Growth Through Discomfort
The frameworks that stick are the ones tested under real pressure, not in workshops, but in the field, with real stakes.
Partnership Principle #5: Growth Through Discomfort
DRAFT – Why Field Tests Beat Workshops
The frameworks that stick are the ones tested under real pressure, not in workshops, but in the field, with real stakes. (Fab’s Approach)
A route grade is one of the most curious objects in alpinism. It is a number, sometimes with a plus or a letter, that claims to describe the difficulty of a piece of rock or ice. It is not assigned by the first ascensionist alone, nor by any committee. It accumulates. Climbers attempt the route, fall on it, repeat it, debate the grade, and over years a consensus settles. A grade is not theoretical. It is the collected record of what the route has done to the bodies that have climbed it.
There are two ways frameworks become real. The first is the workshop method: built in conference rooms, refined through case studies, published in books, presented at conferences. They look beautiful. The second is the field method: built in the actual mess of consequence, refined through what actually broke, written in the language of practitioners who carry the marks. They look ugly. The ugly ones work.
In my career across Vodafone, Digi.me, and the Italian SME ecosystems I work with through Imprese Favolose and Centro Consorzi, I have learned to be wary of frameworks that look finished. The frameworks that have served me, and the partners I have built things with, are the ones that bear the marks of having been wrong at least once. The unmodified framework is either perfect or unused, and the second is the safer bet.
This essay argues that the only frameworks worth carrying into a partnership are the ones tested in the field; under real stakes, with real consequences, by practitioners who carry the scars. Workshop-tested frameworks fail not because the people who designed them are unintelligent, but because the environment they were designed in lacks the only ingredient that grades anything: consequence.
I. The Trap of Workshop Frameworks
Workshop frameworks are recognisable by their aesthetic. They are elegant. They are internally consistent. They have no loose ends, no contradictions, no awkward notes about what happens when the recommended approach meets a specific kind of organisational resistance. They are publishable. They look like they would work.
They often do not. Six Sigma in companies that do not actually have manufacturing precision problems. Agile in organisations that are not building software. ESG metrics that score well but do not change what gets built. The Balanced Scorecard in firms whose strategic problem was never measurement. None of these frameworks is intrinsically wrong. All of them are wrong when applied to environments they were not field-tested in, by practitioners who learned them from books rather than from failures.
The signature of the workshop framework is the absence of failure modes in its documentation. The framework does not tell you what it cannot do, or under what conditions it has been observed to break, or which adaptations were necessary in which contexts. It presents itself as universal. The presentation is the tell. Anything that has actually been used at scale carries the scars of what it could not do. A framework without scars is a framework that has not yet been tested.
A framework without scars is a framework that has not yet been tested.
Climbing has the same problem in miniature. The route description in the guidebook is the workshop version: grades, line, descent. The route in the wet, in spring conditions, with a hailstorm coming over the col, is the field version. The guidebook does not lie. It is simply silent on the conditions under which it would mislead you. The accumulated knowledge of the local guides, what they tell you in the rifugio that is not in the book, is the field knowledge. It is the knowledge that carries the marks.
II. The Science of Field-Tested Knowledge
This principle is grounded in research on expertise development, organisational reliability, and the limits of theoretical knowledge.
1. Anders Ericsson on Deliberate Practice
Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise, summarised in his 2016 book Peak with Robert Pool, established that capability grows at the edge of competence, not within it. Working within established ability builds confidence but not capability. Working at the edge (what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development) is where the next level of capability is constructed.
This applies to individual practitioners. It also applies to frameworks. The framework that is only ever applied within the conditions for which it was originally designed will, over time, lose the ability to handle anything else. Frameworks atrophy in the same way muscles do. Without stress, they lose tone.
2. Antifragility (Taleb)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (2012) distinguishes three system responses to stress: fragile (harmed by stress), robust (unaffected by stress), and antifragile (improved by stress). The aspiration articulated in most management literature is robustness. Taleb’s argument is that robustness is insufficient. Robust systems are eventually outpaced by environments that change faster than they do. The aspiration should be antifragility: a system that improves under stress.
Applied to frameworks for partnership, the implication is direct. The methodology that has been modified in response to specific failures in specific engagements carries information that the elegant unmodified methodology does not. The modifications are not signs of failure. They are the framework absorbing field information.
3. Karl Weick’s High-Reliability Organisations
Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s research on high-reliability organisations (air traffic control, aircraft carrier flight deck operations, nuclear power plant control rooms) established that the organisations that operate reliably under genuinely high-consequence conditions are not the ones with the most elegant procedures. They are the ones that learn most aggressively from near-misses, that treat small failures as the most valuable possible data, and that resist the simplification of their procedures into theoretical models.
The implication for advisory frameworks is uncomfortable: the framework that has not collected its own near-misses, that does not have a documented record of where it almost failed and what was learned, is operating on a much weaker evidence base than its presentation suggests.
4. The Military’s Training-vs-Operations Distinction
Every serious military tradition distinguishes between training and operations. The two are not the same activity at different intensities. They are categorically different, and the distinction is institutionalised. Training is for building capability under controlled conditions. Operations are where capability is graded by what actually happens. Officers who have only completed training, however thoroughly, are not considered the same as officers who have been in operations, however briefly.
This translates with surprisingly little adaptation to professional services. The consultant who has only delivered methodology in workshops, however thoroughly, is not the same as the consultant who has delivered methodology in operational engagements where the framework was inadequate and had to be adapted on the move. The two are different practitioners with different evidence bases. The market often does not distinguish between them. The discipline is to be honest about which one you are.
III. Fab’s Field-Test Hierarchy
Frameworks earn their grade in the field, not in the workshop. The hierarchy below codifies the levels of field-testing a framework may have undergone, and the corresponding right to teach it.
| Level | Test conditions | Evidence base | Right to teach? |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 – Workshop | Developed in isolation; no consequence | Theory; analogy | No |
| L2 – Pilot | Small stakes; controlled environment | Single case | With caveats |
| L3 – Deployment | Real stakes but reversible | Few cases | Cautiously |
| L4 – Operational | Real stakes; irreversible; accountability for outcomes | Multiple cases | Yes |
| L5 – Mature | Tested across cycles including failures | Many cases including scars | Yes, and certify others |
A framework is at the level of its highest sustained test, not the level it was designed for or the level it is sold at. Most consultancy IP is at L1 or L2 even when marketed as L4. The discipline is twofold: to test honestly, and to grade honestly.
Among the six proprietary frameworks I have published under Fab Campaigns, two are at L4, three at L3, and one, the most recent, is at L2 and is labelled as such. The labelling matters. A client choosing between L2 and L4 frameworks is making a different decision than a client choosing between equivalent-looking elegant documents.
IV. European Cases: Frameworks That Earned Their Grade
The European institutional tradition contains some of the most striking examples of frameworks that became authoritative because they were graded by reality, not by committee.
Lufthansa and Crew Resource Management
Crew Resource Management as a body of practice emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s in response to a sequence of aviation accidents; most notably the Tenerife disaster of 1977, in which two 747s collided on a runway with the loss of 583 lives, that were traced not to technical failure but to cockpit communication and authority dynamics. The framework was developed iteratively, with each major incident contributing modifications. The result is not an elegant document. It is a layered set of protocols that carry the visible marks of every accident that shaped them.
Lufthansa was an early and rigorous adopter. The airline’s CRM training programme has been refined continuously through five decades of accumulated incident data. The framework as it exists today is not the framework as it existed in 1985. The difference is the field test.
Italian Protezione Civile
The Italian Civil Protection system as a coherent institutional structure dates from the Friuli earthquake of 1976, was significantly restructured after the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, refined again after the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009, and modified again through the operational experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current organisational architecture (the relationship between national Dipartimento, regional structures, voluntary associations and operational command in emergency) is the accumulated reaction to what failed at each of those moments.
The framework is not elegant. It is layered. The layers correspond to specific historical failures and the specific institutional responses that followed. This is what a mature framework looks like. The untidiness is the evidence base.
The Eurocodes
The European structural engineering Eurocodes (EN 1990 to EN 1999) were developed across three decades and finalised in their current form between 2002 and 2007. The partial safety factors that determine how engineers calculate structural reliability are not theoretical numbers. They are calibrated against the failure record of European construction. Each factor carries the marks of specific collapses, specific overloads, specific instances where the previous calculation method proved inadequate. The Eurocodes work because they have been graded by reality.
Soccorso Alpino
The Italian Corpo Nazionale Soccorso Alpino e Speleologico (CNSAS) maintains protocols for mountain rescue that have been refined through every significant rescue in Italian alpine history. The radio procedures, the helicopter coordination, the avalanche search patterns, the specific drills for crevasse rescue, all of them carry the marks of specific incidents. Some of the marks are from rescues where someone died. Those incidents are not buried. They are studied, debriefed and integrated into the protocol. The protocol grows by absorbing what it could not do.
Post-2008 European banking governance
CRD IV, MiFID II, Solvency II and the SSM (Single Supervisory Mechanism) were drafted in fire. Each of them contains specific provisions that respond to specific failure modes observed between 2007 and 2012. The frameworks are imperfect. They have been criticised, often justly. But they are categorically different from the pre-2008 framework they replaced, because they have been graded by the failure they were designed to address.
Counter-example, presented for symmetry: COSO ERM is a respected framework in its lineage from 1992 through 2004 to 2017. Its evolution has been substantially committee-driven rather than incident-driven. It has not been graded by collapse the way the Eurocodes have. This is a description of its evidence base, not a criticism. The right to teach the framework is correspondingly different.
V. Actionable Implementation
How is field testing operationalised? Through specific practices that treat consequence as the only valid grading authority.
1. The Cremation Test
Before deploying any framework into a client engagement, ask: how would this framework respond to its first real failure? If you cannot describe the failure mode, the framework has not been tested. The Cremation Test is the simplest possible diagnostic. The framework that survives only because it has never been pushed has no grade. The framework that has been pushed, has partially failed, has been modified in response, and has held in subsequent engagements is the framework you can charge for.
2. The Field-Test Logbook
Every framework in active use should carry a logbook: every engagement it has been deployed in, what worked, what failed, what was modified. The logbook is not external documentation. It is part of the framework. The framework without its logbook is missing half its evidence.
3. The Anti-Workshop Discipline
Refuse to publish a framework until it has been tested at L3 or above. Publication carries authority. Authority unearned is harm. Most consultancy IP is published prematurely, at L1 or L2, dressed up as L4, and then sold to clients who cannot distinguish the difference. The anti-workshop discipline is to wait.
4. Scar Evidence
Practitioners who carry the marks of failure, who have implemented a framework, watched it fail, modified it, and watched it hold the second time, are the only valid certifiers of that framework’s grade. Scar evidence is the qualification. A framework certified only by practitioners who have never seen it fail has been certified by people unqualified to grade it.
This has consequences for who teaches what. The senior practitioner who has only ever taught the framework, never operated it under fire, is offering an L1 product even where the framework itself is at L4. The mid-career practitioner who carries scars from three failed implementations is offering a different product. Clients should know which they are buying.
VI. Application to Partnerships
The same hierarchy applies to the partnership itself, not only to the frameworks deployed within it.
A partnership at L2 has been piloted under small stakes. A partnership at L3 has been deployed under real but reversible stakes. A partnership at L4 has been operated through irreversible decisions with accountability for outcomes. A partnership at L5 has been through multiple full cycles including the difficult ones: succession, conflict, near-exit, recovery.
Most strategic partnerships announced with confidence are at L2 sold as L4. The honest acknowledgement of where the partnership actually is, what it has and has not been tested against, is itself an act of mutuality. The partner who can be honest about the grade is the partner who can be trusted with the work of raising it.
Conclusion
The reason the alpine grading system works (across countries, languages, decades) is that it is built on the only reliable evidence: what the route actually did to the bodies that climbed it. The grades are not theoretical. They are accumulated reality. A 6c is a 6c because climbers have agreed, through the act of climbing it, that 6c is what it is.
Frameworks for partnership work need the same humility. Build them in the field. Grade them by what they survived. Be honest about the grade. The framework that has been modified in response to specific failures in specific engagements is more valuable than the elegant unmodified framework, and the reason is that the modifications are the evidence of contact with reality.
There is a kind of intellectual cowardice in the workshop framework. It avoids the discomfort of being wrong. The price of avoiding that discomfort is the loss of the only mechanism by which a framework grows. Growth Through Discomfort is not about choosing hardship. It is about choosing the only learning mechanism that actually works.
A route grade is a record of what the route did. A framework’s grade is a record of what the framework survived. Anything else is marketing.
This is the fifth in a series of essays on the principles underlying Fab Campaigns’ approach to partnerships. The first, “Partnerships Over Transactions,” explores why mutual value creation beats zero-sum extraction. The second, “Embedding Over Advising,” argues that transformational outcomes require transformational presence. The third, “Adventure Over Comfort,” examines how shared challenge accelerates trust formation. The fourth, “Presence Over Performance,” examines the quiet discipline of showing up in the ordinary moments.
Sources
- Ericsson, K. A. & Pool, R. (2016), Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Vygotsky, L. S. (1934; English 1978), Mind in Society (on the zone of proximal development)
- Taleb, N. N. (2012), Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Penguin Books (UK) – Random House (US)
- Weick, K. E. & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007), Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, Jossey-Bass
- Tenerife airport disaster (1977); KLM 4805 and Pan Am 1736 collision; foundational case for CRM development
- Helmreich, R. L. & Foushee, H. C. (2010), “Why CRM? Empirical and Theoretical Bases of Human Factors Training,” in Crew Resource Management (Kanki, Helmreich & Anca eds., Academic Press)
- Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (Italy); institutional history from L. 996/1970 through L. 225/1992 and D.Lgs. 1/2018
- CEN/TC 250; Eurocode framework EN 1990 through EN 1999; calibration documentation in the JCSS Probabilistic Model Code
- CNSAS; Corpo Nazionale Soccorso Alpino e Speleologico, operational protocols and incident review records
- European Banking Authority and European Central Bank; CRD IV/CRR, BRRD, SSM Framework Regulation, 2013-2019
- COSO Enterprise Risk Management; Integrated Framework (1992; 2004; 2017); Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission
This is a working draft