The chooser
Tick the boxes that match your situation and the list narrows. This is the browse-it-yourself sibling of the Framework Advisor: the advisor reads a free-text description and returns a prioritized plan, while this filters the whole library by hand. Every card links to the full framework page.
All 38 frameworks
P Abstraction Laddering Reframe the problem Use when a problem is stated as a bare solution with an unstated purpose, as a vague aspiration with no concrete handle, when people are arguing past each other at different levels, or before committing effort at an altitude nobody chose on purpose. P Affinity Mapping Synthesize into a message Use when a scattered pile of dozens to hundreds of existing items needs to become a few emergent themes, such as synthesizing user-research notes, support tickets, survey free-text, or retro stickies, and the right structure should emerge from the data rather than be imposed. S After Action Review Reflect and route Use when a project, launch, sprint, or incident has finished and you want to turn the outcome into learning, not a status update. S Argument Mapping Clarify the reasoning Use when an argument or recommendation must be evaluated for soundness, or when a fluent case may be hiding a broken inference. P Assumption Reversal Generate options Use when an option space feels stuck inside default constraints, or when you need to expose premises that are taken for granted. S Authentic Dissent Challenge assumptions Use when consensus feels too easy, or to set up genuine challenge before a high-stakes call. P Backcasting Anticipate what could go wrong Use when planning toward a transformative or long-horizon goal that forward planning anchors too low, when a chosen future needs a route mapped back to today, or when milestones and dependencies between now and the goal must be made explicit. P Belief-Update Routine Reflect and route Use when you hold consequential open beliefs, forecasts, or standing assumptions that should track new evidence over time and you want a disciplined, recurring re-score - not a one-time decision record, a finished-event retro, or a single claim's conditions. S Brainwriting Generate options Use when you need breadth of options and want to avoid the anchoring and conformity that make ordinary brainstorming underperform. M/P Causal Loop Diagrams Trace consequences Use when a situation feeds back on itself - growth that funds more growth, a fix that recreates its own problem, capacity that relieves then re-attracts demand - and you need to see why it keeps accelerating, stalling, or overshooting. Not for a single accumulation, a one-directional consequence tree, or a genuinely linear chain. M/P Concept Mapping Synthesize into a message Use when a domain has many interrelated concepts and the goal is to externalize and inspect how they relate, forcing every relationship to be named rather than left as a vague association. P Decision Journal Reflect and route Use when committing to a consequential, uncertain decision (a launch, hire, investment, bet, or strategic choice) and you want to lock in the prediction now to defeat hindsight bias and build calibration, or when pairing a record-now step with a later review. P Decision Option Review Decide between options Use when choosing among several real options, or when a decision needs its tradeoffs made explicit rather than left to intuition. P Evidence vs Inference Sort Clarify the reasoning Use when a recommendation must be trusted, or when you need to audit the reasoning behind a conclusion in a high-stakes context. S Far-Analogy Ideation Generate options Use when near, obvious solutions are exhausted and you need genuinely original approaches. M/P Fermi Estimation Decide between options Use when you need a number and no lookup-able data or genuine reference class exists, so the magnitude has to be built from factors (for example sizing a market, a load, a cost, or a conversion you cannot look up). Not for forecasting from real base rates (use reference-class-forecasting) or decomposing a question for coverage with no number (use issue-tree). M/C Framework Advisor Reflect and route Use when unsure which thinking method or skill fits a decision, problem, or stuck point, when overwhelmed by where to start, or when you need a recommended plan of which frameworks to use and why rather than running one yourself. P Futures Wheel Trace consequences Use when a decision has knock-on effects over time, or when first-order thinking is missing downstream risks and opportunities. P Iceberg Model Trace consequences Use when a problem keeps recurring despite event-level fixes, when a symptom is being treated as a one-off, or when the question is why this keeps happening and where to actually intervene. P Issue Tree Clarify the reasoning Use when a question is too broad or multi-cause to answer as posed (for example "why is churn rising?", "where is margin leaking?", "should we launch a free tier?"), when analysis work must be split into non-overlapping parts, or when coverage matters and missing a whole category would be costly. Not for evaluating a given argument's soundness (use argument-mapping) or clustering existing notes (use affinity-mapping). P Ladder of Inference Check Challenge assumptions Use when a conclusion feels certain but rests on interpretation, or to audit a contested inference. S Linear-Model Aggregation Decide between options Use when the same kind of evaluative judgment recurs (screening candidates, scoring leads, triaging) and gut calls are inconsistent or overconfident. S Natural-Frequency Bayesian Framing Clarify the reasoning Use when interpreting a test result, screening signal, or any "given a positive, what is the real probability" question. P One-Way vs Two-Way Door Decide between options Use when it is unclear how much process a decision deserves, when a team is about to rubber-stamp something irreversible or convene a committee over something trivially reversible, or when a chronically slow org needs a defensible reason to move fast or slow down. P Parallel Perspectives Review See it from other angles Use when a choice needs a rounded look, or when risk-aversion or optimism is drowning out the other perspectives. S/M Premortem Anticipate what could go wrong Use when about to commit to a launch, hire, investment, migration, or any risky, hard-to-reverse decision, or when you need risks surfaced before committing. M/P Problem Restatement Reframe the problem Use when a problem is vague, arrived as a symptom or a pre-baked solution, or before committing significant work to solving the wrong thing. P Pyramid Principle Synthesize into a message Use when a conclusion or recommendation already exists and must be communicated clearly to a busy or senior reader, when findings need to be ordered into a tight top-down case, or when a write-up buries its point under context. P Question Burst Generate options Use when you are stuck, too attached to one framing, or need a better question before answering. C Random Frameworks Reflect and route Use when a framing feels frozen or fixated and the goal is to break out of it with deliberately unranked methods rather than the obvious best-fit ones. Use when relevance-ranked selection would only reinforce the stuck view and a random draw is wanted to surface what a fitted analysis would miss. P Red Team Light Challenge assumptions Use when a plan has too-easy consensus and needs pressure-testing, or to steelman the opposition before committing. S Reference Class Forecasting Anticipate what could go wrong Use when forecasting cost, time, or odds of success for a project prone to optimism or the planning fallacy. Research Framework Reflect and route Use when you need an honest evidence grade and a build-or-fold verdict for a candidate method before turning it into a skill, when reproducing the evidence-and-overlap vetting on a method the catalog already judged, or when you need a ranked shortlist of new candidate methods in a family. P SCAMPER Generate options Use when you have a seed idea and need to break past the obvious options; not for blank-page ideation. S Stocks and Flows Reasoning Trace consequences Use when a problem involves an accumulation (cash, debt, backlog, headcount, customer base, technical debt, emissions) and intuition about whether it is rising or falling may be wrong. C Top 3 Reflect and route Use when a decision, problem, or stuck point deserves more than one lens and the goal is worked output now rather than a plan of which methods to run later. Use when several frameworks plausibly fit and the most relevant few should be ranked, executed, and integrated into a single read. P What Would Have to Be True Decide between options Use when evaluating a strategic bet, or when a disagreement has become a clash of opinions rather than evidence. S WOOP (Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions) Anticipate what could go wrong Use when a goal is already chosen but follow-through keeps failing, or to close the gap between intention and action.
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Thinking Framework Skills v0.3.0 · 38 frameworks