Every framework we use in our working lives carries an implied claim about why we should believe in it. We seldom examine that claim, because examining it is effort, and these frameworks don’t arrive one at a time, in a form that invites scrutiny. They come from company onboarding materials, from courses we were sent on, from conference talks, from colleagues, from whiteboards. They accumulate. And they arrive presenting themselves as trustworthy, which is precisely why they aren’t questioned.
I don’t believe anybody wants to spend their valuable time applying frameworks that don’t deliver, but at the same time we’re all a bit too busy to go hunting for evidence.
The good news is that it isn’t that difficult. The next time a shiny new framework appears in a consultant’s slide deck, follow my advice and sort it into one of these three piles. It takes about ten minutes.
Once you’ve decided whether it’s Plausible, Proven, or Pretend, then you’ll know what to do with it.
Plausible
The mechanism behind the framework is coherent. Someone has thought about how people work, proposed something that hangs together, and seen it survive contact with real world experience. But there’s no body of research evidence behind it, no replication, no effect sizes. Nothing that tells you how much it does, for whom, or under what conditions.
Most frameworks that practitioners actually use live in this category. Most of the retrospective formats, most of the facilitation techniques, most diagrams drawn on whiteboards during workshops.
Let’s take the daily stand-up as an example. The mechanism is completely plausible: a short, regular team check-in surfaces problems when they’re still cheap to fix. But it emerged from professionals who noticed that it worked, not from any empirical research.
Plausible isn’t a criticism. Plausible doesn’t mean the research failed. A great deal of skilled practice is both plausible and useful, and waiting for someone to do the research before putting it to work would mean waiting forever.
So what’s the question? Not whether you should use plausible frameworks. The question is whether you’re aware that a framework is plausible rather than proven.
Proven
There is a real research literature. The finding has been replicated. Someone can tell you the effect size, the populations it was tested on, and the conditions under which it stops working.
Locke and Latham’s work on goal-setting, for example, has four decades of solid research behind it. Their assertion that specific, challenging goals lead to higher performance than “do your best” goals is underwritten by hard evidence.
However, far less of what circulates in organisational life belongs here than the confident tone of most management material suggests.
And the somewhat annoying thing is that proven doesn’t mean settled. A well-evidenced finding usually comes with arguments about its boundaries, and that argument is useful information. When someone presents a proven thing without being honest about the contested edges, something important is being left out.
The goal-setting research offers a good example of this too. Do challenging goals lead to rule-bending and corner-cutting? That debate isn’t settled.
Pretend
This is the interesting pile.
Pretend frameworks are constructed to look like evidence, but that’s not the giveaway. Plausible frameworks lack evidence too.
The giveaway is the presence of evidential decoration. Assessments that produce scores and percentages. There are quadrants and typologies. There are certification programmes. There’s a technical-sounding vocabulary and a thick guide book. All the visible apparatus of research, with no research underneath it.
And somewhere along the line, something is billable. The courseware, the courses, the certification programme, the apps. The most bald-faced pretend frameworks will charge you an access fee at the door.
Pretend is more dangerous than nonsense because nonsense announces itself. Pretend arrives looking exactly like Proven. It usually comes with a practitioner community, a licensing structure, and someone in the room who paid several thousand pounds to be accredited in it.
Here’s an example: Learning Styles. This is the idea that instruction modes must be matched to individual visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic preferences. There’s scant evidence to support it, and when researchers examined the idea in 2008, they concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the cost of building learning styles frameworks into everyday practice.
The sorting is not a ranking
Treat the three categories as a quality scale and you’ll throw away most of your toolkit, because most of it is Plausible. That’s the wrong conclusion.
The categories tell you how much time and effort you should commit to a framework. They don’t tell you whether to pick it up in the first place.
Plausible — use it, and be curious about whether it’s working. Hold it lightly and look directly at any disconfirming evidence rather than explaining it away. Describe it honestly to the people you’re using it with: “here’s a model I find useful” is a different sentence from “here’s what the research shows”. If there’s no research, be honest about that.
Proven — use it within the boundary conditions. By far the most common failure mode is over-extension: applying a proven framework beyond the population, timescale, or context in which it was established, then being surprised when the effect vanishes.
Pretend — don’t use it. Then ask a second question: what makes it attractive?
Pretend frameworks succeed because they seem to answer a real need. Often that’s the need to deal with something difficult using safe, neutral vocabulary. The need is genuine, even when the framework isn’t.
Something has to meet that need. If you simply remove the pretend thing without meeting the need, it will come back.
How to actually sort something in ten minutes
Ask these three questions. When put together the answers will give you confidence about what to do next.
Where did this come from?
Who did the original work, and does that work exist? A framework that cites a named researcher and a real literature is in a different position from one whose provenance is “developed over twenty years of consulting practice”.
What would disconfirm it?
Plausible and Proven frameworks can both answer this. Pretend frameworks generally can’t. They’re constructed so that every outcome confirms them.
If you can’t describe the observation that would make you abandon the framework, that’s the finding.
Who benefits from you believing it?
This isn’t a conspiracy test. It’s a follow-the-structure test.
A framework with a certification pipeline attached is economically invested in your belief in a way that a framework in a journal isn’t. That doesn’t make it wrong. It does make it worth a harder look.