Do We Need Frameworks?

 

by JJ Sutherland | July 23, 2021 | Blog

In a perfect world, there would be no systems or frameworks, or methodologies. 

Why?

Any system is waste. Seriously. 

All they do is put weight on the only thing that matters: doing the work. I just sit down, knock out the work, go home to a well-deserved brandy, a richly rewarding day. 

That’s actually my perfect day.

Here’s the fly in that ointment. 

We aren’t working alone. We have to make sure my work doesn’t mess up their work (or more importantly vice versa). So we have to talk about what we’re doing. 

If we don’t we will both build a piece of a thing that doesn’t do the thing it is supposed to do because we never quite agreed about what the thing was we were creating. 

So, says one to one’s self, why don’t we set up a framework to ensure that we talk to other people about the things we are working on to create that bigger thing we are all working on?

Let’s have pre-determined meetings. Let’s have artifacts that inform those meetings. Wouldn’t it be great to have a meeting ahead of that meeting where we decide if we need more meetings about the thing we’re creating? What was that again?

We love systems, us humans, we love them. 

We love making rules about rules about making the rules. And those systems are critical. Without them working together would be nigh impossible. We need some sort of framework. Some sort of system. 

But all too frequently we try to build a system that can catch all the possibilities and every edge case. Every one. So we need to spend more time thinking about the system of making the thing rather than any time making the thing itself.

What we really need is a middle ground. Someplace between chaos and paralysis. 

And that space is large. 

There are lots of possible frameworks. There are. But for the greatest creativity, innovation, and delivery you want to be just up against the edge. Just enough rules that the whole thing doesn’t collapse into chaos. 

Just enough. Just barely enough. 

So what are the fewest set of rules you can have to drive the results you want? Results like value, speed of delivery of that value, and the sustainability of the teams doing all that work. Because you probably want to do it more than once. That, unfortunately, requires some thinking about whom talks to whom, when that happens, what do they need to share, and how do they get feedback about what they are doing is the thing people want.

That’s the only reason for frameworks. 

To make it easier to create. To make it simpler to coordinate. To make sure we are doing the right thing in the right way.

That’s all.