Why I Won't Do the Framework

Someone asked me this week for "the framework." A one-pager. Five boxes, maybe an arrow between them. Something a planning committee could put on a slide before I show up.

I opened a blank doc and tried. Step one: name the pattern. Step two: something about agency. Step three — I sat there for ten minutes trying to find a verb that wasn't "notice" or "choose" again, because apparently my whole professional life runs on two verbs.

Here's the problem. The people I'm actually talking to have already tried six frameworks this year. They've got the wheel diagram from the last all-hands. They've got the acronym from the vendor before me. Somewhere in a drawer is a laminated card with five steps on it that nobody has looked at since the workshop ended. Another framework doesn't help them. It just gives them a seventh thing to feel behind on.

So I didn't send the one-pager. I sent one sentence instead: name what's actually happening, then take the smallest true step available to you. That's it. It doesn't sound like much on a slide. It's not supposed to. A framework is designed to be followed in order. Real weeks don't come in order.

My PowerPoint does not have the authority to give someone a five-step plan for their actual Tuesday. I've watched frameworks work fine in the room and then run straight into someone's real, complicated, badly-timed life the following Monday. The framework doesn't fail because it was wrong. It fails because life was never going to hold still long enough to follow it.

ONE SENTENCE THEY CAN USE
BEATS FIVE STEPS THEY WON'T.

I still don't have a wheel diagram. I have one sentence and a stubborn refusal to pretend I have more certainty than I do. So far, nobody's asked for the one-pager back.