The Methodology Merchant

She sells a framework. Not a tool. Not software. A framework. It has a name. The name is an acronym or a geometric metaphor or both. There is a certification. The certification costs money. Organizations send their analysts to get certified, which takes three days, and the analysts return with a binder and a badge and the vague anxiety of someone who has learned a map for a country they have never visited.

The framework is not wrong. That is the most important thing to understand about the Methodology Merchant. The framework usually contains real insight.

The heresy is in the selling of the framework as a substitute for judgment rather than a scaffold for it. The heresy is in the certification as credential rather than beginning. The heresy is in the binder.

No one was ever saved by a binder.

The framework is not the discipline. The discipline is what you do before the framework tells you what to do, and after, and when the framework runs out, which it always does somewhere around the place where the real problem actually lives.