Frameworks as a System: Scale Your Ideas Without Reinventing the Wheel

What if your ideas aren't actually the problem, just the way they're structured? What if the mess isn't in your message, but in the fact that it's different every time you say it? Today, we're solving for calm. One KPI, one bottleneck, one business at a time. And this time, we're starting with your ideas.

As founders, experts, or creatives, most of us have been talking about the same core thing for years. But every time you're on a podcast, a sales call, or writing a blog post, it shows up a little different. There's no system, no scaffolding, and without a consistent structure, your ideas can't scale. Right now, your ideas are powerful but scattered. They live in your brain, in your talks, in your client calls, in your content, but they're shape shifting every time you try to share them.

You want to make your thinking scalable, but every time you try to document your IP, it either feels oversimplified or messier than when you started. The fix? It's not branding, it's systems thinking. Frameworks for your ideas aren't just for thought leadership, they are operational infrastructure. And today's guest, Melanie Diesel has built an actual system for turning raw unstructured ideas into scalable functional frameworks.

Spoiler, she even made a framework for making frameworks, which you know I love. Her iron framework is the exact process I use to help me shape the earliest versions of the calmer framework. And working with Mel helped me evolve it from a clever acronym into the visual model and upcoming full diagnostic tool. It's something that now sits at the core of my business. So we're gonna geek out about how to build frameworks around your ideas, not just to help people understand your thinking, but to give you the framework for your services, your content, and even your operations.

And yes, we're getting a little bit meta here because the calmer framework is going to be all over this episode, including in a little bit of behind the scenes on the development process. Specifically though, we're talking about the business design lever here and how structuring your ideas and your assets can help you create margin, reduce reactivity, and scale calmly. So I think for a lot of folks out there, they are not really necessarily thinking about structuring their ideas or thinking about their ideas in any kind of a system. What do you see the default behavior being, or how do most people experts approach their ideas structurally?

What I find is that a lot of times you have, like, your go to idea, your your passion, like, your talking point, whatever you wanna call it. And you kind of approach every interaction as an opportunity to try to explain it. So it's like whether you're on a podcast or you're talking to a potential client or, I don't know, you're on a stage or something, you're like, okay. Now here's what I'm so passionate about. And you probably use slightly different language to talk about it each time.

The idea is no less true. It's no less important, but it's very difficult for your audience to have any sort of memorable experience with that idea if you are also not having a consistent experience of that idea. And so it's like that's that's really the main issue, I think, is you can know your idea inside and out. But if it's not being communicated in any sort of structured way, people are not going to remember it. They're not gonna pass it along.

And I think that's that's really the biggest thing is, like, if you're just winging it each time you're trying to explain it, then, you know, you're kinda leaving a lot on the table.

Yeah. I think there's also maybe an element of none of us like saying the same thing over and over because Yeah. We get bored with our own ideas. But the reality is most of the people listening to us don't even notice that we're repeating ourselves if we bother to.

It's true. Well and first of all, you're not talking to the same people every time. Right? If you're going on different podcasts, talking to different clients, speaking at different events, whatever the case may be, it's not gonna be the exact same people reading it, listening to it, experiencing it every time. Second thing, even if they have heard it before, they have not taken action on all of the things that you said, and hearing it again may actually help.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had someone say something, but like, oh my god. I I meant to do that. I should be doing that. Why have I not done that yet? Right?

Like, the repeat helps. But I think the other thing is when you have a structure to the idea, you can actually design very intentional different ways to talk about it, but you're doing it with intention instead of doing it because you're winging it. When you know what the idea is very clearly in their structure, you can come up with specific different framing, specific different positioning that brings you into that same idea. But, again, it's done in an intentional way rather than this is the words I happen to say, and it worked, and now I can't ever repeat it because I don't remember what came out of my mouth.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never experienced that at all. So if we're trying to systematize our ideas or create some sort of structure. You are a big believer that frameworks are a really strong, powerful way to do that. Talk to me about what a framework is.

So when you are describing, let's create a framework around your ideas, what is that?

It's such a good question because I think different people have different ideas of what that means, and they're not all necessarily wrong. When I say a framework in the broadest sense, I mean a consistent consistent structure structure that underpins your ideas, that supports those ideas. You could think of it as a visual framework. In many cases, it is. You could have a pyramid or a flywheel or, you know, I give the example of, like, remember we all grew up, we had the food pyramid.

Like, in one instance, it's a lecture about things that are healthy and how much of you should have of them. In another, it's the the food pyramid, which even if it's now been replaced with something called MyPlate, which looks much more like a pie chart, it gives you a visual representation of, like, these are things I should have a lot of at the bottom, and these are things I should not have as much of at the top. It's much more memorable and easy to understand. So it could be visual like that. It could also be something like an acronym, you know, where each letter of a specific word stands for a different element.

It could be like a rhyme, like a mnemonic I before e except after c. Rather than you having to memorize every single word and and how the spelling is, like, you have this mnemonic that you can fall back on that kinda informs things. So there's a lot of different ways you can put structure behind those ideas, but the idea the the goal really is to have some sort of consistent consistent structure structure that your idea fits into and using that as the jumping off point for how you present that idea to the world.

Are there any default assumptions or ideas that you think we need to challenge when it comes to packaging ideas into frameworks, into systems? Are there ideas that we just need to let go of?

I think naming needs to come last. This is like the one like, I will beat this drum until my dying breath. I think the biggest mistake I see people make, and especially if you're newer to this or you're really trying to make a big impact, is you come up with a buzzy name. Like, I'm gonna do the people pleaser pyramid. You know?

Like, you come up with some of buzzy name, and your ideas don't need to be in a pyramid. The pyramid doesn't make sense for those ideas because they're not building. They're not appearing in different percentages. You kind of force a framework because you come up with a name that sounds good to you, and you wind up creating a framework that doesn't actually serve you, your ideas, your business, your audience. So I think that's the big one.

Right? We think, okay. Well, whatever my thing is, it needs to have a brandable name that I'm gonna trademark. You know? And it's gonna be like my official flywheel or like, you know, something like that.

And it's so much less important what you call the thing than that it actually does its intended job of making your ideas easier to digest and easier to remember.

I love that and am guilty of that. Unintentionally guilty of it, but guilty of it because I love a good name.

I mean, the name is important. I'm not gonna lie and say you know, if you call it something crazy, it's gonna be harder for it to catch on. But this is where I like to remind people of things like the Pareto principle, which is the eighty twenty rule or Schrodinger's cat or the Heimlich maneuver. Like, even if things aren't necessarily super buzzy or easy to pronounce or easy to spell right off the bat, like, those names can still come to represent an idea when it's well executed and when appropriately tied to the thing. So it doesn't mean that the name doesn't matter.

It doesn't mean you can't have your name in it if that's super important to you. It doesn't mean it can't be a cool acronym. It totally can. But you really wanna start with those ideas first and make sure you're coming up with a cool or memorable name that serves your ideas and not one that holds them back.

So talk to me about the function. How does organizing your ideas or your IP into a framework help create a system for them?

So it it can work a bunch of different ways, and I think this is easier to talk about with a specific example in mind. So just for the purposes of this, I'll talk about the framework I used for my first book, which was called the Content Fuel Framework. So at the base of it, I wanted to explain to people, like, coming up with ideas is easy if you have a system. That was very difficult to do because it's very abstract. So I came up with a tangible visible system, which is a matrix.

Right? You put the topics of your content along one side and the formats, like video, audio, writing down the other side. And so it made it very easy for me to say, look. You can pick any of these things and any of these things, and boom. You have a possible way to tell that story.

So in that case, having the matrix allowed me to do a couple things. I could structure my chapters and sections around those columns and rows, which made the book very organized and easy to use. It gave me tons of ideas for content to talk about the book. Right? Each of those different subjects, those columns and rows could be the topic of a social post, a blog post.

I embarked on this challenge to create a piece promoting the book at each of those intersections as kind of a fun way to talk about it. It guided the way that I could talk about creating content, about how your content you know, the impact that your content has. And it allowed me to pull examples from all different kinds of industries in a very structured way. Right? Here are some from all these different industries, all these different business types.

So it just allowed me to organize the entire thing. Whereas if I went into it saying, it's really easy to come up with ideas and here's a 100 pages about that, that's chaotic. It's hard for people to recommend the book after that and say, no. It's it's really good. It'll help you come up with ideas probably.

Whereas now, the recommendation part of why I think the book has done well is people can say, it has a system that you can follow, and here are the tangible outcomes of following that system. Right? So it makes it very easy for people to take away the clear takeaways and pass them along to other people. That's it's an example just to say that when you have a system to fall back on, it can become a lens through which you approach the other parts of your business. I have resources that are tied to that system, you know, worksheets that are tied to that system that people can buy.

I have services that are tied to that system. I have a a workshop that I give that's tied to that system. So it becomes an underlying structure that you can build on. Right? You can build other services, other products, experiences all around that same underlying like, think of it as, like, the the framing of a house.

Right? Like, the the house may look different on the outside. The types of people who use it and the ways they use it may be different. But at the end of the day, it's a bunch of two by fours screwed together, like, underneath. You need that for it to hold up, right, and for it to to have any staying power.

And so it's very similar. Yeah.

Think I my framework is a lot newer than yours and still sort of in development. But what I realized was once I had, like, the one idea, everything can tie back to that. Yep. It started as an acronym, which now makes me wanna, like, hide hide my face.

But it's okay. It's okay.

It started as an acronym because that's where I thought it was gonna go. It evolved into more of a visual framework that's something a little bit more actionable. It's now evolving into an assessment and different personality types. And I could write a book now on every single lever because I think, for me, one of the benefits that we actually haven't talked about is I am somebody who has a really hard time wanting to say the same thing over and over because I love new ideas. Like, one of the reasons I love businesses is is because there's always a new idea.

There's always something new to learn. And the framework for me was a way to get myself into the idea, get comfortable with saying the same thing over and over. Because for me, there's always a new way to now explore that idea. I'm not just saying out there, I mean, am, that she should go make Call Me Your New KPI. I say that everywhere.

But for me, then I get to explore that through the lens of management style, that through the lens of business design. And then within those, there's, like, multiple sub dimensions and different spectrum. And it is a really good way for me to control myself and my desire to talk about new things.

Yeah.

Because I can talk about new things to me that feels like the same thing to anybody who's hearing it.

Totally. Well and I think that there is this broader misconception, and this is true of, like, all creative environments, jobs, efforts, projects, is that people think creativity is stifled by limitations, and it's actually amplified by limitations. When you have no limitations, it is incredibly difficult to make forward progress because you have the entire world at your disposal. How do you possibly decide what to cook with no ingredient list? Right?

How do you possibly decide what to craft when you are in the middle of a craft store? There's too many options. Right? And we've all had that experience of, like, I don't know where to start. There's too much.

When you have guidelines, it actually forces you to think in a more productive way so that even if you ultimately go outside of those guidelines, you're doing it with intention, and you're doing it in a structured way, and it winds up creating more ideas. It's why if you think about any challenge based show that you've ever seen, it's built around rules. Like, I love Chopped. Have you ever

seen Chopped? Oh, I love Chopped. It's my favorite.

So here we have these amazing chefs, for anyone who hasn't seen it, amazing chefs who, you know, they run restaurants. They're, like, private chefs for celebrities. Like, they've won awards, whatever. They run multi star Michelin restaurants, and they come in and someone says, here you go. You need to make an appetizer using gummy bears, chili peppers, and I don't even know, like marshmallows.

I don't know.

And they give them these challenges, and that's an incredible challenge. But if they came in and said, make an appetizer, and they have this whole pantry, like, where do you even begin? The fact that they give them a difficult challenge forces innovation. It forces them to think differently, and they end up coming up with things. Even though they're incredibly talented, they come up with things they never would have otherwise.

Right? So having structure, having those limitations doesn't actually make you less effective. It doesn't make you less able to communicate your ideas. It forces you to think about it in a new way.

I love the chopped analogy. So the next logical question is, cool. How do I go do that thing now? Because that sounds super cool, also really hard. Yes.

So how do you go about creating a framework around an idea? Like, what's the actual process?

So what's really fun for me is I'm autistic. My brain is very visual and organized and systematic just by nature. And so most of the systems that I teach are systems that I was doing automatically and then reverse engineered to figure out, okay. Like, how am I doing this in my head? Because I can't teach other people if I don't know what I'm doing.

So that's how content field framework came to be, and it's how I came into this process of making frameworks. I'm like, how do I look at ideas and make sense of them? And I realized that I had four distinct things that I was looking at. The first one is the ideas themselves. So what are the key pieces of information that we are trying to communicate?

We need to have those fairly clear. Even if they might go by different names, like, what are the key elements? Let's make piles. Like, here are these types of things, these types of things, and these types of things. Let's get those key ideas down.

So that's the first step. That's the information. The second step is we look at the relationship between those pieces of information. Are they all equal? Are some of them more important than others?

Do they, you know, need to happen in a specific order? Do they lead from one to the other, or are they just a list of things? So we're looking at how do those pieces of information relate to one another. The third one is operation. What do we want people to do with this thing?

Do they need to memorize it? Do they need to use it as guidance for a process? Do they need to measure themselves against it in the case of, like, your assessment? How are they going to operate this model? And then the last step, as we talked about, is naming.

This is what I call my iron framework, I r o n, information, relation, operation, and then naming. And that's really how we take your ideas and kind of get rid of all those wrinkles and get them into a straight, smooth, and organized pile of information.

I think that sounds nice. I found the concept of the iron framework to be very helpful.

So how do we break it down?

Yeah. I think the part that I struggled with was realizing how iterative the process ends up being. Because for me, it started as an acronym, And I'm gonna like, originally, it was CALM. And then it became CALMER. Then Uh-huh.

As I started using it, I realized this doesn't quite hold up in the real world. Yep. Okay. But now I'm stuck with CALMER as an acronym that, like, the buckets have changed because I started using this in the real world. And that prompted me to have to go, okay, well, maybe it's not an acronym anymore.

Yeah. Maybe it's a visual thing that I can still keep the name Calmer Framework, but it's something else. And that evolved into, I think, it was like a a sunburst kind of, like, And then evolved into the lever system That, that we have like, even I think it's I'm now, like, eighteen months down the road of this process. As I was evolving, then I was taking the levers and trying to turn them into an assessment. I ended up realizing, oh, one of the names of my levers still isn't quite right because it requires too much explanation.

And the process of going through the assessment meant I went back and changed Yeah. The name of the lever. So talk about how the process normally evolves for folks.

Yeah. It's a really good point too because it's very rare that you sit down and you're like, let me make a framework, and then it's just like perfect for all eternity. So for some context, again, just to use the same example, the content field framework matrix that I used, I didn't make it up for the book. I had been using it in workshops just like you're talking about, like, actually using it out in the world for about a year and a half to two years before I memorialized it into the book, and so much changed from initial to when it was printed. And I would probably adjust it now because there's been innovation since then in the tools we use for content.

Like, it doesn't address AI at all. That's probably gonna have to happen in a version two. So it it is important to know that it's going to evolve. Right? There's nothing wrong with that.

Think about the periodic table of elements. They discover a new element, and they add it on there in the right spot. Right? Or the the tree that shows all the different classes and kingdoms and phylums of species, they discover something new, they tack it on. That happens.

That's going to happen. What's important is that you recognize when that's happening and make those changes. So the fact that you saw that it needed to be reorganized is part of that. Right? Putting it to use and seeing where it's lacking and being able to adjust it.

I even mentioned the food pyramid that we all grew up using. You know, if you're of relatively middle age or quarter life crisis zone, you probably grew up with the food pyramid. They don't even use the pyramid anymore. Now they have this, like, pie chart plate. They changed it because it didn't serve anymore.

If you see the framework as a way to present your ideas and not as a name that we're married to and it has to be in this form, it becomes easier to update it because you're making it serve the ideas better. So, yes, it will definitely evolve over time as it needs to. The idea is if we go through the iron framework, if we start by really getting clear on what those key ideas are, then we're less likely to need to do major restructure. So I'm using you as an example. You know, I love the calmer framework, so this is all from a place of love.

When you went from calm to calmer, what I see that as is that is a problem of that first stage of the key information. We thought there were four buckets. Right? You thought there were four pieces of information. You came to discover there's actually six.

We gotta adjust it. That's where if we start with those key information, we really interrogate it. We ask really critical questions about what is necessary, what needs to be in here, and what can be part of something else. We can get clearer on, for example, how many buckets, how many steps, how many of those key information pieces need to be included. So, hopefully, that helps keep you from a major restructure.

And then it's the relation and operation, I think, is where it brings you back. Right? Because if you start using it like you did in the world, this is how people are operating, how I'm using this in the world, I've discovered a gap. I need to go back and make sure that the key information pieces are the same. But the naming part that you mentioned, that's at the end because changing the label on the lever, that's an easy switch to make.

Right? You can do that. I've changed the names of categories. Initially, there was a category of people focused content. It used to be called features.

I come from journalism. Features to me means, obviously, it's about a person. That doesn't seem obvious to people who didn't come from journalism, and I didn't know that until I started using it around people who didn't come from journals. Right? So naming stuff, I think, is an easy swap to make.

Those bigger structural things, it's why we start with the key information first. Because if you could get as clear as possible on the most important information, the rest of the stuff tends to come easier, or it becomes clear, like you mentioned, when you need to take a step back and reevaluate at the high level.

Yeah. I think for me, when I created the buckets of ideas, I was very confident in those ideas. And I do think they still exist. Like Yeah. They were reorganized, for sure.

But all of the pieces of information that I started with are still in the model now. Yep. Where I ended up getting stuck was the translation. And I think this is one of those areas where this is something that is fundamentally really, really challenging to do by yourself in isolation Yeah. In your room.

Like, I was very confident in the original version. Like, I tested it. I interrogated it. I put people that I know into different areas. It came out of my work with, you know, real world businesses.

But there is an element where, like, you need a different perspective to come in and help you understand the connections.

It's your idea. It comes from your brain. It makes sense to you. It's kind of like how editing requires outside eyes because you know what you meant to say, so you might read the correct word or the correct spelling even if it's not on the page. It's very similar with your framework.

You know what the different buckets are, so you might just skip the steps that an outsider would need to have more explicitly explained. So, yeah, I think it's really helpful to have other eyes, but it's also helpful not to commit too early. Like, when you're playing around with those ideas, again, that's why naming is last. Right? If we're not sure if this is the final iteration, like, let's get out there.

Let me do a workshop with it. Before I give it a fancy name, let me just call it how to create a calmer business or, you know, something, how to come up with more content ideas. Go teach my version of it as it is now and see how it lands or write a blog post, see how people respond, see what questions they have, talk about it on social, see what the replies and comments say. So just start to put it out there. Like, that's part of the process.

Right? You're just it's like beta testing of a software or, like, having a focus group. Right? You're just kinda putting it out there for other eyes to see, or find a partner who can bring an outside perspective to that early process when you're in the development, which it was I mean, I have really enjoyed getting to work with you on the calmer framework and watching it evolve to to where it is now over the course of the last, I guess, yeah, it's been, like, almost two years.

Yeah. Part that I I love about it I mean, I love a system. I always love a system. It had never occurred to me to have a system around my ideas, and I spent eight years talking about essentially the same stuff. Right?

Like, calmer framework doesn't contain anything in it that I wasn't talking about in the first year of my business. But it ended up being a surprisingly collaborative process in a way that I didn't expect because it's all my own ideas. But every time I talked to somebody about it, they would bring in a different perspective, especially if it's somebody that had known my work for a long time. Right? Yeah.

So, like, when I started thinking about, essentially, what's my premise? What do I talk about? How do I, like, create this circle around all the things that I talk about? And that ended up being, cool. I'm gonna talk about it in the context of calm.

I was trying to describe it to a friend who has known me for the whole ten years of this business. I met them, I think, in the first year of my business. And when I was talking about, hey, here's this new idea. And they were like, oh, you know, that totally plays into the idea of default decisions. That is this idea from the first year of my business that stuck with them that then ended up being one of the ends of the spectrum.

That

Yeah. It didn't even occur to me that the ideas were all connected. They were all the same until I had somebody who's heard me talk about stuff in eleventy billion ways over the course of a decade, realizing from the outside, like, hey, it's all the same. Like, you're trying to make this multiple different things. It's not different things.

It's all one thing. And so being able to talk to different people who come at ideas from different ways. Right? So like, they came in with the idea of they've listened to me talk about stuff for a decade. You came in with the idea of like, hey, this should be a system.

Right? Like, Jay Kinzo is somebody else who was like very integral in the process of what is the premise? Like, what's the circle around this stuff? And so I think this is one area where even though on the surface, I think most people are coming to it like, this needs to be me my ideas. This is my IP.

This is my framework. For me, the process has been so collaborative. Like, there's so many people that have had an impact on what the idea ends up eventually becoming. Think that's a really underestimated part of this I think it's true. Evolution of the process.

Yeah. And it's it's really true too because, I mean, I've worked with a bunch of, you know, entrepreneurs. I worked with organizations who are trying to do something similar, and that is often a concern where they're like, well, we don't want you to come up it. And I'm like, no. I don't wanna come up with it either.

Like, I don't know your core ideas as well as you do. To me, I feel like I'm trying to help you organize them in a way that makes your ideas more clear, that makes it easier for you to communicate them, that makes them fit together. You have all these disparate pieces. Like, how do we see the bigger vision and find out how they work together? It's just It's your ideas organized organized.

In a way that makes them easier for you. You can make a really simple analogy too. It's like, think of a closet. If you have no system in your closet and there's just, like, pants and underwear and sweaters and, like, bathing suits and everything's just all mixed up and there's no dedicated drawer or or shelf or area for any thing, it's hard for you to find what you need. It's hard for you to find the thing that somebody else needs to borrow that you know is perfect for them.

It is hard to make sense of that space. If you take everything out, you figure out what your categories are, and you put them in the place that best serves how they're going to be used, it's very, very similar. You're doing the same thing like organizing a closet just like with your ideas. We're putting like with like. We're understanding what needs to happen in what order.

Like, it doesn't make sense to put your underwear all the way in the back if everything else is over here because then you're gonna have to, like, go really far to start with your base layer. Like, that should probably be first. You know? So it's the same content that you already have in your brain. We're just working together to organize it in a way that will make it easier for you.

It'll make it make more sense for you. You make better use of all your amazing ideas cause you can get to them. I don't know. I think I'm just a a glorified closet organizer. Just brains instead of closets.

I love that. Is there anything you think we should talk about that we haven't actually, like, touched on when it comes to frameworks or this process?

Yeah. Another common concern I can't remember if if you went through this at all. I think you were you kinda had this already tackled. But one thing that people worry about is, like, how much do you put in it? Like, does my framework need to cover every possible service that I offer and every possible thing I've ever talked about?

No. It doesn't. It it needs to be somewhere in the middle of enough that people understand what you do and understand your main premise, your main idea, and not so much that they don't have follow-up questions. And that's kind of a sweet spot that can be hard to see from the inside, but there's a difference between, again, the food pyramid and a graduate level course on nutrition. They're not intended to be substituted for one another.

Right? It plays a very specific role, that pyramid, to give you the basic overview. And if you have further questions, you can dig in deeper. That's really what we wanna do with our framework too. You know, it's not everything that you've ever known, everything that you think, everything that you have to teach someone.

It shouldn't live on its own without you to be implemented. It should help people understand your main idea so that they ask those follow-up questions where you can help them do more.

I love that. Sometimes I feel like mine is too big, and I think that's partially because I talk about all different aspects of it. But sometimes it does feel kind of big and unwieldy. And one of the things I like about it is, on the surface, it's four levers. That's pretty straightforward.

When you start getting into the details, man, I really could write a book on each of the levers. Totally. Like, could totally be a it's standalone thing. Now, when I see the world, I'm so appreciative of really well designed designed frameworks that can, like, really encapsulate an idea so succinctly. Like Yeah.

Before having a framework, when people were like, what do you do? And I would give them this long winded Yeah. Thing about like, oh, I'm a fractional COO and CFO and I help people do finance and operations. And the people would be like, what do you mean? And then I had to expand on that.

Now I could say, you know, I help people engineer calmer businesses. That's enough. Right? Like, that's enough to get people to go, Tell me more about that. But I don't think I would have been able to get there without having a framework that, like, organized the complexity for me.

Yeah. Well and it's the difference between is I need you to tell me more because I don't understand and tell me more than sounds interesting. Like, that's right? It's like they still want more information but not because what you started with is insufficient but because, wow, I I wanna learn more about how to do that. Take me further down that road.

Yeah. I it has been I think probably the single most powerful thing that I have invested business in a decade was just committing to having a framework and exploring it. I don't think I could communicate, like, how much of an asset that has become for the business.

Like Awesome.

Very surprisingly. Like, I think in systems all the time. It never occurred to me to put a system on top of my ideas.

I mean, listen. I made a system for making systems. So I feel

you sometimes. That is my favorite thing. When I'm talking to people about you, I'm like, the best thing is that she made a system for making systems, and it's my favorite thing ever.

I mean, listen. At least I'm walking the walk. Right? I I practice what I preach. So

if people are listening and they want to try to start this process for themselves and they've been in business a while, they've got ideas, they have a bajillion t blog posts and email email newsletters newsletters and and podcast interview. What is one tiny thing that they could do to start?

A couple different options. If you are really committed to, like, a DIY or you feel like you're in the really early phases, go back to that iron framework that I walked through. So start by really getting deep on your big ideas. You can do this in a bunch of different ways. If you're a whiteboard person, throw it all in the whiteboard.

I personally like post its because it allows you to reorganize, and that's what the next step involves. Right? That relationship between all those ideas. So I like putting everything on post its, whether it's on a wall, on paper, and just get all your ideas out so you can figure out what the key information is. What's the overlap?

You can try to figure out what are your ingredients that you're working with so you can then go on to build. That's where I would start because I think that's where a lot of light bulb moments happen. Things start to become more clear when you really get everything out all at once and you're looking at all of those elements. So that's where I would start. If you want a a middle of the road option, I do have a framework development cheat sheet on my website that's, $5 or something.

Just a downloadable guide that walks you through each of those steps. And I also work with people, with my framework accelerator, which I've done with you, where we do sort of a two hour in-depth session, and we do that together. We interrogate those ideas. We organize them appropriately, and then we get you to the point where we don't always get to name at the end. That's more of a personal choice.

But we can figure out those key ideas, figure out their relationships, and organize them in a way that allows you to go forward and then make those part of

your business. This wasn't just a conversation about frameworks as a concept. It's about using them as a lever. And the lever that Mel and I both pulled? Business design.

Specifically, the decision to treat our ideas as infrastructure. We both realized that our IP, the core thinking that runs through everything we do, was too important to leave undocumented or ad hoc. We needed a system that could hold the complexity without requiring us to show up live every time to explain it. Melanie's iron framework walks you through clarifying the information, so your core ideas, defining the relationships between them, understanding the operation or how people will use it, and last, developing the naming and the language that fits around it. When your framework can contain your core ideas, you can talk about the same thing everywhere without feeling like you're repeating yourself.

Your clients can move faster because you're working from a shared mental model and you gain a lens to evaluate new offers, content, and strategy choices. Frameworks don't just help you explain your ideas. They can actually help you run your business. So, yes, we're pulling the business design lever of the Calmer framework here, specifically the decision to systematize your intellectual property. Because when your ideas live in a consistent flexible structure, they don't just sound clearer, they actually scale.

That's what a good framework does. It gives you a repeatable way to package your thinking, build services and products, communicate with your team, and reduce the mental load of reinvention. So as Mel suggested, here's your tiny action to make some progress. Block off 20, pull together every blog post, talk, outline, or scribbled note you've made about your core idea. Then ask yourself, what is showing up over and over again?

What belongs together? What are you actually trying to teach or change? Don't try to name it yet. Don't diagram it. Just surface the raw ingredients because clarity isn't just a messaging problem.

It's an operational opportunity and designing your ideas like infrastructure. Well, that's how you scale calmly. Now in the next episode, Mel and I are going to take you behind the scenes of her framework accelerator service, the one that we talked about here in a live coaching episode where we're going to redesign and automate her client onboarding experience using the very framework we've been talking about. So hit subscribe in your favorite podcast player, and I'll see you there.