What is Contextual Framework (And how do i build them myself)? In Blackboard Fridays last episode 134, Jacob talks about Commercial Vision. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Welcome to the final episode of Blackboard Fridays.

We created Blackboard Fridays to give you, the business owner, the business leader at least 5 minutes every Friday morning where you could work on your business, not in your business. We didn’t want to continue that forever, sending out videos week after week with decreasing incite, decreasing value. We feel we’ve managed to create a comprehensive business system to help address any of the key issues or opportunities that may arise in your organization in the future.

More importantly, we’ve created these in a bite-sized way that allows you to watch them over and over again as your business grows and evolves through its business lifecycle, you can find yourself returning to videos and seeing them with new eyes, new insight, gaining new solutions because they’ve been designed to help businesses at all of those different stages and to get to the heart of what you need.

Your feedback has been immense and the best feedback that we’ve received have been the many emails, phone calls and conversations with people have said, “Jacob, you and the guest presenters on Blackboard Fridays have managed to take a complex issue and make it simple, make it simple for me to understand and simple for me to make a final choice.”

So, for this, our very final episode of Blackboard Fridays, I wanted to show you how I do that so that you can too so that the legacy of Blackboard Fridays is more than 12 hours of incredible video content. The legacy is a legion of business leaders like you around the world who have the blackboard inside them.

What is a strategic framework? What do I mean?

You’ve seen over 100 examples here on the blackboard, so let’s break it down. A strategic framework is usually visual which is why we chose blackboards as a medium to add some color, to help connect with people in an emotional level and the strategic framework is designed to do two things, it’s designed to help an individual bring awareness to the contextual choices that they have made in the past and to make it easy for them to make a different choice moving forward.

You might recognize this diagram of an individual here and where they want to get to. Right now, they’re doing whatever it is that they might be doing in the content but they want a different outcome. They want different stuff going on for them and their business.

Most business strategy sessions, conversations an awful lot of consultants keep their focus in the content space. They try and take all of the stuff, maybe they categorize it, maybe they create lists and take all of that stuff and carry on just in the content, just in the stuff and the reality is you don’t need more stuff in your business.

You don’t need more content, you need less and the only way to achieve that is to go up first from content, what we do into context, why we do it, what are the filters, the strategic decisions that we have made consciously or not in the past and so, that’s what a great strategic framework does.

It first takes you from where you are up into the choices you’ve made, the context that you are running. It allows you to bring awareness to see those decisions that you’ve made and therefore makes it easy for you to make a different choice, to choose a different context, run a different filter that will give you a different outcome.

Let me give you a specific example. Our capacity framework, the capacity engine. Now as I said, strategy for a lot of people is lots and lots of ideas and stuff and I can come in and bring even more stuff that would not help you with your strategy. You need something simple, something that cuts to the heart of why you’re doing what you’re doing and the capacity framework makes that very, very simple.

Of the million things you could be doing your business, we break it down to just one choice. Right now, do you need to be better in your existing engine or do you need to be bigger and grow your business into a bigger engine?

That simple choice helps cut away a lot of the noise, remove that content and improve your decisions as a business leader. That’s the power of a great strategic framework. It’s something that you can do, in fact, it’s something you’re probably already doing.

Because if you think about your business, your clients, your team, you exist to take people from here where they have a pain, they have a challenge, they have some kind of opportunity to that they want and you take them over to here where that pain has been solved, that opportunity has been realized, where they are more empowered to create the life, the business that they’re looking to achieve.

The process that you have that you take them on, that’s a strategic framework. If it’s consistent, if it’s repeatable, if it’s documented, that’s a strategic framework. If you can map out the specific steps that they need to go through in the process, that’s a strategic framework.

Most importantly, for your clients is there a key decision that they need to make? Is there something that they’re doing with their life that they need to fundamentally shift to get the outcome that they want? Do you have a process, a diagram, a story to help them to do that?

Because if you can create that that framework, that ability and we use color, we want to get into a feeling space, we want to get out of the awareness in their head and into the acknowledgement in their body that they need to make that change and if you can achieve that with the framework, and help your client to recognize why they’re creating what they’ve got at the moment and what that new choice might be, you will accelerate their outcomes, you will stand out in the business world, you will be memorable and your team will be able to repeat it because they will be able to take that framework and the context and not have to memorize all of your content.

The legacy from blackboard Fridays is more than just the videos we’ve created and I’ve been incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to share a whole lot of my thoughts and insights and stories with you over all of these episodes.

Your choice here is to continue to embrace the Blackboard Fridays in your business and more importantly take those lessons, take all of our pretty drawings and diagrams into your business, into your team and to embody them for yourself so that I can pass this chalk-sized baton over to you and even though this is the final episode of Blackboard Fridays, I can wrap it up knowing that the blackboard lives on in all of you.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
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