What gets in.
An archive of clever solutions is only worth having if something is kept out. 404 entries have passed this bar; 25 sit below it, kept as connective tissue but off the front page. Here is the whole test, so you can argue with it.
the one hard question
Can a working professional read this and see their own problem in it?
Every entry carries one sentence naming the business or professional situation it transfers to. The case itself need not be a business case — a battlefield surgeon, a nursing home, a high jumper and a city's rubbish all qualify — but the mapping has to be specific and real. "Teaches creativity" is not a transfer; "any operation where the person who can see the failure has no authority to stop it" is. If that sentence cannot be written honestly, the entry does not belong here however delightful it is.
four soft ones, weighed not tallied
- The aha
- The move, stated in twenty-five words, should still surprise someone who has the problem.
- The wrong door
- Does it attack a different door than the problem points at? Houston lengthened the walk instead of speeding the baggage.
- Disproportion
- The effect should be large against what it cost. A fake bus stop costs nothing and replaces locked wards.
- Not the standard answer — at the time
- Judged at the moment of the move, never against today. Inventors stay; followers do not. Singapore invented congestion pricing in 1975 and it is now taught everywhere — that is the achievement, not the disqualification.
what never gets in
- Best practice, playbooks, and anything whose honest summary is "they executed well" or "they spent more".
- Fabricated management legends. The toothpaste-factory fan, the Colgate tube-hole story, the Swanson TV dinner — famous, retold everywhere, and unsupportable. They are exactly what the source check exists to kill.
- Undocumented claims. Every entry names a real organisation, a year, an outcome, and two independent sources that open today. Folklore may be filed, but it is labelled as folklore.
- Cleverness aimed at deceiving the people it serves. Wartime deception is filed for its signalling logic; dark patterns are the sibling archive's material, not ours.
how the categories work
Nothing here was categorised in advance. The 24 problem-shapes are re-derived from the whole corpus at intervals — the entire archive is re-read cold, shapes are born, merged and retired, and every case is re-tagged. A case that fits no shape is filed unfiled, which is a normal state and not a defect. The taxonomy follows the evidence; it never gates it.
Found something wrong — a dead source, a number that does not hold, a case that is really just standard practice? Tell us. Corrections are the cheapest way to make this archive worth trusting.