Frameworks for the AI Age.
Why I’m Giving Away One of the Most Valuable Things I Use
There’s a strange moment that happens when you prepare to teach something you’ve practiced: you suddenly see the value of it with fresh eyes.
That’s what happened while I was prepping the Google workshop on AI as a Force Multiplier, a few weeks ago.
In every run-through, every refinement, every rehearsal, I kept returning to the section on Frameworks as a Force Multiplier. The most powerful thing in my career has never been the tools, the decks, the jobs, or the companies. It’s been the frameworks.
Not the buzzword kind. The thinking kind. The ones that let you walk into chaos and find shape. The ones that turn a vague instinct into a defendable path. The ones that separate noise from signal when the world is accelerating faster than any human can track.
Taking a swat at SWOT
I have worked most of my career in or around advertising and marketing, and the most common framework taught and used, ad nauseam, was/is SWOT. Hated it, always have, always will.
SWOT is the intellectual equivalent of a lukewarm cup of water. It doesn’t offend. It doesn’t excite. It doesn’t move anything forward. And for creatives, people whose job is to imagine, reframe, provoke, and redesign reality, SWOT is almost perfectly engineered to flatten thinking rather than elevate it.
SWOT is built for listing, not thinking. It turns creative complexity into four polite buckets and gives teams the satisfying illusion of progress once the boxes are filled. But nothing actually changes. No tension, no reframing, no synthesis, just categorisation dressed up as strategy. Creativity depends on friction, surprise, and provocation; SWOT removes all three.
That said, SWOT isn’t worthless. It’s upstream. It sets the stage, surfaces the obvious truths, and clears the throat of a project. But its outputs are raw ingredients, not answers. The real work, the creative work, happens when you move beyond the boxes and into frameworks that stretch, collide, and transform those early observations into something directional and alive. SWOT sets the table; frameworks and creativity serve the meal.
Frameworks used to be gated.
Blue Ocean Strategy, Red Teaming, Laddering, First Principles, JTBD, Cynefin — these aren’t just frameworks. They’re windows into how the world really works. They’re the difference between reacting and designing, between navigating complexity and being swallowed by it. And for most of modern business history, these windows were positioned high enough that only a select group could look through them.
They lived behind the paywalls of elite consulting firms. They were taught in MBA programs, whispered in boardrooms, guarded by jargon and slide decks, and protected as intellectual property. They were the ladders that let certain people climb higher while everyone else just watched from the ground.
For decades, this was the unspoken structure of the industry: insight was a privilege, not a public good. If you didn’t have the pedigree, the credentials, the access, or the budget, you weren’t invited into the room where the real thinking happened. Frameworks weren’t democratised; they were monetised.
But times they are a-changin’.
AI blew open the gates. It put the ladder in everyone’s hands. It turned once-elite thinking models into accessible, usable, everyday tools. What was once rarefied is now reachable. And that shift is reshaping who gets to see clearly, who gets to make decisions, and who gets to create the future, not just interpret it.
A few years ago, using frameworks properly required time, data, experience, and a room full of specialists. You had to know how to set up, interrogate, validate, and extract value from the model. It wasn’t that people lacked intelligence; the cost of entry was too high.
Then AI collapsed the cost structure. Now anyone can run a Blue Ocean analysis in seconds. Anyone can map a story arc using Hero’s Journey. Anyone can ladder a value chain, diagnose a systemic failure using Cynefin, or run a full Six Hats collision set without needing a facilitator trained in de Bono.
The hard part used to be knowing the model. Today, the hard part is knowing which model to use — and why.
That is a seismic shift. AI didn’t just democratize access to frameworks. It democratized power. For the first time, the fruit at the top of the tree is available to anyone willing to reach.
The hidden scaffolding of my creative life.
So much of the way we work was established in the days when artificial intelligence was a character in a movie or a book. Now, it’s on our phones, our watches, in our boardrooms and bedrooms.
In the blink of an eye, we crossed the line from reading about AI to reading with AI. But what is taking much longer to navigate is how to think about how we use AI, how it can become a force multiplier in our work, and when to actually step away from the machine, to think, to doodle, to imagine.
While I didn’t know them as Frameworks, in retrospect, they have been the scaffolding of my career. Design Thinking, First Principles, SCAMPER, Brand Archetypes, 3 Act Structures – these were routinely used at the places I worked, like frog design, or with the client teams I worked with at Apple or Disney.
They’ve helped me navigate ambiguity, build strategy, direct teams, write stories, challenge assumptions, and design futures that didn’t exist yet. They were/are the silent architecture behind everything I do.
Some ideas are too valuable to keep.
Watching the Google team — smart, driven, capable people — realize how frameworks could transform their day-to-day work reminded me of something I had not considered: Access changes everything.
And that change shouldn’t be gated behind a paywall or sold as a productized thought leadership package. When someone suddenly can see clearly, to question sharply, to make sense of complexity, it changes how they lead. It changes how they create. It changes how they make decisions.
As I was writing my first book, To Question Is to Answer: How to Think Critically and Thrive in the Age of AI, I began my deep dive into the power of frameworks via the Socratic Method, as a way of thinking, which led me into exploring Frameworks as the scaffolding of thinking. And discussion with some really outstanding process thinkers like @Keith Timony and @Robin Moroney helped inform how I wanted to approach a send book, taking a look at how frameworks might be considered in the Age of AI.
Then, I wrote Frameworks Reframed. I use it in my workshops and in my work. The idea of frameworks as a force multiplier keeps coming up in the coffee talks I have with agency and brand leaders.
If it helps you, you can have it.
So I have decided to give it to you if you want it.
You know the drill. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Write something in the comments. I’ll drop it in your DMs. Hell, you have read this far, so consider this the reward for your patience and persistence.
Because if AI is going to reshape our world, then the real divide won’t be who has the tools. It’ll be who has the thinking. Frameworks are no longer the privilege of the few. They’re part of the operating system of the AI age.
The moment you combine a framework with AI, you get something exponentially more powerful than either alone:
Blue Ocean becomes a system-level search engine for opportunity.
OODA becomes a real-time decision loop.
First Principles becomes a way to break industries, not just improve them.
JTBD becomes a cultural decoder.
Six Hats becomes a high-speed multi-perspective machine that reveals contradictions, hidden risks, and new routes forward.
The ladder we all used to climb, slowly, painfully, expensively, has been replaced by a platform that anyone can stand on. That is worth giving away.
This is why I am doing it.
Access is impactful because democratising thinking is more meaningful than monetising it.
Because the Google workshop reminded me that what feels obvious to me can be transformational to others.
Because our industry is drowning in content and starving for structure.
I’m putting the frameworks into the world because I think the world is better when more people can see clearly, choose confidently, and create with intention.
At some point, every industry hits a moment when the rules quietly change. This is one of those moments. AI has made the tools cheap, but it has made the thinking priceless. And if we want better work, better leadership, better ideas, then we have to stop treating frameworks like insider knowledge and start treating them like shared infrastructure.
So take this. Use it. Break it apart. Improve it. Pass it on. If frameworks helped me climb, they can help you climb higher.
And maybe that’s my goal.
