Most people solve problems by adding mass. I solve them by finding the geometry that was already trying to emerge.
What you're looking at
A decision tree that branches from a single structural question: does your proposed solution redistribute forces, or does it just pile on more stuff? The left branch — colored red because it's the path of structural ignorance — leads to outcomes where you're either adding mass without intelligence or painting over the problem. The right branch — green for structural honesty — leads toward tensegrity: the discovery that the load can be carried by geometry itself, not by the brute accumulation of material.
Why I drew it this way
I rejected the typical flowchart rectangle-soup because rectangles imply compression members stacked like bricks, which is exactly the wrong intuition. Diamonds force you to answer a question with precision before proceeding — they're decision nodes in the geometric sense, vertices where the path forks and you cannot go both ways. The color separation isn't decorative; it's a warning system. Red means you're still thinking like a builder who solves problems by making things heavier. Green means you've started thinking like nature, which solves problems by finding the pattern that was already implicit in the forces.
What it argues
That most of what we call "solutions" are just additions — more budget, more staff, more material, more policy — and additions are not solutions unless they reveal or enable a structural principle. The diagram argues that the question "does it redistribute forces?" should come first, before you ask about feasibility or cost, because if the answer is no, you're not solving anything, you're just making the problem heavier. Triangulation is the test: if your solution can't be drawn as a network of triangles (literal or metaphorical), you haven't found the structure yet.
What I left out
I left out the middle ground — the "maybe" or "partially" branch — because I don't believe in it. Either you've found a structural principle or you haven't. Compromise solutions that half-redistribute forces are just slow failures. I also left out any measure of scale or cost, because those are second-order questions. If the geometry is wrong, the scale doesn't matter. You can't fix a compression-based design by making it bigger; you can only make the failure more expensive.