Pro

•Simplification and Focus: Frameworks eliminate unnecessary components and improve focus by representing relationships between attributes or components…. For instance, SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) helps organizations plan strategy and make decisions.

•Highlighting Relevant Criteria: Frameworks aid decision-making by emphasizing relevant criteria and providing standard result formats, accelerating progress and ensuring thorough analysis coverage.

•Embedding Past Learning: Frameworks embed learning based on past experiences, offering a starting point to organize thinking and understand relationships of major entities. The Business Design Method (BDM) reduces the complexity of innovation development and increases confidence in navigating uncertainty.

•Challenging Existing Orthodoxies: Frameworks can question assumptions, such as Whole Foods challenging the assumption that grocery shoppers are merely task-oriented instead of experience-seeking and sustainably motivated.

•Identifying the Problem: Frameworks enable continuous questioning and reflection on business challenges, team alignment on a problem hypothesis, and guidance for effective customer-centered solutions. An innovation design brief demands that teams iterate to solve the right problem for the target user.

•Understanding Customer Needs: Frameworks facilitate a deeper understanding of customer needs and motivations, minimizing biases and increasing insight. The customer journey framework helps teams understand a customer’s likely states of mind and needs before, during, and after using a product or service.

•Visual Representation: Frameworks lend themselves to visual representations, which can generate clarity and enable reuse. Story structures, for example, offer innovation teams an aligned narrative to connect, guide, and inspire stakeholders.

Con

While frameworks offer numerous benefits, they also have limitations:

•Oversimplification: By their very nature, frameworks simplify situations, and if misapplied, they may oversimplify and mislead.

•Contextual Limitations: Narrow, proprietary frameworks may not be suitable for purposes outside specific situations or industries. Using a retail consumer marketing model for a business-to-business distributor channel, for example, may yield inaccurate results.

•Need for Flexibility: Good frameworks should be flexible and reusable, applicable to a class of problems with the potential for tailoring to specific uses.

•Risk of Inaccuracy: Improper use of frameworks can lead to inaccurate results.

•Static Application: Conceptual frameworks should be viewed as dynamic rather than static tools, as an ongoing process rather than an artifact.