ICPD v2.0 · Consulting Framework · Feb 2026
The DISCOVER Framework▌
Traditional design dictates every hallway, every door, every path a person walks. Agent-based design lays down the roads, the zoning, the services, and the vehicles — then lets autonomous actors navigate on behalf of citizens, by intent, not by hardcoded route. This is the methodology for the post-three-tier era.
The Eight Phases
- DDiscover
Capture personas, intents, context, constraints, and data capabilities through interviews, transcripts, and domain immersion.
- IIdentify
Score and prioritize intents by business value, frequency, risk, and feasibility. Select the MVP cohort.
- SSpecify
Author Persona Intent Documents — the atomic artifact binding persona, intent, tools, guardrails, and metrics.
- CConverse
Design conversation blueprints, clarification strategies, prompt templates, and escalation patterns.
- OOrchestrate
Architect the ecosystem: tool specs, agent personas, memory model, multi-agent collaboration, and security.
- VVitalize
Bring the design to life — MCP endpoints, agent runtime, planner, memory store, and test harness.
- EEvaluate
Safety review, red-team testing, user acceptance, and metrics validation. Iterate the PIDs on what you find.
- RRelease
Canary launch, progressive rollout, continuous monitoring, feedback loops, and PID evolution.
What We Design For
| We design for… | …over | |
|---|---|---|
| A city | over | a building |
| Intent | over | hardcoded routes |
| Agent character | over | a procedure manual |
| Judgment within guardrails | over | fixed call sequences |
| Persona Intent Documents | over | use-case documents |
| Lanes added alongside | over | roads torn out |
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The Dual-Persona Model
Design two personas, not one.
Traditional UX modeled only the human. In agentic systems the agent itself has character, judgment, and behavioral boundaries — and so it becomes a first-class design artifact in its own right.
You would never hire an employee by handing them a procedure manual on day one and saying “follow these steps.” You hire on role, values alignment, judgment, and escalation authority, then onboard with context and constraints. Agent persona design works the same way.
Hire the agent. Don’t script it.
Five Dimensions of Agent Persona
Role Identity
What the agent is in the user’s mental model — expert, coach, assistant, concierge, sentinel.
Autonomy Spectrum
How much it does without asking — from reactive confirmation to supervisory orchestration.
Reasoning Strategy
How it thinks — answer directly, plan and execute, clarify first, decompose, or observe and intervene.
Behavioral Boundaries
Its code of conduct — what it must, must never, and prefers to do, plus when it escalates.
Adaptation Profile
How it learns — within a session, across sessions, across the population, or deliberately not at all.
Two Principles That Change The Shape
Autonomy is contextual.
Autonomy is not a property of the agent alone. It is a property of the agent–persona–intent triple. The same agent acts independently for a power user’s routine task and asks permission for a newcomer’s identical one. The PID captures the difference.
The same agent, calibrated to who is asking.
Collaboration is itself an intent.
If individual agents are autonomous vehicles, orchestration is the traffic system — handoff protocols, capability signs, dispatch centers, accident response. ICPD models the coordination itself as intent: delegation, escalation, consensus, notification. Each is a designable PID.
Even the handoffs are designed.
ICPD invents no new atoms. It is the first methodology to assemble personas, intents, tool contracts, agent character, multi-agent collaboration, and memory governance into one coherent, repeatable process. The PID is the connective tissue that makes the assembly hold.
Stop drawing hallways. Start zoning the city.