Work you can stand behind.

Find their footing: to ask where to begin on a new asset, to have a page summarized, to check a section against its sources, to ask what is missing, or to find out what VITAL can and cannot do for the problem in front of them.

A short answer in the panel beside your document, with its sources attached, that you can add to the page in one click. When the question is bigger than a Chief of Staff should answer alone, it says so and hands you the right route instead: a Brief, a Panel, or an Analysis. It never pretends to be the specialist.

Get up to speed on something new, understand how something works, compare two options, work out why something is going wrong, think through what happens next, judge something against a standard, decide between paths, or plan a sequence of steps.

One of eight shapes, chosen from what you asked: a scan, an overview, a comparison, a diagnosis, an outlook, an assessment, a decision memo, or a plan. Nothing is hidden behind a summary, and anything the expert could not source is marked as a gap.

The panel back as one document: the question and who was in the room, each panelist’s position in full, what they agreed on, where they split, and what follows from it. Disagreements are written down rather than averaged into a consensus nobody actually holds, because the split is usually the useful part.

A round table for coverage, a divergence review to surface the split, a red team review to stress a plan, and a stakeholder rehearsal to hear how a decision lands.

First you get a plan — the questions the method says must be answered. You agree it, change it, or narrow it. Only then does the work start, and the finished document answers every question in the plan or marks it as a gap and says why.

Headings that are the same next time, so two analyses of the same kind can be compared side by side. Every number carries its source. The closing section names what would reopen the conclusion.

A Mission is that process. Every step names who does the work, who approves it, who is consulted and who is kept informed, and each step stops until the named approver signs. The finished pack shows not only what was claimed and where it came from, but who was answerable at each stage.

People and agents hold the same roles in the same matrix. That is the part of VITAL the name describes most literally.