Framework Library

SWOT

Strategy

Best for: Summarising strategic implications

⚠ Commonly misused — Used as the main analysis rather than as a synthesis of prior analysis.

🐕 SWOT is usually where you summarise the thinking, not where you do the thinking.

PESTLE

Strategy

Best for: Scanning the macro environment

⚠ Commonly misused — Used as a strategy in itself rather than a scan that feeds strategy.

🐕 Only list factors that have actually moved. A PESTLE full of generic items is decoration.

Porter's Five Forces

Strategy

Best for: Industry attractiveness

🐕 This is an industry structure tool, not a general business health check.

Porter's Generic Strategies

Strategy

Best for: Naming a competitive posture

🐕 The label is the easy part. The hard part is the operating model that earns it.

Porter's Value Chain

Strategy

Best for: Finding internal sources of advantage

🐕 If every activity looks important, you haven't done the analysis.

VRIO

Strategy

Best for: Testing whether a resource is a real competitive advantage

🐕 Most 'strengths' fail the I in VRIO. Be honest.

Resource-Based View

Strategy

Best for: Explaining why some firms outperform structurally

🐕 Don't quote RBV. Use VRIO to actually test the claim.

Core Competence Framework

Strategy

Best for: Identifying capabilities to double down on

🐕 If your list has more than four items, none of them are core.

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

Strategy

Best for: Allocating cash across a real portfolio of businesses

⚠ Commonly misused — Used when there is no real portfolio, or with made-up market share data.

🐕 No portfolio, no real share data? You're decorating, not deciding.

GE-McKinsey Matrix

Strategy

Best for: Multi-factor portfolio prioritisation

🐕 The scoring is the analysis. Don't fudge it.

Ansoff Matrix

Strategy

Best for: Naming growth routes: penetration, development, diversification

⚠ Commonly misused — Treated as a substitute for market, financial or capability analysis.

🐕 Ansoff helps name the growth route. It does not prove the route is wise.

Strategy Canvas

Strategy

Best for: Visualising competitive positioning across factors of competition

🐕 If your curve is heroic on every axis, you're drawing fiction.

Bowman's Strategy Clock

Strategy

Best for: Mapping competitive positioning across price and perceived value

🐕 Perceived value is the data you don't have. Get it.

Scenario Planning

Strategy

Best for: Decisions under deep uncertainty

🐕 If your scenarios are 'optimistic' and 'pessimistic', that's a forecast in a costume.

Three Horizons Model

Strategy

Best for: Balancing core, adjacent and transformational bets

🐕 Most companies have no Horizon 3. Pretending you do is worse than admitting it.

McKinsey 7S

Strategy

Best for: Diagnosing internal misalignment after a strategy change

🐕 If every S looks fine, you're not looking honestly.

TOWS Matrix

Strategy

Best for: Turning a SWOT into actual strategic options

🐕 Doing SWOT without TOWS is leaving the work half-done.

Strategic Group Mapping

Strategy

Best for: Seeing who really competes with whom inside an industry

🐕 Pick axes that customers care about, not axes that flatter you.

Industry Life Cycle

Strategy

Best for: Setting expectations about growth, margin and consolidation

🐕 A 'mature' industry can still be disrupted overnight.

STP (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning)

Marketing

Best for: Choosing whom to serve and how to be perceived

🐕 Segmentation by age and gender is rarely segmentation at all.

4Ps Marketing Mix

Marketing

Best for: Translating a positioning into concrete product, price, place and promotion choices

⚠ Commonly misused — Used as the strategy itself rather than as execution of STP.

🐕 Without STP first, the 4Ps are decisions in search of a customer.

7Ps Services Marketing Mix

Marketing

Best for: Service businesses where people, process and physical evidence matter

🐕 If the three extra Ps are afterthoughts, you've just done 4Ps badly.

Customer Journey Mapping

Marketing

Best for: Locating friction across the customer experience

⚠ Commonly misused — Used to explain churn when the real issue is price or unit economics.

🐕 If the real problem is the price or the cost-to-serve, the journey map will hide it.

Jobs to Be Done

Marketing

Best for: Reframing the product around the underlying job customers hire it to do

🐕 Without switcher interviews, JTBD is just opinions in a new wrapper.

AIDA

Marketing

Best for: Structuring a single campaign or sales conversation

🐕 AIDA is a copy template, not a marketing plan.

Brand Positioning Map

Marketing

Best for: Showing how brands sit on two key buying dimensions

🐕 Without research data, this map shows your bias, not the market.

Perceptual Mapping

Marketing

Best for: Quantifying how customers actually perceive competing brands

🐕 Quant evidence or it's just a brand map.

Customer Lifetime Value

Marketing

Best for: Justifying acquisition spend

🐕 Garbage retention in, garbage CLV out.

Net Promoter Score

Marketing

Best for: A single relative loyalty signal over time

⚠ Commonly misused — Treated as a strategy rather than a thermometer.

🐕 An NPS number with no driver analysis is theatre.

Kano Model

Marketing

Best for: Classifying features as must-haves, performance, or delighters

🐕 Today's delighter is tomorrow's expectation.

Diffusion of Innovation

Marketing

Best for: Planning adoption sequencing across customer types

🐕 Most products die in the chasm. Plan for it.

Product Life Cycle

Marketing

Best for: Aligning marketing tactics to stage of product

🐕 Stage labels don't excuse strategy decisions.

TAM / SAM / SOM

Marketing

Best for: Sizing a market opportunity defensibly

⚠ Commonly misused — Top-down numbers pulled from analyst reports with no logic chain.

🐕 Show your math, or it's just three numbers in shrinking fonts.

Funnel Analysis

Marketing

Best for: Locating drop-off across awareness to revenue

🐕 Knowing where they drop is not knowing why.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Finance

Best for: Comparing options on a common monetised basis

🐕 What you leave out of the table decides the answer.

ROI

Finance

Best for: Quick comparison of returns relative to investment

⚠ Commonly misused — Used instead of NPV for multi-year decisions.

🐕 ROI ignores time. For anything multi-year, use NPV.

NPV

Finance

Best for: Investment decisions with time-distributed cash flows

⚠ Commonly misused — Applied to speculative ventures with made-up cash flows.

🐕 NPV with speculative inputs is precision theatre. Test sensitivity first.

IRR

Finance

Best for: Ranking investment options by % return

🐕 When IRR and NPV disagree, NPV wins.

Payback Period

Finance

Best for: Liquidity-sensitive investment screening

🐕 Fast payback ≠ good investment.

Break-Even Analysis

Finance

Best for: Finding the volume at which you stop losing money

🐕 Break-even is a maths question. Can you actually sell that many?

Unit Economics

Finance

Best for: Testing whether each unit pays for itself once true costs are loaded

🐕 If the unit doesn't pay, scale just multiplies the loss.

Contribution Margin Analysis

Finance

Best for: Product-mix and pricing decisions

🐕 Contribution is not profit. Don't confuse them.

Sensitivity Analysis

Finance

Best for: Finding which assumptions actually move the outcome

🐕 If your result barely moves, your model isn't telling you anything.

Scenario Analysis

Finance

Best for: Decisions where several assumptions move together

🐕 Scenarios should change the strategy, not just the spreadsheet.

Real Options Analysis

Finance

Best for: Valuing the right to wait, expand, or abandon

🐕 Real options is not 'we hope it might work out.'

DuPont Analysis

Finance

Best for: Decomposing ROE into margin, turnover and leverage

🐕 Use it to ask 'why' — not to admire the formula.

Working Capital Cycle

Finance

Best for: Cash-conversion diagnosis

🐕 Profit doesn't pay the wages. Cash does.

Lean

Operations

Best for: Eliminating waste in repeatable processes

🐕 Lean isn't a layoff plan in a kimono.

Six Sigma / DMAIC

Operations

Best for: Reducing variation in well-defined processes

🐕 Six Sigma kills variation. Sometimes variation is where innovation lives.

Theory of Constraints

Operations

Best for: Finding and exploiting the system bottleneck

🐕 An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage.

Bottleneck Analysis

Operations

Best for: Spotting where throughput collapses

🐕 If the bottleneck never moves after you fix it, you didn't fix it.

Business Process Mapping

Operations

Best for: Making invisible work visible end-to-end

🐕 Maps don't fix processes. Decisions do.

Value Stream Mapping

Operations

Best for: Quantifying value-add vs waste across a process

🐕 Without numbers, it's just a flowchart with arrows.

SERVQUAL

Operations

Best for: Measuring service-quality gaps

🐕 If you don't ask about expectations, you're measuring noise.

Benchmarking

Operations

Best for: Finding performance gaps vs peers or best in class

⚠ Commonly misused — Copying practices without understanding the context that made them work.

🐕 What works for them may break for you. Borrow lessons, not recipes.

Root Cause / 5 Whys

Operations

Best for: Simple, single-cause problems

🐕 If your fifth 'why' is a person's name, you stopped early.

Fishbone / Ishikawa

Operations

Best for: Surfacing multiple cause categories for a problem

🐕 Brainstorming is not analysis. Test the causes that matter.

RACI Matrix

Operations

Best for: Clarifying who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

🐕 Two As is none. Pick one.

OKRs

Operations

Best for: Aligning teams to outcomes, not activity

⚠ Commonly misused — KPIs in OKR clothing — activity dressed as outcome.

🐕 OKRs don't make a strategy. They expose whether you have one.

Stakeholder Power-Interest Grid

OB & Change

Best for: Prioritising stakeholder engagement

🐕 Stakeholders move. Re-map them.

Kotter's 8-Step Change Model

OB & Change

Best for: Large-scale change rollouts that need urgency and coalition

⚠ Commonly misused — Used when the real issue is incentives, capability or strategy, not adoption.

🐕 If your problem is bad incentives, no amount of urgency rallies will fix it.

Lewin's Change Model

OB & Change

Best for: Framing change as unfreeze-change-refreeze

🐕 In many organisations, nothing ever refreezes. Plan accordingly.

ADKAR

OB & Change

Best for: Individual-level change adoption

🐕 People can't change what the system punishes.

Bridges Transition Model

OB & Change

Best for: Managing the emotional transition, not just the change

🐕 The new model is announced in a day. The transition takes months.

Tuckman Team Development

OB & Change

Best for: Understanding team-formation dynamics

🐕 Storming returns whenever the team changes. Plan for it.

Situational Leadership

OB & Change

Best for: Adapting leadership style to follower readiness

🐕 Style doesn't fix structural problems.

Hersey-Blanchard Model

OB & Change

Best for: Matching directive/supportive style to follower development

🐕 Leading a senior expert like a junior will end badly.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

OB & Change

Best for: Framing motivation conversations

🐕 Useful metaphor, weak evidence base. Cite carefully.

Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory

OB & Change

Best for: Distinguishing hygiene factors from motivators

🐕 Raises stop complaints. They don't create motivation.

McGregor Theory X and Y

OB & Change

Best for: Surfacing leadership assumptions about people

🐕 Leaders act on their assumptions. Check them.

Psychological Safety

OB & Change

Best for: Diagnosing team learning and risk-taking climate

⚠ Commonly misused — Confused with 'being nice' or avoiding accountability.

🐕 Safety isn't softness. High-safety teams hold each other to higher standards, not lower.

Organisational Culture Web

OB & Change

Best for: Diagnosing the actual culture behind strategy execution

🐕 Most culture decks describe the brochure, not the place.

Burke-Litwin Change Model

OB & Change

Best for: Mapping transformational vs transactional change drivers

🐕 Don't pull transactional levers for transformational problems.

Balanced Scorecard

OB & Change

Best for: Translating a clear strategy into balanced measures

⚠ Commonly misused — Built before there is a clear strategy.

🐕 Scorecard without strategy is dashboarding.

Business Model Canvas

Innovation

Best for: Summarising how a business creates, delivers and captures value

⚠ Commonly misused — Filled in as a planning exercise without evidence in any block.

🐕 BMC is a summary, not a strategy. Don't confuse the canvas with the case.

Lean Startup

Innovation

Best for: Reducing risk under deep uncertainty via fast cycles

🐕 Lean is not 'ship it and hope'. Name the assumption you're testing.

Design Thinking

Innovation

Best for: Human-centred problem framing and prototyping

🐕 Sticky notes without research is decoration, not design.

Double Diamond

Innovation

Best for: Visualising diverge-converge in problem and solution

🐕 Most teams collapse the diamonds. That's why they solve the wrong problem.

Minimum Viable Product

Innovation

Best for: Learning fast about a riskiest assumption

⚠ Commonly misused — Shipping a half-finished product and calling it an MVP.

🐕 If it doesn't test an assumption, it's not viable, it's just minimum.

RICE Prioritisation

Innovation

Best for: Comparing feature/initiative priorities transparently

🐕 Score honestly. The maths is only as good as the inputs.

MoSCoW Prioritisation

Innovation

Best for: Scoping a release with clear must-haves vs nice-to-haves

🐕 If everything's a Must, you haven't prioritised.

Product-Market Fit

Innovation

Best for: Diagnosing whether retention and pull justify scaling

⚠ Commonly misused — Declared on vibes rather than evidence.

🐕 If you have to ask whether you have PMF, you don't.

Technology Adoption Life Cycle

Innovation

Best for: Planning the chasm crossing for new tech

🐕 The chasm is real. Pick a beachhead.

OKRs for Product Strategy

Innovation

Best for: Aligning a product team to outcomes

⚠ Commonly misused — Output KPIs dressed as outcomes.

🐕 Ship dates aren't outcomes.