Most difficult problems aren’t solved badly because people lack information.
They’re solved badly because they’re understood badly.
RESOLVE is a structured approach to the hardest part of problem-solving: getting the problem right before you try to fix it.
What is RESOLVE?
We live in an era of fast answers. AI can generate a response to almost any question in seconds. Search returns thousands of results instantly. Advisers, consultants, and experts are rarely far away.
And yet difficult problems — in organisations, in policy, in communities, in practice — remain stubbornly difficult. They persist not because we lack answers, but because we keep answering the wrong question.
RESOLVE exists to address that. Not with a promise of clever tricks or faster outputs, but with a disciplined method for doing the harder, slower, more valuable work: understanding what is actually going on, what is actually at stake, and what would actually constitute a better outcome.
The tool
Turn your problem into a structured RESOLVE analysis using AI. Enter your issue, generate the prompt, paste it into your AI tool, and review the results..
The guide
RESOLVE is a seven-stage reasoning method for difficult problems. The guide explains the steps, when to use them, common pitfalls, and how to apply the method with or without AI..
In practice
The best way to understand a reasoning method is to see it applied. These case studies show RESOLVE working through real problems and where the analysis changed direction..
The thinking
Explore the ideas behind Better Thinking and RESOLVE: why reasoning fails, where AI helps and misleads, and why some problems stay stuck.
Who is this for?
RESOLVE is for people who work on difficult problems
Better Thinking is used by practitioners, consultants, policy professionals, researchers, and analysts who regularly face problems that don’t yield to fast, obvious answers. It is not a productivity tool. It is not a template generator. It is a reasoning discipline — one that takes seriously the difference between structured thinking and the appearance of structured thinking.
If you are comfortable with uncertainty, willing to question your first framing, and interested in improving the quality of your reasoning rather than just the speed of your outputs, you are in the right place.
Tony Callaghan
Tony Callaghan is the founder of Better Thinking.
His background is applied: more than 15 years working across product innovation, environmental systems, and the practical challenge of turning complex domains into usable knowledge. That work — spanning composting, biochar, soil systems, and circular-carbon applications — gave him a recurring problem to solve: most organisations and individuals were working hard on solutions before they had properly understood what the problem actually was.
Better Thinking grew from that insight. RESOLVE is the structured method that came out of it.
His current focus is the work that sits upstream of execution — root-cause finding, reframing, option generation, and reasoning quality — and on building frameworks and tools that others can use and critique without requiring him to become the long-term operator of every downstream implementation.
Where to start…
RESOLVE is free use… launch the tool here
Our full guide is online or as a PDF…
Our RESOLVE in practice (case studies) are open…