discovery-synthesislisted

# Discovery synthesis ## Core principle Synthesis is the traceable path from a thing a person said or did to a claim a team acts on. Every step of that path stays auditable. If a reader cannot get from a finding back to the specific segments that produced it, the finding is an opinion with citations attached. The failure this prevents: reading the transcripts, forming an impression, and then selecting quotes that support the impression. That process feels like synthesis and is indistinguishable from it in the output. ## The pipeline ``` raw sources → segments → codes → categories → themes → opportunities → tree | | | | | | dated one idea labelled grouped named & customer & coded per unit with an by shared counted language, of meaning ID meaning sourced ``` Never skip from raw to themes. The middle is what makes the output auditable, and it is also what makes disconfirming evidence visible. ## Step by step **1. Inventory the corpus.** Source, type, date, participant code, segment, and the sampling frame that produced it. Sources with no provenance are excluded, not fixed. **2. Segment.** Cut into units of meaning. One idea per segment. Keep the verbatim text and a locator (participant code plus timestamp or line number). Never paraphrase at this step; the paraphrase becomes the quote later. **3. Code openly.** First pass, inductive: label what is the