The Crucial Step You're Overlooking In Signature Framework Design

Frameworks are such a distillation of your work. It’s taking everything that you do, everything that you stand for, the core essence of your work and pulling it down into the simplest, clearest form.

But here’s the thing…

Simple and clear, doesn’t mean surface level.

And there’s a lot of rhetoric floating around on how you should design your framework - i.e, the method that says just chunk down what you know into buckets, throw on some acronyms or a nice alliteration onto it and voila, here's your signature method. Sound familiar?

But a true framework has more to it than that.

A good solid framework has a clear outcome, while showcasing and representing your underpinning philosophical, ideological and theoretical lens that you bring to your work

What your framework does is distill down the essence of the core fundamental building blocks or pillars of your body of work, and it encapsulates what you do in a clear, distilled, easy to understand conceptual framing.

Here’s a delicious example: you believe that the BEST chocolate chip cookies are chewy not crunchy, you’re plant based so they use vegan butter, and the baking temperatures need to be exact (because you’re drawing on theory and science), but ultimately the baker needs to trust their gut, and you’ve chosen a METHOD based on those beliefs and structured and sequenced your method to support your outcome.

Because your framework is a representation of your entire body of work, it’s literally the framing of everything that you do, we also want to know:

What are the skills and abilities attached to your framework?

For example, when someone engages with your framework how will you know that they’re engaging? How will you know that this is your work and they are progressing through it and that they’re getting results? And how will you know that they’re doing it to the standards that you are expressing in your brand?

This is why when I’m supporting my clients with designing their framework, the first thing we do is brain dump everything to get it all out onto the table - everything you do and teach your people.

And then we can distill it down and pull out the threads to find the skills and abilities that at the core are the most essential to the framing for your work.

Back to our cookie example:

The building blocks of the cookie framework might be:

Ethical ingredients
Science-backed baking principles
Self-trust - being able trust your baking belly
Environment - A warm cozy kitchen where you feel comfortable

Powerful, transformational frameworks go one step further - they showcase the core SKILLS you need to master in order to reach the outcome of the framework. This allows us to go next level with your programs, including assessments, audits and other tools to assess where your people are at.

Ex. Ethical ingredients -> the ability to assess how ethical an ingredient choice is, the ability to choose alternate ingredients without compromising structural integrity of the cookie.

Because when we have those abilities distilled down, it helps us with the expansion and the expression of our body of work.

And then once you have those skills and abilities, then you’re able to ask yourself - How am I dispersing this in my body of work?

Am I creating assessments where my people can track their progress through the beginning, halfway point and end of the program?

Am I creating a certification program where I’m training people on my methods, and on my framework, so I have standards to which they need to be able to demonstrate these skills?

Or am I pulling one or two pieces of my framework and teaching it in one program and then teaching the other pieces in another program?

The distillation and simplification of those skills and abilities helps you create the framing and the structures for everything that you stand for.

So while some frameworks may seem really simple, when they’re done well there is a complex nuanced process that goes on behind the scenes to get to that level of the expression of your brand which then opens up so many possibilities.

Rather than having a whipped together method that is only a beautiful acronym 😉