The grain
framework™

The Story

It was seeing the same thing happen in businesses everywhere that led to the development of The Grain Framework™. 

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Leadership decides on a strategy, they have vocal sponsors and sometimes there’s even a new hire to drive it. But, somewhere between the boardroom and the frontline, it would stop working. Disappearing before it event reached the levels it was trying to change. It was this same scenario, especially in innovation and the digital spaces, and now with AI that made us question: what is actually happening?

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The clearest version of this came from a business that had restricted staff to a single, sanctioned AI tool, and believed that the policy was working. It wasn't though, people were already using other tools, and working around the system that didn't reflect how they actually worked. That's what The Grain Framework™ is built on: look for the simple truth, and build on that. Not the version of events in the strategy document, but what's actually happening on the frontline and at people's desks.

Grain felt like the right name for it. Individually small, collectively indispensable, grain is the people inside an organisation, the smallest unit that the whole thing is actually built from. Work with the grain, not against it, and most of what looks like resistance turns out to be information.

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What it brings to a business is an honest way of finding out where strategy and reality have parted ways, closing that gap through small proven wins rather than a big imposed change, and then building the internal structure to make sure what works scales across the whole business.

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It's experience and human judgement that are applied properly.