One sheet, every framework

All 93 frameworks with a short explanation of each, laid out as a single landscape poster. Print it or save it as a PDF.

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Useful Consulting Frameworks

A field reference for consultants.
93 frameworks across 7 categories.

Strategy 22

Corporate strategy and competitive advantage

Ohmae's 3C Model Explore

In Ohmae's 3C model, strategy has to hold the company, the customer, and the competition in view at the same time.
Bowman's Strategy Clock Decide

Bowman's strategy clock is eight competitive positions based on price and perceived value, beyond the generic strategy choices.
Resource-Based View Explore

The resource-based view looks for competitive advantage in resources the firm already holds, rather than in the market position it picks.
Core Competencies Decide

The core competencies framework finds the deep proficiencies that are hard to copy and that can be reused across more than one product.
SPACE Matrix Decide

The SPACE matrix places the firm in an aggressive, competitive, conservative, or defensive posture.
Scenario Planning Explore

Scenario planning builds several plausible futures and stress-tests a decision that has to survive more than one of them.
Balanced Scorecard Align

The balanced scorecard turns a strategy into measures across finance, customers, internal process, and learning and growth.
Hoshin Kanri Deliver

Hoshin kanri is a planning cadence that connects company goals to the daily work of individual people.
Three Horizons of Growth Design

The three horizons of growth balance the current business, emerging opportunities, and bets that could replace both.
Greiner's Growth Model Explore

Greiner's growth model is six stages of organizational growth, and the crisis that has to be resolved before the next stage.
PESTLE and Its Extensions Explore

PESTLE scans political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental forces, including the ethical and geographic extensions.
BCG Growth-Share Matrix Decide

The BCG growth-share matrix sorts business units by market growth and relative market share into stars, cash cows, question marks, and dogs, to decide where cash should go.
GE-McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix Decide

The GE-McKinsey nine-box matrix rates each business on industry attractiveness and competitive strength, then sorts it into invest, hold, or harvest.
Porter's Five Forces Explore

Porter's five forces explain how profitable an industry can be from rivalry, the power of buyers and suppliers, and the threats of new entrants and substitutes.
Porter's Generic Strategies Decide

Porter's generic strategies are cost leadership, differentiation, or focus. A choice of how to compete, with a warning about getting stuck in the middle.
Porter's Value Chain Explore

Porter's value chain splits a firm into the activities that create value, so cost and differentiation can be traced to where they come from.
Ansoff Matrix Decide

The Ansoff matrix is four routes to growth from existing or new products in existing or new markets, each carrying a different level of risk.
SWOT Analysis Explore

SWOT analysis sets internal strengths and weaknesses against external opportunities and threats. It earns its place only when it ends in choices.
VRIO Framework Explore

The VRIO framework tests whether a resource is valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and backed by an organization able to capture what it is worth.
Playing to Win Decide

Playing to Win is five linked strategic choices: the winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the capabilities required, and the management systems behind them.
OKRs Align

OKRs are objectives and key results: a few goals per period, each with measurable outcomes that show whether it was met.
Blue Ocean Strategy Design

Blue ocean strategy uses a strategy canvas and four actions to change what an industry competes on and reach demand nobody is serving.

Problem solving 12

Problem solving, logic, and communication

SCQA Align

SCQA is situation, complication, question, answer: a structure for proposals and executive summaries.
Cynefin Framework Explore

The Cynefin framework sorts a situation into Clear, Complicated, Complex, or Chaotic, and changes how you respond.
OODA Loop Deliver

The OODA loop is observe, orient, decide, act: a fast cycle for decisions that have to be revised as the situation moves.
Kepner-Tregoe Decide

Kepner-Tregoe is a sequence for gathering information, comparing alternatives, and examining risk before a decision.
Design Thinking Design

Design thinking is empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, so a solution is shaped with the people who have to live with it.
First Principles Thinking Explore

First principles thinking takes a problem down to the constraints that are actually true, then builds up from those.
Six Thinking Hats Decide

The six thinking hats look at one decision from separate stances, including facts, feelings, caution, and creativity, instead of mixing them into one argument.
TRIZ Design

TRIZ uses recurring principles of invention to get past trial and error when a design faces a contradiction.
Issue Trees and MECE Explore

Issue trees break a question into branches that do not overlap and together cover it, so each one can be tested and assigned.
Fishbone Diagram and 5 Whys Explore

The fishbone diagram and 5 whys lay out the possible causes of a problem by category, then keep asking why to reach the cause worth fixing.
Pareto Analysis Decide

Pareto analysis ranks causes by size to find the few that account for most of the effect. The 80/20 rule, applied to data.
Pre-Mortem Decide

A pre-mortem assumes the project has already failed and asks the team to explain why, while the plan can still change.

Markets 12

Marketing, sales, and pricing

Diffusion of Innovations Explore

The diffusion of innovations describes how an idea spreads, from innovators and early adopters through the majority and on to laggards.
Brand Equity Explore

Brand equity is how awareness, associations, perceived quality, and loyalty add up to a brand people will pay for.
The Challenger Sale Deliver

The Challenger Sale is a business-to-business approach that teaches, tailors, and takes control of the commercial conversation.
Miller Heiman Strategic Selling Align

Miller Heiman strategic selling is a way through a large sale in which several buyers do not share one motive.
Price Elasticity of Demand Decide

Price elasticity of demand is how much quantity demanded moves when the price moves.
Marketing Funnel Explore

The marketing funnel is the drop from awareness toward advocacy, used to see where prospective customers leave.
Net Promoter Score Deliver

The net promoter score is promoters minus detractors, used as a proxy for loyalty and for the likelihood of a recommendation.
Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning Decide

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning divide a market into segments, choose which ones to serve, and define the place the offer should hold in those customers' minds.
Marketing Mix (4Ps and 7Ps) Design

The marketing mix is product, price, place, and promotion, extended with people, process, and physical evidence for services.
Crossing the Chasm Decide

Crossing the chasm is the gap between early adopters and the pragmatic majority, and the narrow beachhead strategy used to cross it.
Customer Lifetime Value Decide

Customer lifetime value is the margin a customer is expected to produce over the relationship, used to set what winning and keeping them is worth.
MEDDIC Deliver

MEDDIC is metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, and champion: a checklist for qualifying a complex sale.

Organization 14

Organization, culture, and change

Galbraith's Star Model Design

Galbraith's star model aligns five choices in organization design: strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people.
Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model Explore

The Nadler-Tushman congruence model reads performance from the fit among the work, the people, the structure, and the culture.
McKinsey Influence Model Align

The McKinsey influence model treats role modeling, understanding, formal mechanisms, and skill building as the conditions of a change that sticks.
Bridges Transition Model Align

The Bridges transition model follows the psychological path through an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning.
Burke-Litwin Model Explore

The Burke-Litwin model shows how leadership, culture, systems, and other factors connect in transformational and transactional change.
Tuckman's Stages Explore

Tuckman's stages are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning: a map of how a group becomes a team, and then ends.
RACI Align

RACI names who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, so a piece of work has one owner.
Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Explore

Hofstede's cultural dimensions compare cultures on dimensions such as power distance and individualism, often when two organizations have to work as one.
Competing Values Framework Design

The competing values framework places culture on two axes: flexibility against stability, and an internal focus against an external one.
McKinsey 7S Framework Explore

The McKinsey 7S framework checks the fit among strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff, and skills.
Kotter's 8 Steps Deliver

Kotter's 8 steps are a sequence for leading large change, from creating urgency to anchoring the new ways in the culture.
ADKAR Align

ADKAR is awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement: the stages each person passes through before a change takes hold.
Stakeholder Mapping Align

Stakeholder mapping places the people around a decision by power and interest, so engagement goes where it can change the outcome.
9-Box Talent Grid Decide

The 9-box talent grid plots people by current performance and future potential to guide development, succession, and retention decisions.

Finance 9

Finance and valuation

DuPont Analysis Explore

DuPont analysis breaks return on equity into profit margin, asset turnover, and financial leverage.
Altman Z-Score Explore

The Altman Z-score is used to estimate the risk of bankruptcy within about two years.
Activity-Based Costing Explore

Activity-based costing assigns overhead through the activities a product actually consumes, so reported profit sits closer to real profit.
Discounted Cash Flow Decide

Discounted cash flow values a business from the present value of the cash it is expected to produce.
Weighted Average Cost of Capital Decide

The weighted average cost of capital is the firm’s average cost of financing across debt and equity.
Economic Value Added Decide

Economic value added is operating profit after a charge for the capital used to produce it.
Price-Volume-Mix Analysis Explore

Price-volume-mix analysis splits a change in revenue or margin into the parts caused by price, volume, and mix, so the story behind the number is clear.
Break-Even and Contribution Margin Decide

Break-even is the volume at which contribution covers fixed cost, and contribution margin is the margin each unit adds toward it.
NPV and IRR Decide

NPV and IRR are two decision rules from discounted cash flow: the value an investment adds today, and the return at which it breaks even.

Operations 12

Operations, supply chain, and manufacturing

SIPOC Explore

SIPOC is a one-page view of a process: suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers.
PDCA Deliver

PDCA is plan, do, check, act: the basic cycle of continuous improvement.
Total Quality Management Deliver

Total quality management is an organization-wide approach to quality, aimed at long-term customer satisfaction rather than inspection at the end.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness Deliver

Overall equipment effectiveness is availability times performance times quality: a measure of how much of a machine’s scheduled time becomes good output.
SCOR Model Design

The SCOR model is a reference for supply chain performance across plan, source, make, deliver, return, and enable.
Kraljic Matrix Decide

The Kraljic matrix sets a purchasing posture from profit impact and supply risk: routine, leverage, bottleneck, or strategic.
Economic Order Quantity Decide

Economic order quantity is the order quantity that minimizes the combined cost of ordering and holding inventory.
5S Deliver

5S is sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain: a method for keeping a workplace orderly enough to see problems.
DMAIC Deliver

DMAIC is define, measure, analyze, improve, control: the Six Sigma cycle for reducing variation in a process.
Value Stream Mapping Explore

Value stream mapping maps how material and information move through a process, and separates value-adding time from the seven kinds of waste.
Theory of Constraints Decide

The theory of constraints finds the one constraint that limits throughput, and organizes the rest of the system around it.
A3 Problem Solving Deliver

A3 problem solving is one sheet that holds the problem, the analysis, the countermeasures, and the follow-up, written to be discussed and revised.

Innovation 12

Innovation, product, and digital

Business Model Canvas Design

The business model canvas is one page for partners, activities, resources, the value proposition, relationships, channels, segments, costs, and revenues.
Value Proposition Canvas Design

The value proposition canvas matches a customer’s jobs, pains, and gains with the product’s pain relievers and gain creators.
Lean Startup Deliver

Lean startup is build, measure, learn: short cycles used to cut the risk of building something the market does not want.
Doblin's 10 Types of Innovation Design

Doblin's 10 types of innovation extend innovation past the product itself, into the profit model, network, structure, process, channel, brand, and related types.
Wardley Mapping Decide

Wardley mapping maps a value chain by how evolved each component is, from genesis to commodity, so a shift can be seen before it arrives.
Hype Cycle Explore

The hype cycle traces a technology from the trigger, through inflated expectations and disillusionment, toward broader productive use.
Agile, Scrum, and SAFe Deliver

Agile, Scrum, and SAFe are iterative ways of building software and digital products, from a single-team practice to a scaled system.
Product Life Cycle Explore

The product life cycle is introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. The stage changes what marketing, investment, and product work are for.
Jobs to Be Done Explore

Jobs to be done asks what progress a customer is trying to make, and what they hire a product to do, to explain why people buy and switch.
Kano Model Decide

The Kano model sorts product features into basics, performance features, and delighters by how each one moves customer satisfaction.
Stage-Gate Deliver

Stage-Gate runs product development as stages separated by go or kill decisions, so investment grows only as uncertainty falls.
MoSCoW and RICE Prioritization Decide

MoSCoW and RICE are two ways to choose what to build first: must, should, could, or won't, or a score from reach, impact, confidence, and effort.