(2020-03-17) Chin Reality Without Frameworks

Cedric Chin: Reality Without Frameworks. When you’re inexperienced, frameworks are wonderful things.

frameworks are anything but easy to apply.

Things never seem to line up with the frameworks you find in books. In the legendary marketing classic Crossing The Chasm, Geoffrey Moore writes about the challenges technology companies face when moving from an early-adopter market to the mainstream. He categorises customers...

Everything is nice and simple until you attempt to identify real-world examples of each archetype within your customer base.

Frameworks can act like blinkers (blinders). Once you use them to interpret the world around you, it can be difficult to view things any other way. (gloss)

The prevailing business culture is to use frameworks as a crutch for sense-making.

Hiten Shah argues that startup founders spend too much time studying strategy frameworks, and too little time gathering a high quality and quantity of inputs to those frameworks. (GIGO)

if you collect data after you’ve read up on strategy frameworks, your tendency is to filter your observations of reality in service of some framework.

The more you rely on frameworks, the more you lose your ability to think from first principles.

when was the last time that you did a whole bunch of user interviews, read a stack of reports, or clicked around in a company dashboard … and not do anything to interpret it?

Stew in the messiness of the inputs.

When it comes time to apply some framework — later — you’ll be surprised at how much more critical you’d have become.

All frameworks are wrong, but some are useful. Delaying their use paradoxically makes them less wrong, and more useful, than you might otherwise expect. (All models are wrong, but some are useful)