I built five working frameworks, then removed them. This is the record of why.
The idea was reasonable. I had a set of half-formed instincts about research practice, and I thought that naming them — turning each into a small three-move framework — would sharpen them into something teachable and distinct. Working with an LLM made the building fast. Too fast: it let me generate the appearance of insight quicker than I could notice its absence. A three-move framework with a principle under each move reads as thinking. The act of naming something confers a sense of having understood it. And a model will produce as much of that as you ask for, fluently, without ever telling you that the thing you’ve named was never unclear in the first place.
So I applied the test I apply to anyone else’s work: what, specifically, is this — and where is the evidence it’s mine? Five of the frameworks failed it. Not because the ideas were wrong, but because they were already common practice wearing a new name, or my own framing added nothing the concept didn’t already carry. Keeping them would have weakened the frameworks that are mine, by association: a reader who spots that one is repackaged standard practice starts doubting the rest.
Below, each dropped framework as I built it — its three moves, stated as the assumption they encoded — and the specific reason it didn’t survive.
Productivity Decision Compass
The assumption, in three moves.
- Scan the surplus — when unexpected time appears, survey what could be done with it.
- Choose the highest-leverage move — commit to one use rather than diffusing across several.
- Close the loop — capture what the choice produced so the next decision is better informed.
Why it was dropped. It’s a personal-productivity tool, not a research method. It answers “what to do with spare time,” not any question about users, evidence, or service conditions. A framework belongs in a body of work only if it addresses that work’s actual domain — a good tool in the wrong section weakens the section. Category coherence is a bar, not a formality.
Triangulation Lens
The assumption, in three moves.
- Gather across types — hold quantitative, qualitative, and observational evidence side by side.
- Read the disagreement — treat conflict between sources as information, not a problem to resolve away.
- Notice the absence — ask which type of evidence is missing before trusting the picture.
Why it was dropped. It is triangulation. Mixing evidence types and noticing which is absent is foundational method, taught everywhere. The name added nothing the concept didn’t already carry. Renaming a standard practice isn’t authorship — if the idea survives without my framing, my framing wasn’t the contribution.
Stakeholder Listening Compass
The assumption, in three moves.
- Attend before extracting — listen for what a stakeholder means before converting it into requirements.
- Translate into layers — separate the stated ask from the underlying concern and the organisational pressure behind it.
- Reflect back — return your reading to the stakeholder to test whether it holds.
Why it was dropped. It’s active-listening technique applied to stakeholders — competent, generic, and available in any facilitation guide. “Applied to stakeholders” is not a differentiator. Porting a common technique to a new audience doesn’t make it a new framework.
Heuristic Plus
The assumption, in three moves.
- Apply the heuristics — evaluate an interface against Nielsen’s ten.
- Ask what each misses — for every heuristic, name what it can’t see in this context.
- Record the gap — treat the blind spot as a finding in its own right.
Why it was dropped. The substance is Nielsen’s, verbatim. The additive move — “ask what it misses” — is a single question standing on someone else’s framework, not a framework in itself. Building a small extension onto a well-known model invites the obvious question of what I actually added. If the answer is one prompt, it’s a note, not a framework.
Ethnographic Lens
The assumption, in three moves.
- Enter with curiosity — let the field surprise you before categories lead the encounter.
- Describe before interpreting — record verbatim and physical action before assigning meaning.
- Frame as partial — present the reading as true of these people, in this context, seen from here.
Why it was dropped. It’s a competent summary of applied ethnography — true, useful, and indistinguishable from a methods-handbook page. Accuracy is not distinctiveness. A correct summary of an existing discipline is teaching material at best, not an original instrument.
What the discarding was actually for
The five failed on two bars: distinctiveness (does it contribute something beyond established practice?) and category coherence (does it belong in this body of work at all?). Neither bar is about the idea being bad. Triangulation is good practice; ethnographic discipline is good practice. They’re just not mine to name, and publishing them as frameworks would have claimed authorship I hadn’t earned.
The useful part isn’t the drop. It’s the test. The check I apply to everyone else’s work — what, specifically, is this, and where is the evidence — is the check I stopped applying to my own the moment the output started arriving fast and looking finished. Obvious words are easiest to generate when they’re yours. Keeping this record public is a way of keeping the test switched on.