Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 265

SWIM Framework

A framework is scaffolding, not the building. SWIM Framework holds your thinking up while you do the real work.

Use the framework as a checklist, not a straitjacket. The moment it starts answering questions for you, rather than sharpening them, put it back in the drawer.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. If this page made you think of one specific person, do not send it to them. Apply it to yourself first; that is how these things work.