@sixdays
The founding collection — frameworks written to show what a good entry looks like.
Separate urgent from important, and notice how much of your week serves neither.
Use when Use it when you are busy but not progressing, when a team is permanently reactive, or during a periodic review of where a role's time actually goes. It works well as a recurring habit rather than a one-off, and it is a useful device for a manager and report to look at a workload together without it becoming personal.
Avoid when Avoid it where you have little real autonomy — telling someone to delegate work they cannot delegate is just a way of blaming them for their constraints. It handles individual tasks better than long collaborative efforts, and it has nothing to say about work that is important to someone else and not to you, which is most of what makes a job hard. It also assumes you can tell importance from urgency, which is exactly the skill people struggling with this tend to lack.
Understand the person, frame the real problem, build something rough, and learn from their reaction.
Use when Use it on ill-defined problems where the need is genuinely unclear, where the people affected are not you, and where the cost of building the wrong thing is high. It is strongest early, when the framing is still open and cheap to change.
Avoid when Avoid it when the problem is well-specified and the answer is known — it is expensive ceremony for work that needs execution. It struggles with problems whose constraints are technical or regulatory rather than human. And it is the most ritualised framework in common use: workshops, sticky notes and a five-stage poster routinely produce the appearance of the method with none of the substance, because nobody left the building to observe anyone.
Not all features are equal: some delight, some merely satisfy, and some only hurt when missing.
Use when Use it when a roadmap needs to balance table-stakes against differentiation, when entering an established category where expectations are already set, or when heavy feature investment is somehow producing no measurable satisfaction gain.
Avoid when Avoid it in a genuinely new category, where customers have no expectations to classify against and the survey returns noise. It is survey-based, so it inherits every weakness of stated preference — people are poor predictors of their own delight. It is also expensive to run properly and stale quickly; a three-year-old Kano study is a historical document.
Score competing work on reach, impact, confidence and effort so the argument is about evidence.
Use when Use it when you have many comparable candidates competing for one team's capacity, when prioritisation has become political and you need a neutral vocabulary, or when you need to explain to stakeholders why their request did not make the cut without it being personal.
Avoid when Avoid it for work that is not discretionary — security fixes, legal obligations and keeping the service up do not get scored, they get done. It handles strategic bets badly: anything genuinely new scores low on confidence and reach by construction, so a team that follows RICE mechanically will optimise itself into small safe increments forever. It also cannot see dependencies or sequencing.
People don't buy products, they hire them for a job — find out what the job is.
Use when Use it when demographic segmentation has stopped generating insight, when you cannot explain why customers churn or convert, when entering an adjacent market, or when a roadmap has become a queue of the loudest requests with no organising logic.
Avoid when Avoid it for incremental optimisation of a well-understood product — you know the job, and reopening it is procrastination. It is weak for infrastructure and compliance work with no discretionary hiring decision. Done badly it collapses into vague poetry about customer aspirations, and 'the job' becomes whatever the loudest person already wanted, now with better rhetoric.
Observe, orient, decide, act — and win by cycling faster than the situation changes.
Use when Use it in genuinely competitive, fast-changing situations — an incident, a live negotiation, a competitor's surprise move, a crisis. It suits environments where information is incomplete by nature and waiting for completeness means losing.
Avoid when Avoid it for decisions that are expensive to reverse and slow-moving: a factory site or a pension scheme does not want tempo, it wants analysis. It is widely misread as 'decide fast', which drops the orient step and produces speed without judgement. It also has little to say where there is no adversary and no clock.
Ask how this fails, not how it succeeds — the failure list is shorter and more honest.
Use when Use it before committing to a plan that is expensive to reverse, when a team has become uniformly enthusiastic and you suspect the optimism is social rather than evidential, and in any decision where avoiding a catastrophic downside matters more than optimising the upside.
Avoid when Avoid it as a general operating posture — a culture that only inverts becomes paralysed and treats every idea as a hazard. It is weaker in genuinely novel territory where the failure modes are unknown rather than unspoken. And it will not generate a strategy: it removes ways to lose, which is not the same as finding a way to win.
Strip a problem back to what must be true, then rebuild — instead of copying what exists.
Use when Use it when an industry's costs or practices have been stable for a long time without obvious justification, when you are entering a field as an outsider and lack the incumbents' assumptions, or when repeated incremental attempts have all failed and the problem may be framed wrongly.
Avoid when Avoid it for routine decisions — it is slow, effortful, and analogy is right most of the time. It is also a common vehicle for arrogance: reasoning from first principles while lacking domain knowledge tends to rediscover why the convention exists, expensively. If experts cannot explain why a practice exists, that is worth investigating; if they can, listen.
A jointly owned, dated plan from here to live — so the deal has no invisible middle.
Use when Use it on complex deals with long cycles, multiple approval gates, and implementation work after signature — especially where you have been burned by late-stage procedural slippage or where the buyer has a hard date they must hit.
Avoid when Avoid it on small or fast transactions, where it is bureaucratic overhead the buyer will resent. It is worthless if it becomes a seller-authored document emailed for agreement — that is a project plan with a friendly name, and it will not predict anything. And it cannot fix a deal with no genuine urgency; it will simply document the drift precisely.
Lead with a commercial insight that reframes the buyer's problem, rather than asking what keeps them up at night.
Use when Use it in complex B2B sales where you have genuine cross-customer data the buyer lacks, where the competition is undifferentiated on features, and where the real enemy is the buyer's inertia rather than another vendor.
Avoid when Avoid it when you have no real insight — performed without substance it is just contrarianism, and buyers detect it immediately. Avoid it with sophisticated buyers who know their domain far better than you, where a reframe reads as condescension. It also demands enablement most sales organisations do not have: the insight must be built centrally, because individual reps cannot see across the customer base.
Four kinds of question that let a buyer talk themselves into the size of their problem.
Use when Use it in considered, higher-value sales where the buyer has a real problem they have not fully priced, and where the purchase requires internal justification. It is especially strong when your advantage is genuine but not obvious in a feature comparison.
Avoid when Avoid it in low-value transactional selling, where the buyer knows what they want and the questioning reads as an obstacle between them and a purchase. It fails when the buyer has already diagnosed themselves and wants a price — implication questions asked of a decided buyer feel like manipulation, because at that point they are. It also requires real preparation; run cold it produces an interrogation.
A checklist for whether a complex deal is real, before you spend a quarter finding out.
Use when Use it on high-value B2B deals with several stakeholders and a long cycle, especially where forecast accuracy matters and pipeline reviews have become exercises in optimism. It is most useful as a shared vocabulary that lets a manager ask 'what don't we know?' without it reading as an attack on the rep.
Avoid when Avoid it in transactional or self-serve sales, where the overhead exceeds the deal value and there is no committee to map. Applied mechanically it becomes a CRM compliance ritual that reps fill in after the fact, which produces the paperwork and none of the thinking. It also qualifies deals; it does not create them.
Compete somewhere else: redraw the offer so the current rivalry stops being the question.
Use when Use it in a commoditised market where competitors are near-indistinguishable and margins are eroding, or when a large population plainly declines to buy from anyone in the category and you want to know why.
Avoid when Avoid it in a young market where the rules are not yet settled — there is no convergence to escape. Be wary of it as a rationalisation: 'we compete differently' is the most comfortable thing a losing company can tell itself, and the framework supplies attractive language for it. The literature also selects heavily on winners, so the base rate for this working is far lower than the case studies imply.
Explain why an industry is profitable — or isn't — before you commit to competing in it.
Use when Use it before entering an industry, before a major capital commitment, or when strong execution is somehow producing weak margins and you need to know whether the problem is you or the structure you are operating inside.
Avoid when Avoid it for short-term or tactical calls — it describes structure, which moves over years. It fits industries with recognisable boundaries better than fluid ecosystems and platforms, where roles blur and today's supplier is next year's competitor. It also says nothing about your own capabilities, and it is a snapshot of a structure that will keep moving after you present it.
Scan the six external forces that will shape your market whether or not you act.
Use when Use it when entering an unfamiliar market or geography, when setting strategy over a multi-year horizon, or when a business is heavily exposed to regulation, commodity prices, or public sentiment. It pairs naturally with a competitive analysis, which handles the forces PESTEL deliberately ignores.
Avoid when Avoid it for operational or short-horizon decisions, where macro forces move too slowly to matter and the exercise becomes theatre. It also has no opinion about your competitors, your customers, or your own capabilities — mistaking a completed PESTEL for a strategy is the standard failure.
Sort what you know about a decision into four buckets so the gaps become obvious.
Use when Use it early, when a group needs to pool what it collectively knows before choosing a direction — entering a market, responding to a competitor, or opening annual planning. It is most valuable when the people in the room hold different pieces of the picture and have never assembled them in one place.
Avoid when Avoid it when you need a decision rather than an inventory: SWOT ranks nothing and will not tell you what to do. It rewards confident assertion, so it degrades badly in rooms with a strong seniority gradient. And it is a snapshot — for anything fast-moving it dates quickly, and a stale SWOT presented as current is worse than none.