge across seven lifecycle stages and deliver a structural diagnosis. Free, no account required.

02

Design

Specialist agents map your operation — workflows, stages, and steps — starting from the gap your diagnosis identified. Your current-state process becomes a designed system.

03

Specify

Each step is designed across three planes: what it needs, how it's done, and what the stakeholder experiences. This three-plane specification is what makes delegation possible.

04

Evolve

Your Operation Map grows with your business. When fixing one problem reveals the next — and it always does — start a new conversation. The cycle continues.

Phase 4 connects back to Phase 1. Your Operation Map is a living system — designed to evolve as your business evolves.

Phase 1 · Discover

How does the
discovery work?

01

Who you are

Henry asks for your business name and location. Every diagnosis starts grounded in your specific context — not a generalized scenario.

"What's the name of your company, and where are you based?"
02

What you do

Your core product or service — the unit of value you deliver, and to whom. Henry captures the business model before touching the problem.

"What's your core product or service, and who are you selling it to?"
03

Which motion creates friction

The specific revenue or delivery stream to examine. Henry adapts the question to your business type and narrows to one operational motion.

"Which part of that operation creates the most friction right now?"
04

What's not working

Your problem, in your words. Henry doesn't suggest answers. Your language is the raw material for the diagnosis — the framework maps to your reality, not the other way around.

"What's not working the way it should?"

Diagnosis Card · Generated from conversation

B2B Software Company

Customer Renewal & Expansion Motion

Funnel

Awareness functional
Acquisition functional
Activation functional

Flywheel

Engagement undesigned
Retention ← primary gap
Revenue undesigned
Referral absent

Off-Ramp

Emergency Exit Path absent
Off-boarding Path absent

“Your pipeline is healthy — your Flywheel isn't. No sentinel system means accounts go quiet before renewal and nobody catches it early. You have a replacement cost problem, not a pipeline problem.”

The Diagnosis Card — your structural map that persists throughout the design process.

The diagnostic framework

What is the
AAAERRR framework?

Every business runs through seven lifecycle stages — Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Revenue, and Referral — organized across three zones. Every operational problem has a structural address within this framework. The diagnosis tells you where yours lives.

The Funnel
Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
The Flywheel
Engagement
Retention← HERE
Revenue
Referral
Off-Ramp
Emergency Exit Sentinel-triggered · Intervention → Graceful Close → Win-Back
Off-boarding Completion-triggered · Engagement → Retention → Revenue → Referral → Awareness

Funnel — Awareness to Activation

Awareness → Acquisition → Activation. A prospect becomes a committed customer. Linear, sequential, non-reversible. If it breaks here, you have a conversion problem.

Flywheel — Engagement through Referral

Engagement → Retention → Revenue → Referral. A committed customer becomes a sustained relationship. Most businesses have a Flywheel problem they're solving with Funnel dollars.

Off-Ramp — two required pathways

Emergency Exit: Triggered automatically by sentinel conditions. Activates Intervention with a time boundary. If recovery fails, Graceful Close executes. Win-Back routes back to Acquisition.

Off-boarding: Triggered at final delivery. A designed linear exit at peak goodwill. Referral advocacy re-enters the Funnel at Awareness and Acquisition.

Phase 3 · Specify

What are the three planes
of step specification?

Every atomic step in your operation is specified across three planes. This three-plane specification is what makes delegation — to people, AI agents, or automation platforms — structurally possible.

Work Plane

Intent, inputs, outputs. What this step accomplishes, what it consumes, and what it produces. The strategic "what" and "why" of every atomic unit of work.

Execution Plane

Who performs this step, how it gets done, when it fires, and in what mode — human, AI, or hybrid. The specification that makes delegation possible.

Experience Plane

What the stakeholder should feel. The emotional and perceptual design of each interaction — the layer most operations never specify but always need.

Why three planes?

Most operational frameworks stop at "what gets done" (the Work Plane). They never specify how it gets done or what it should feel like. Without all three planes, you can describe work but you can't delegate it — because the executor has no specification to follow.

What makes delegation possible?

A step specified across all three planes contains everything needed to hand it off. The Work Plane defines the outcome. The Execution Plane defines the method. The Experience Plane defines the quality bar. An AI agent — or a new hire — can follow this specification without tribal knowledge.

The deliverable

What do you actually get?

Not a report. Not a slide deck. A complete operational design — the blueprint for how your product or service gets delivered, from Awareness through Referral.

An Operation is OkHenry's term for the complete designed system around one product or service your organization offers. If you sell three products, you have three operations. Each one gets its own diagnosis, its own workflows, and its own step-level design.

A typical operation contains 7 workflows (one per lifecycle stage), 40–50 stages, and 200+ atomic steps — each specified across three planes with a 5×5 input/output contract. That's not a framework poster. That's an executable blueprint your team can follow, your AI agents can consume, and your automation platforms can implement.

Every step, fully specified

Intent. Inputs and outputs across five categories. Execution mode. Failure conditions and recovery paths. Stakeholder experience design. Each step contains everything needed to hand it off.

Human-readable and AI-digestible

The same operational design can be read as a document by your team, consumed as structured data by an AI agent, or accessed interactively inside OkHenry. One design, three modes of access.

Fit-assessed for delegation

Every step carries a recommendation: human-only, human+AI, AI+oversight, or fully autonomous. You know exactly which parts of your operation are ready for AI and which parts need a human.

Your words, your context

Nothing is generic. Your business name, your products, your customers, your language — everything in the design comes from the conversations you had with Henry. The blueprint reads like it was written by someone who knows your business.

Under the hood

Meet the agents

Behind the four phases, a team of specialized agents handles different aspects of your operational design. You don't need to know them — but here they are.

The foundation

What is the Deliberate Work
methodology?

Deliberate Work bridges two traditions that have never been combined in operational design: the Practice Tradition and the Systems Tradition.

The Practice Tradition teaches that skill is not repetition — it is intentional repetition with specified feedback loops. Applied to operations: work that isn't designed can't be improved, delegated, or scaled.

The Systems Tradition — from early industrial engineering through modern operational science — establishes that the design of work is separable from its execution. You can specify a step before anyone performs it.

Henry is the software that makes this design work tractable. The AAAERRR framework is the diagnostic tool that tells you which step to design first.

The Practice Tradition

Deliberate practice applied to operations. The step is the unit of improvement. Work that isn't designed can't be improved, delegated, or scaled.

The Systems Tradition

The design of work is separable from its execution. You can specify a step before anyone performs it. The specification is what makes delegation possible.

See it in action

Watch Henry work

A 3-minute walkthrough: from first conversation to designed operation.

Video coming soon

Related reading

For Founders → For Business Teams → For Consultants → AI Isn't Working? →

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