Announcing Throughline's Broad Framing Initiative
It is where we're taking the "America's New Map" vision next
When Throughline, in the form of then-CEO and Founder Scott Williams, approached me about writing what became America’s New Map, a larger vision was simultaneously pitched. That vision was about the company making new and bold efforts on its “strategy” side (Throughline bills itself as an “enterprise design and strategy” firm) and using both me and the book to push such efforts.
In short, I’d be a bit of an experiment, which is what I always seem to be.
At the time, I was intimidated enough about the prospect of writing another book and ignorant enough about the company’s wide and deep talent base (subsequently discovered and leveraged during the book’s creation) that such a prospect struck me as … I dunno … I was just dumbstruck, I guess.
Now, on the far side of having generated and published the book, you can strike the dumb and simply put me down as stoked!
It takes an enormous amount of self-confidence to push a strategic vision, and any sane person naturally wavers during such efforts between Who the hell am I to be making this argument? and THIS IS MY LIFE’S MISSION!
As a rule, the former emotion is what keeps you up and night and the latter is what gets you out of bed in the morning.
Hell, the scary part would be if you DIDN’T regularly waver, because it would signal a complete lack of self-awareness.
The problem is, for this type of work, visionary types are loners — horizontal thinkers who tend to suffer horizontal careers. We’re great at this one thing but that one thing isn’t something that takes you up the corporate ladder, per se. You often come off as this out-there John the Baptist-type crying out in the wilderness about this BIG THING coming down the road.
So, how do you organize that energy and vision into something you can share with others on a practical basis?
You focus on the skillset involved, which, for me, is short-handed as broad framing any issue. Take that one subject and view it comprehensively within the context of everything else. Map those intersections, recognize those boundary conditions, and spot where actions of the highest impact can be made for the entity in question (individual, group, enterprise, community, industry, government, industrial domain, international organization, etc.).
To do all that for clients, you need to be good at a lot of things, all of which Throughline has in numbers:
Translators who can visualize complex processes, data, trends, dynamics …
Storytellers who can craft and present tales in all manner of media
Experts at exploring intersections among domains (where X meets Y)
Facilitators who can navigate the exploration, envisioning, and execution of all of the above
Designers who can package any work/final product into superior visual messaging.
It’s all that talent and experience and ambition that Throughline is now packaging in its Broad Framing Initiative, which we’re now offering to various clients as an eight-week package of sprints on a number of subjects, the primaries being:
North-South thinking/integration (see the upcoming post in this series)
Climate change adaptation (upcoming)
Digitalization of global trade (see this previous post)
Supply chain consolidation (upcoming and this previous post)
Shifting demographics (upcoming)
Global middle class (upcoming)
Superpower brand wars (upcoming)
Deeper dives on any great power you can to name (for example, I just got invited to deliver an address to yet another Times of India business-summit event!).
Does that exhaust the list? Hardly.
I led a workshop in Green Bay last January involving a hundred of so major dairy farmers, so … yeah, we can go just about anywhere you want.
Anyway, please check out the new Broad Framing Initiative site, along with the revamped America’s New Map site (click on the graphic below).
If you have any questions, reach me at tbarnett@throughline.com or my colleague Liz Gaither at lgaither@throughline.com
In the meantime, as I vacation with my family this week and next, please read along with my series of Broad Framing posts.
