Beyond Frameworks

I am moved to tears by the quote: "There's no such thing as other people's children". I have fantasies of assigning myself some sort of "common curriculum" to revisit each year.  The specifics tend to vary, but always include something by Brene Brown, the Heath brothers (am currently obsessed with "The Power of Moments"), Bryan Stevenson and Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" -- ideally with the latter two always paired together. Tyler and I had a visioning weekend date this past weekend.  We packed up our bags (and Elliot!) for a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Cascades... and for the ~five hour drive there and back, we talked about our hopes and dreams and life visions.  While it was energizing and inspiring, there was also one element that really nagged us... For the first time in our adult lives, we couldn't easily state what we stood for.  We tried to rationalize it (we have a baby now...

If I've learned one thing as a strategy consultant, it's that asking the right questions is a skill -- and a hard one at that.  It's one that I'm still working on (though have an amazing teacher... my husband is likely the best question asker I know). I've always been intrigued by the idea of daily questions.  I first heard of this when Marshall Goldsmith spoke at one of my business school classes.  He talked about making a list of 5 yes/no questions to ask yourself daily (or ideally, have a buddy) -- giving an example of how this literally can change your life (one of his friend's yes/no questions was around making an appointment to see his doctor... he got so sick of answering this "no" that he finally made an appointment -- only to discover he had early stage cancer, but was early enough to address it).  My list of 5 questions kept changing, though the one I remember to this day is: "was I kind to those I love most?" - making me cr...

Inspiring day today.  Senior Ministry of Health officials from eight countries (Mexico, Scotland, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia), plus technical partners, such as WHO, ISQua, Healthqual and others.  What struck me most was that even though the room was so full of experts (heads of Quality Directorates, former State Ministers of Health, CEOs and senior staff, Don Berwick, etc), what a spirit of genuine curiosity, humility, and exploration there was in co-developing a National Quality Strategy framework to help guide countries in this difficult but critical process. If you read my last post, you know my love-hate relationship to frameworks -- which, if ungrounded with reality, risk being irrelevant and academic at best, and misleading and simply wrong at worst. That's why I was so excited by the experiment we ran today -- my first exposure to a "world café".  In this format, we had senior representatives from five countries present on ...

So here's the thing.  I love frameworks.  I really do.  I'm the type of person who thrives on creating order out of chaos - both in the physical realm (just wait until you see my file cabinet) and in the world of ideas.  As a strategy consultant, I've basically built my career around this.  Done well, a framework is elegant in its simplicity -- a mental shortcut that not only simplifies the complex, but empowers the user with a roadmap for success (e.g. moving to the upper right quadrant of a 2x2 matrix or climbing up Maslow's pyramid of needs).  When my husband told me about an issue he was struggling with on a recent date night dinner out, I reached for my computer and pulled out a framework I had come across earlier that day (that he not only indulges me in this but also somehow finds it helpful is one of the many reasons I love him). So you can imagine my surprise when, about thirty minutes into a Lean In Seattle talk last weekend, I started to ...