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The framework, in depth

Three phases. One gap. Then it repeats. The rest is detail.

H³ is a cycle, not an event. Harvest opens the room, Hack builds the thing, Harness commits it to a real destination. Then a 3–6 month gap of real work follows, named owners carry adoptions through it, and the next Harvest inspects how far each one actually reached.

One layer deeper than the homepage: what each phase is for, why it has the shape it does, what you experience inside the room, and what the Sponsor takes away.

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The shape, at a glance

Three on-site days. One gap of real work. Then the next Harvest.

The H³ cycle: Harvest (half-day) flows into Hack (full day), into Harness (half-day). After three calendar days on site, a 3 to 6 month gap of real work follows, before the next Harvest opens the next cycle.
01 02 03
  1. 01

    Harvest

    ½ day

  2. 02

    Hack

    full day

  3. 03

    Harness

    ½ day

  4. ↻

    The Gap

    3 to 6 months in real work, then it repeats

Harvest

Half-day

Surface what people have already lived.

What it is

Harvest is a half-day Open Space session. The people closest to the work share what they've actually tried with AI: the wins, the stalls, the weird edges. Live demos are welcome. Slides are not. A Facilitator captures the themes onto a shared wall, in the speakers' own words.

Why this shape

Real adoption starts from inside the room, not from a strategy that flows down to it. By the time anyone outside writes a deck about "the AI opportunity," the people doing the work already know what is and isn't possible this quarter. Harvest exists to surface that knowledge before the day moves on.

In the room

You arrive into a room with no fixed agenda. You can call a session on anything you have tried, are stuck on, or are curious about. You can sit in on someone else's session and challenge their assumptions. You can show the thing you built last Sunday. Nothing is rehearsed. Nothing is performed for the Sponsor.

What the Sponsor sees

A Themes Wall in the participants' own words. Real questions and real opportunities, ready to feed the Hack day. The Sponsor sees the inside of the org for what it is, not what a steering-committee summary said it was.

Hack

Full day

Build, prototype, document, decide.

What it is

Hack is a full day. Self-organising teams take Harvest themes (and the fresh proposals that always show up overnight) and turn them into something demoable. Code. Prompts. Configs. Workflows. Drafts of guidelines. Comparative tests of two models on the same task.

Why this shape

An idea you can describe is not the same as an idea you can show. Adoption only sticks to things people have built, tried, and felt in their hands. Hack day refuses to settle for ideas. It insists on artefacts you can hold up at the end of the day and explain.

In the room

You pick a team or invent one. You spend the day building. The Coach drops in with prompt patterns, model tips, and hands-on help when a team is stuck. Lunch is short. Coffee is plentiful. By late afternoon every team has decided what they would say if someone asked, "and what should happen with this?"

What the Sponsor sees

Heterogeneous, concrete outputs at the end of the day. Not slides about possibility. Things people built today, that they can show working, and that they are willing to propose for a real destination tomorrow.

Harness

Half-day

Turn outputs into commitments, with names attached.

What it is

Harness is a half-day closeout. Each team presents what they made and proposes one of three destinations for it: a guideline update, an adopt-now decision the room agrees on, or a continue-exploring thread that survives the gap. Someone in the room steps up to be the named owner for each commitment.

Why this shape

Most workshops die at the demo. They produce energy, a few brilliant ideas, and zero follow-through. Harness exists because adoption is the thing that makes the previous three calendar days worth running at all. Without it, you have a thrilling event and the same blockers on Monday.

In the room

You show your team's output. You propose what should happen with it. Someone (sometimes you, sometimes not) volunteers to carry it forward. The Sponsor is in the room and confirms air cover, live, per decision: procurement help, security fast-track, time, budget. The room agrees, redirects, or kills with reason. Nothing leaves the room undecided.

What the Sponsor sees

A list of commitments with names attached. Decisions made out loud, in front of the people they affect. A clear difference between "we explored this" and "we are adopting this, and Maya owns it from here."

The Gap

3–6 months

Adoption happens here, not in the room.

What it is

The Gap is the three to six months between the on-site days and the next Harvest. Named owners carry their adopt-now decisions into the live system. Continue-exploring threads keep being explored. The Coach stays available alongside the owners. No new event, no new framework, just the work that converts decisions into how the org actually runs.

Why this shape

Adoption happens in production, not in a workshop room. Without a structured period for that work, the on-site days collapse into theatre: a portfolio of slides nobody implements, a wall of stickies nobody returns to. The Gap is what turns three on-site days into real organisational change. It is also the bet the Sponsor is funding; everything before it is preparation.

In the gap

You are no longer in a facilitated room. You are at your desk, with the colleagues you sat with last week, doing the work you committed to in front of the Sponsor. The status page is public and your decision is on it with your name beside it. The Coach is one message away when a model misbehaves or a workflow turns out harder than it sounded at Harness. The Sponsor is one escalation away when procurement, security, or schedule gets in the way.

What the Sponsor sees

Motion on the status page over months 3 to 6. Some decisions ship into production. Some pivot. Some get killed with documented reason. Your job is air cover for the named owners when they hit the predictable obstacles. That visible motion is the only honest basis on which Cycle 2 gets funded.

Across all phases

The Coach circulates with AI expertise on tap.

Through Harvest, Hack and Harness, an experienced Coach moves between conversations and teams. Prompt patterns when a team is stuck. Model choice when one isn't behaving. Hands-on examples when something is one nudge away from working. Mostly quiet in plenary; constantly useful in the team rooms.

The Coach stays available to the named owners across the gap, so the moments when an adoption is actually being put into the live system have AI expertise nearby. That continuity is part of why commitments survive past the on-site days, instead of dissolving in the first procurement queue.

Principles

Three rules that hold the cycle together.

Drop any of these and the cycle still runs, but it produces theatre instead of adoption. They are the small print that lets the rhythm work.

  1. Opt-in, never assigned

    Participation is genuine. Invitations are real. "No" carries no consequence. Named owners self-select at Harness; they are never appointed. A commitment with a forced name on it is theatre. A commitment with a volunteered name on it is the start of adoption.

  2. Air cover from the Sponsor

    Adopt-now decisions get live confirmation in the room. Procurement help, security fast-track, time, budget, whatever the named owner needs to move next week instead of next quarter. The Sponsor is not a courtesy attendee. The Sponsor is the unblocking authority.

  3. Status, every cycle

    Each new Harvest opens with honest status checks on prior adoptions. Not "do we still use it?" but "how far did it actually reach?" The cycle is built so a Sponsor can choose, with evidence, whether to fund the next loop. That choice stays open every time.

The H³ Handbook, an 87-page field handbook that ships with the licence.

The handbook

Everything above, codified.

The full method ships as an 87-page field handbook with the licence, and we train an internal coach inside your organisation to take the cycle over, usually within three to five cycles. The capability stays with you, and the rhythm keeps running without us.

  • Part 1 Foundations Ch 1–6
  • Part 2 Roles Ch 7–11
  • Part 3 Running a cycle Ch 12–18
  • Part 4 Discipline and recovery Ch 19–22
  • Part 5 Reference Ch 23–25
Portrait of Jurgen De Smet

Behind the framework

Designed by Jurgen De Smet. Delivered by Trusted Coaches.

Years of Lean and Agile work, Open Space facilitation, and hackathon leadership, brought together by Jurgen into one cycle for AI adoption that actually changes how organizations work. Today a growing roster of Trusted Coaches runs that cycle alongside him.

Read the story

Hand it off

Take H³ to your CFO, board, or whoever needs to see it first.

Two ungated PDFs you can forward before the discovery call. Same H³, two reading distances.

Want to see if H³ fits your organization?

In 30 minutes we work out four things: whether you have a viable Sponsor, where adoption is currently dying in your org, whether H³ fits the shape you're in, and what would make Cycle 1 succeed or fail. You leave with a concrete next step, sometimes "not yet."

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No retainer trap: we train an internal coach to run H³ without us, usually within three to five cycles.

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