One Question, Asked Six Times at Higher Resolution
A left-to-right wedge cut into six labeled chambers, dots thinning from thirty in the first chamber to one in the last, with the discarded dots falling below as hollow circles labeled "THE DISTRACTOR POOL."
The one idea
Clinical judgment is not six skills. It is one question, what matters now, asked six times at a finer grain each time. Recognize Cues, Analyze Cues, Prioritize Hypotheses, Generate Solutions, Take Action, Evaluate Outcomes. Each step's only legal input is the previous step's output. Judgment is not the recall of a right answer; it is the discipline of narrowing without dropping the cue that mattered.
Panel 1 · What narrows
Roughly thirty pieces of client data enter at the left. Three or four survive as relevant cues. Those cluster into two or three candidate explanations. One explanation takes priority. That priority produces a short action set. The action set produces a single measurable outcome you can check by name and by clock.
Panel 2 · Why it cannot be repaired late
A cue discarded at step one is not in the pool at step five. You cannot reach back for it, because your later options were built without it. The item writer knows this. Distractors are assembled from exactly the cues candidates throw away early, so the late correction you want is unavailable by construction, not by bad luck.
Panel 3 · Where the points are
In an unfolding case set the items map roughly one per step. That makes your weakness visible and repeatable. A candidate who is confident at Take Action and careless at Analyze Cues does not lose points randomly. They lose the same item position in every case, which is good news, because a predictable loss is a fixable one.
Watch outJumping straight from a cue to an action, with no hypothesis in between, is the single most common scoring loss in case sets, and it is the same move that treats one client's symptom as if it belonged to another client's problem.
Margin noteyou can't fix step 1 at step 5.
The introductory pass through the loop, one step per page, lives at → BOOK 01 · P9–P14. This page deliberately does not redraw it as a circle.
TakeawayThe six steps are one narrowing question, and each one can only work with what the step before it handed over.