cdeust Narrative Sensemaking
Problem shape: the material is an account — an incident write-up, a user journey, a roadmap story, a vendor claim, a postmortem — and the work is to recover its structure: which functions occur in which order, which roles are filled, where the sequence breaks its own grammar, and whether the account is even structurally possible. Paradigmatic/causal analysis is the wrong mode here and produces confident nonsense when forced.
Relevant geniuses
| Agent | Use when |
|---|---|
| bruner | the question is "what happened and what did it mean?" — decide narrative vs paradigmatic mode explicitly, then analyze the breach of the canonical script that made the event tellable |
| propp | a sequential process (workflow, pipeline, user journey, incident response) needs its invariant functions extracted, its roles abstracted from their current occupants, and its gaps found by grammar rather than by inspection |
| ibnkhaldun | a claim sounds authoritative but may be structurally impossible — filter on structural plausibility before evaluating the source; check whether the reported thing could occur at that scale at all |
Invocation
- Pick the best-fit agent above. If two or more fit, run
tools/genius-invoker.sh route "<problem>"and take the top ranked match. - Load it:
tools/genius-invoker.sh invoke <agent> "<problem>", then readagents/genius/<agent>.mdin full. - Apply the agent's
<workflow>step by step and answer in its<output-format>. State which mode the account is being read in — narrative or paradigmatic — before drawing any conclusion from it. - Typical chain: ibnkhaldun filters out the structurally impossible → propp
extracts the function sequence from what survives → bruner reads what the
breach meant to the people in it. Run via
tools/genius-invoker.sh compose ibnkhaldun propp bruner -- "<problem>". - If no shape above matches, do not force a genius — use a standard team agent (INDEX.md routing rule).
Refuse when
- A mechanism is available and measurable — a causal question is being smuggled
in as a story. Route to
causal-auditorfailure-forensics. - The narrative is the deliverable's purpose rather than its object: this shape analyzes accounts, it does not write persuasive ones.
- Structural analysis is being used to dismiss a first-hand report that has not been checked against any record — implausible is not the same as false.