The Homa Files

Found this browsing through some old files.

My students know that I think conceptual frameworks are important.

This article might have been my inspiration …

What is a framework?

The world is confusing, and to understand cause-effect relationships, we have to distill most problems to their essence.

That’s what theory does, highlight the most important aspects of a situation that account for most of the variance between specific instances of the situation.

You might call these important aspects “drivers” or “critical success factors” or “independent variables.”

If our model of the world is almost as complex as the world itself, it is not very useful — models help us understand and predict only when they strip a problem down to something we can grasp, a small set of key driving forces that we can focus on while ignoring other things that have far less explanatory power.

If you give a manager a checklist of 37 things to focus on, s/he simply cannot grasp the essence of the problem.

If you can highlight a much smaller number of drivers and articulate the relationships among them, s/he not only can grasp the problem but can apply those insights to other, similar problems.

Frameworks — or call them models, analytical schemas, analytical lenses, conceptual maps, etc. — show the key cause and effect relationships that you think a person should focus on to approach a given situation.

They apply to a general class of problems; each case is a specific instance of a problem class.

The acid test of whether a framework is useful is that it both explains and predicts.

It helps you understand what is going on in this case and draw appropriate analogies to other cases that exemplify the same problem class.

It helps you predict what will happen if the client takes a given course of action, and test your prediction by seeing how other cases in the same problem class turn
out.

These predictions are hypotheses — they are insights into what would follow if the world worked the way your model suggests.

Source: James Anderson

* * * * *
For a tutorial re: the 6 Ps Framework go to Marketing 101 Online

* * * * *
Follow on Twitter @KenHoma

Tags: frameworks, models problem-solving

This entry was posted on November 28, 2012 at 6:49 am and is filed under frameworks, Problem solving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.