Exploring stuckness with visual frameworks
Exploring stuckness with visual frameworks
Do you feel stuck? It might help to explore the variations and permutations of stuckness.
Hi all,
This visual frameworks project has been a labor of love for many years, and I look forward to unpacking this and sharing my passion with you. I think of visual frameworks as power tools that can transform the way you think about problems and help you generate more creative strategies for dealing with them.
The phrase “visual frameworks” can mean different things to different people, so I’m going to start by defining what I mean by it.
A visual framework is a sketch or diagram that depicts a thought. Visual frameworks are similar to words or phrases, but instead of representing thoughts with verbal sounds and text, they use images and labels, like a road sign, corporate logo, or simple infographic.
Right now I won’t go too deep into the geekery of how and why they work. We can delve into that later. For now I will simply say that they do work. They change the way you think about difficult situations, and help you generate new ideas and possibilities.
I’ll start by showing you a few visual frameworks that represent the feeling of being mentally and emotionally stuck. “Stuck” can manifest in a number of ways.
Exploring stuckness
For example, you might feel you’re lost in a fog. You can’t really see what’s going on. The real problem is obscured. You have lots of questions but very little data and few answers.
You might feel that your situation is more like a mess. Not just one thing but a tangled, complex, knotted hairball of problems that needs to be unraveled.
You might see your situation as a set of problems and pain points — a landscape of pain!
Maybe it’s more like a puzzle. It’s complicated, but you can see the pieces, and you just need some time to think. In time, you can probably put all the pieces together.
Another way to see a problem is like a maze. A complex network of paths and passageways, many of which probably lead nowhere. But maybe somehow you can find a way through.
Maybe you can see your way through the problem, but you know that it will be difficult to get there. You can foresee all kinds of troubles, trials and tribulations ahead. It’s hard to get started because you know you’ll be running a gauntlet.
It could be that you see the situation as a gap. There’s a chasm between where you are and where you want to be, and you have no idea how you’ll get across it.
Maybe it’s not just a gap but more than that — a deep and irreconcilable conflict that seems impossible to resolve.
It could be that your problem is more like a bottleneck. You have a kind of traffic jam in your life somewhere, and things that need to be done are piling up faster than you can deal with them.
Some situations can feel like a black hole, a vortex that’s pulling you in. If you pass the event horizon, you feel like you’ll never escape. Maybe you have already passed it, and you fear that all hope might be lost.
That feeling can put you into a doom loop, a cycle of habits, routines and behaviors that reinforce each other. When you feel like you’re stuck in a doom loop, it can seem that there is no way out.
A doom loop can feel like a hole, where the more you try to dig your way out, the more the sides cave in and the deeper the hole gets.
This is the end of our catalog of problems, for now. Which leads me to the law of holes: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!”
If one or more of these frameworks resonate with your situation, don’t despair. Visual frameworks help you see problems more clearly, but that’s just the beginning. They also are great at suggesting ideas, approaches and strategies that can get you unstuck and moving forward.
I hope this little exercise has shown you how visual frameworks can help you expand your thinking and help you see your situation through different frames and perspectives.
As a next step, I have set up an online catalog with 100 visual frameworks for you to explore for ideas about how to get unstuck.
This collection is just a starting point. There are hundreds more that I’ll be sharing in the future, and thousands more of these for us to explore together.
But for now, 100 is enough to get started.
A card deck and some other things are forthcoming. I’ll be setting up a Zoom call soon for those who want a deeper dive into how you can use these with friends, team-mates, clients and patients.
For now, take a look at the visual frameworks website, poke around, and let me know your thoughts by replying to this email.
Until next time,
