Business problem framing: The value of frameworks in analysis and communiction

As part of ongoing professional education, I took the INFORMS Business Problem Framing class, which is also the lead in to the Certified Analytics Professional training that is being developed.  You may wonder what can be learned in a 5 hour course.  It is a tour of frameworks for looking at business problems.  And this is something that gets short changed in engineering training that focuses on analytic methods (i.e.math) to the expense of understanding the problem in context and working with people.  This course is needed by anyone who learned analytics as a math or computational practice and needs to learn to work with business partners/clients and is good for those who work with business partners/clients but want more range and ways of communicating (which is everyone who works in analytics in the real world)

Back when I was an enginneering professor, the supply chain center at the associated business school asked if I would be willing to coach their supply chain case study teams.  As a school with a certain amount of pretension, they found it disheartening that they were never winning these regional competitions (operations management supply chain professors and industrial engineering supply chain professors are drawn from the same pool, so this actually made sense as they needed someone who was not actually part of running a case competition.) But, after some conversations I did not approach it as a refresher on supply chain modeling, I approached our coaching sessions as teaching them how to read a case through the lens of frameworks that they had learned at some point, but may not have realized were a key tool.  Because frameworks are tools for organizing how you think of problems and a way to communicate about problems.

In every domain of expertise, experts use frameworks to organize how they look at the world.  Frameworks help experts look at all aspects of the situation.  And when provided information they can realize that they have not been given critical information that can change how they should approach a problem. Novices will often work only with what they have, like a classroom problem.  I have noted that Generative AI foundation models make the same mistake, they work with only what they have in cases where a framework would have told them a direction to go to get missing information for a fuller picture of the problem.

The other use of frameworks is communication. Frameworks provide a way of quickly communicating the essense of the issue and the information that a decision will depend on. When I was deployed in Afghanistan, I had a brief that was working its way up the chain.It was being scheduled for a 2-star general. A couple of that general's staff were present when I had given the brief at a lower level. And they told me that the brief was good, but I had to completely redo it to fit into a specific framework. Because that is how that general processed information.  (In the end, the staff went through my brief and realized that the recommendations were sound and we got the result without having to formally present the brief)

What can a 5-hour class do?  The Business Problem Framing course is a tour of a wide range of frameworks, probably familiar to someone coming out of business school, but not familiar to those whose focus is on analytical methods, math, and programming with data. And many of the frameworks are very similar in purpose.  But the right framework for the problem is on partially about the particulars of the problem, it is also about the framework that communicates the problem to everyone involved.  And just as having many ways of delivering a message is helpful to have, familiarity with a number of frameworks is helpful to have when communicating with stakeholders, because it is more possible that you will find a framework that resonates with everyone. And that leads to a better and more fruitful effort in solving the right problem at the right time.