They are devilishly difficult to install and disturbingly stubborn to alter.
Like a boat caught in an adverse current, all of the external pressure and change that COVID has brought to bear might be causing them to work against you right now.
What I’m referring to are frameworks. Frameworks can be formal and explicit or hidden and implicit. They are agreed to thought models that have either grown up organically in your firm or have been imported from another place and context. You might think of them as the “soft” structure of your business, made up of a variety of “apps” and service layers that form the hidden – but very real – paths that are used to find, form and execute decision making.
As an example, I worked with one manufacturing firm that was having competitive issues in the marketplace. In the course of the diagnostic work, we found they had a complex financial spreadsheet for evaluating the ROI of new product investments in a large complex business unit. To put all the projects on equal footing, many key assumptions were “locked” and when the portfolio review took place, everyone knew that the ROI from that tool was the gold standard. As we dug deeper into the context and assumptions built into the tool, we found that it was systematically biased against those projects that had closer in cash flows and moderate risks. All this was built on knowledge more than a decade old.
Significant progress in business is usually aligned closely with understanding and refining deeply held frameworks.
Why? When high functioning and accurate, they take us to the right problem for right now. But when they’re not, they can take us to near ruin.
How Do They Come to Be?
The suite of frameworks in a firm are rooted in the common experience and history of the group. The frameworks themselves are commonly distilled from a few key episodes or stories. Every individual and firm has a specific experience arc that leads to deeply embedded patterns. There is a set of behaviors that are learned quickly by our new hires that aren’t outlined in any onboarding training.
Many times we co-opt frameworks from other domains. In my work with technical ops leaders, for example, it’s not uncommon for them to repurpose a technology or quality framework as a business leadership framework. Examples that are very successful in their sweet spot are Six Sigma (variation reduction), Lean (waste reduction), and Agile (iterative development). But when they are applied to the enterprise as a whole, the firm frequently starts to serve the frameworks in a rote fashion. When this happens, it can drain away the core value of the framework and compliance can trump value.
Useful frameworks have self-evident truth and clarity that is immediate and deep. They build on validated understanding and allow individuals and groups to map very complex issues quickly and decisively. They provide a common vocabulary for the group to have a high-quality discussion, enabling true insight and subject matter knowledge to come forward. Once proved useful and onboarded, they provide a referenceable and scalable resource to the group.
They are very resilient. I’ve helped firms discern, describe and update these frameworks, and you would be surprised at how tenaciously a group will cling to an outdated framework, even when the evidence that it’s not serving them begins to stack up.
What Frameworks Can Do
- Allow a firm to get to focus on the root of issues quickly. When a firm has a great embedded framework, it is able to quickly assess questions and challenges and make decisions. Teams can form from various functions and feel like they’ve known each other for a long time. The time saved in forming and deciding approach provides a real competitive advantage.
- Enable the “edge” of the organization to deal quickly with very complex problems. Many firms struggle with the empowerment of the front-line teams. If you have a well-understood and agreed to frame, the leaders at the edges feel much more empowered to make decisions and those decisions are much more likely to fit into the whole picture.
- The best ones allow a firm the ability to “renew” itself. A good framework (that transcends the boundaries of the firm) allows it to self assess when things are not going well.
What Frameworks Can’t Do
- Frameworks rarely update themselves or flag themselves when obsolete. When a firm has a deep framework, it tends to build itself to support that framework. Conventional auto companies are finding this out as they need to pivot toward augmented, hybrid and autonomous vehicles.
- They can’t solve problems. When you have a strong framework it leads you to a high leverage problem to solve – but you need to have the resources to build the solution.
- They can’t install themselves. Putting in a new framework requires diagnosis, collaboration and leadership. Understanding what happens every day on autopilot in your firm and keeping it up to date is some of the most important work you as a leader undertake.
Signs You Might be Using the Wrong Framework
So, as we are coming into a new phase of our COVID journey, are your frameworks leading you to the right problems and solutions or just keeping you busy with activity?
Some questions to help you decide where you find yourself:
- What are the currently active frameworks in your firm? Work to see beyond the obvious, for example, what unwritten rules are there about who your firm serves?
- On a scale of 1-10 how are they serving your customer? (You can use either the internal or external customer as a guide.)
- What tensions are they creating? How can you make the shifts visible?
How I Help
You can get a start on this with internal resources, but to truly get an objective assessment on this, you’ll need to expand your viewpoint by taking an external viewpoint. To paint a fresh picture of the frameworks active in your business unit, we typically undertake a diagnostic that consists of 1:1 interviews, team “ride alongs” and management layer dialogues culminating in an assessment document.
I work with a select group of clients in complex firms who have a technology background and are sponsoring or leading transformation in their firms. They have exhausted off-the-shelf tools and knowledge and need integrated, bespoke solutions to achieve their goals.
Together we use proven diagnostics to expose hidden patterns that are holding back their journey to value creation. If you’d like to accelerate your success with a validated model, please use this link to put a call on the books or reach out to me at scott@scottpropp.com.
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