People who encounter The Frame through a seminar or a keynote often assume it began as research — a model built at a university, then tested in the field. The order was reversed.
The lesson before the lecture hall
I was twelve when my mother was forced to leave home. I learned the street before I learned the classroom. At a market stall in Nkongsamba, I watched what happens when a system has no slack for the people inside it: a single bad harvest, a single broken promise, and dignity is the first thing spent. You learn quickly to separate what is true (the reality in front of you), what is right (the ethics you will not abandon), what you wish were true (the vision), and what it will cost you to act on any of it (the courage). Long before I had the vocabulary, I had the practice.
What research added
Years later, at the University of Washington's Polymeric Composites Laboratory, and then at MIT through the Lean Advancement Initiative, I found language and method for what I already knew experientially. Lean Six Sigma gave me tools to measure waste without dehumanizing the people generating it. Working alongside Boeing engineers on FAA certification trials, I saw that the same four-point tension — vision, reality, ethics, courage — governs an aerospace certification process exactly as it governs a market stall negotiation. Scale changes. The architecture does not.
Why this matters for how I teach
I distrust frameworks that only work in a classroom. The Frame survives because it was pressure-tested somewhere that offered no academic safety net. When I teach it now — to hospital administrators, to factory managers, to university leadership — I am not handing over a theory I hope holds up in practice. I am handing over a practice that, decades later, theory finally caught up to.
That is the order I want anyone using The Frame to understand: lived first, formalized second. It changes how seriously you take it.