Mind Readings: Frameworks and Checklists

In this episode, let's talk about frameworks and checklists. I was at an event recently, Content Marketing World, listening to one session, and seeing a presenter kind of commingle strategy and tactics, right? The what are we going to do and how are we going to do it kind of thing? And they're commonly intermingled and they really shouldn't be because they're different things. They're different things.

Generally speaking, if you're talking about strategies, you should be doing things and working with things like frameworks, for example, some kind of framework that helps you elucidate your strategy and make it easier for people to understand, such as Porter's Five Forces or a SWOT analysis, or uh the four P's of marketing, right? These are frameworks that help you define your strategy. The Trust Insights 5P model is an example of a framework that applies to a strategy. When you are talking about tactics and execution, frameworks don't really apply as much there. They can to some degree, but they at that point you're really talking about checklists, right?

You're talking about checklists, um, almost recipes or cookbooks on how do you do the thing in a repeatable scalable uh efficient effective manner. So if you find yourself working with frameworks, you're probably doing strategy. If you're finding yourself working with checklists, you're probably working with tactics and execution. And the vice versa is true. If you are being asked for strategy and you've come up with a checklist, you you've not, you've come up with a set of tactics.

If you have come up with a framework, then you you've probably started on the road to strategy. Here's a good analog for this. A strategy is like a menu, right? When you go to a restaurant and you read the menu, that is a framework, right? There's appetizers, main courses, uh, desserts, drinks.

That framework helps you make decisions, right? About what to have, what should I eat? And you know, depending on the comp the restaurant you go to, the you could have a lot of challenging decisions in front of you. Like, do I want the creme brulee later? Do I want the steak?

What kind of why do I want the steak? And so on and so forth. The tactics and execution, those are the recipes. Here's how to cook a medium rare steak, right? You get the center to 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Um and and don't let it go above that. Um, here's how to make mashed potatoes, here's how to do this, here's how to make a salad that that tastes good. Always salt your tomatoes, um, because tomatoes contain glutamic acid. Adding salt makes it form a natural form of MSG. Those are all recipes, right?

Very tactical, very executional. And can you imagine sitting down in a restaurant and having someone hand you a cookbook full of recipes and say, Yep, here, just uh, you know, here's what we have available. You'd be like, um, I don't need to know how to cook it, man. I just want it, I just want to order some food. Right.

Can you imagine working in the kitchen saying, okay, so the customer just ordered uh veal picata, and um, and and you know, your sous-chef just hands you a menu. Like, no, I mean you know how to cook this thing. Um help me out here. That's the difference between strategy and tactics, frameworks and checklists, right? This the menu is a framework, the the recipe is a checklist.

If you are working with one type of content, right, framework or checklist, you know what you're working on. If you want to be doing more strategic work, right? If you're you aspire in your career to be doing more strategic work, you should be working with more menus. You should be working with more frameworks, you should be introducing frameworks. Even if your company doesn't do that, you could be blogging about it, putting it up on YouTube, things like that.

That's how you move from one to the other, right? If you want to improve the tactics and execution in your company, maybe you're the CMO, maybe you're a VP in marketing, and your marketing team is just not getting the job done. You can sit there and yell, like, well, this is this is not aligned with our strategy, or you can say, Show me your cookbook, show me your recipe, show me your checklists, show me the the order of operations and how you do things, and let's sit down and make better recipes. Right. So you can step down into tactics and execution to fix and tune them up.

But the distinction between the two is really important. You don't want to commingle them, you don't want to mix them up. You don't want to think you're doing one thing and and not at the other, right? You don't want to think that you're doing strategy, but you're actually doing tactics because then when someone comes along who says, Show me your strategy and you hand them a recipe, they're gonna look at you like um you don't really know what you're doing, do you? So that's my suggestion for how to tell whether you're working on strategy or whether you're working on tactics you're either working on frameworks or checklists menus or recipes thanks for tuning in talk to you soon if you like this video go ahead and hit that subscribe button