INBOX INSIGHTS, December 3, 2025: Frameworks as Sanity Checks, AI Performance Evaluation - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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INBOX INSIGHTS: Frameworks as Sanity Checks, AI Performance Evaluation (2025-12-03)

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Frameworks Aren’t Buzzwords; They’re Your Sanity Check

I get a good chuckle out of the running joke that “Katie has a framework for that.” Honestly, it’s usually true. If it’s a big, messy problem that involves data, people, and technology, chances are, we’ve broken it down into a repeatable sequence of letters.

Lately, it feels like “framework” has become the hottest buzzword in marketing, right up there with “Generative AI” and “hyper-personalized customer journey.” Everyone has one. There’s the one that promises to fix your content, the one to optimize your sales funnel, and the one that will make you breakfast (okay, maybe not that last one yet, but I’m sure Chris is tinkering with it).

So, are frameworks just another example of corporate jargon we need to ignore? I don’t think so. I’m here to argue that they aren’t buzzwords; they are the essential infrastructure for handling the overwhelming complexity of modern business. You need them because, frankly, they turn complexity into consistency.

The Problem: We’re Drowning in Data and Possibilities

Think about what we’re being asked to manage today. It’s not just a website and an email list anymore. You’re juggling GA4 migrations, multi-channel attribution, ethical AI governance, social media platforms that change algorithms monthly, and the constant pressure to prove ROI to leadership.

It feels like trying to cook a gourmet, seven-course meal without a single recipe or standard operating procedure (SOP). You have all the ingredients (data!), all the fancy equipment (tech stack!), but without a plan, you’re guaranteed to end up with chaos, burnout, and a dish that doesn’t look, taste, or perform the same way twice.

We all want agility—the ability to pivot quickly when the market shifts. But agility isn’t chaos. Agility is the ability to move quickly because you have a strong, reliable foundation built on repeatable processes. That’s exactly what a good framework provides.

Why Consistency Is Your Competitive Advantage

When you look at companies that thrive, especially during periods of massive disruption like the one we’re in now with AI, their secret isn’t a silver bullet technology. Their secret is consistency.

A framework is essentially a standardized recipe for strategic thinking. It ensures that regardless of who is tackling the problem—whether it’s your leadership team, operations, or a new intern you just onboarded—they follow the same logical steps, ask the same critical questions, and arrive at a result that is measurable and repeatable.

I used to work in organizations where every new project started from scratch. We’d waste weeks trying to define the scope, only to realize halfway through that we were using the wrong metrics or hadn’t gotten buy-in from a key stakeholder. Why? Because we didn’t have a shared, repeatable process.

That’s the beauty of standardization. It reduces the cognitive load of having to constantly reinvent your approach, freeing up your valuable human time for the creative, empathetic, and strategic work that truly drives value.

The 5P Framework: A Guide Out of the Weeds

When I set out to build a framework at Trust Insights, I wanted something that forced us to look at a project holistically, not just through the lens of technology. That’s how the 5P Framework was born: Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance.

I saw too many “digital transformations” fail because they bought the technology (Platform) first, then tried to cram their staff (People) into rigid new workflows (Process) without ever defining the measurable goals (Performance) or, most critically, the Why (Purpose).

Here’s how the framework forces clarity:

Purpose: What’s the problem we’re actually solving? Not, “We should use AI.” But, “We need to reduce the time spent on manual reporting by 50% to free up our analysts for predictive modeling.” Clarity on your Purpose is everything.
People: Who’s involved? Who needs to be trained? Who’s going to resist the change? If you don’t address the human element and change management upfront, your project is doomed.
Process: How do we do it today, and how should we do it tomorrow? We need SOPs, clear workflows, and governance. You can’t automate a messy process; you’ll just automate the mess.
Platform: Now you choose the tool. Once you know the Purpose, People, and Process requirements, choosing the right platform becomes easy. It’s the last choice, not the first.
Performance: How do we know we succeeded? Did we hit the goal set in the Purpose? This loop ensures every investment is tied to a measurable business outcome.

I remember once trying to roll out a new project management tool in a past life. Everyone hated it. Why? Because we focused entirely on the Platform’s features—it had Gantt charts and beautiful dashboards!—but we skipped the People and Process. It was a total flop that wasted time, money, and demoralized the team. If we had used the 5Ps, we would have recognized that the team needed a cultural shift toward transparency, not a new piece of software.

Applying Frameworks to Generative AI

The ultimate complex topic today is Generative AI. It’s moving so fast, it can feel impossible to pin down a strategy. This is where frameworks move from helpful to mandatory.

When clients come to us overwhelmed by AI, we immediately put their challenges through a prioritization system like our TRIPS Framework (Time, Repetition, Importance, Pain, Sufficient Data).

This helps us narrow down the infinite list of possible AI use cases to the one Quick Win that has the biggest impact and the highest chance of success.

For instance, let’s say a task scores high on Repetition (it happens every day) and Pain (the team hates it). That’s a perfect candidate for AI automation because solving that problem delivers instant efficiency and boosts team morale.

But we don’t stop there. Before we press go, we use the 5Ps to check readiness and the 6Cs to check the quality of the Sufficient Data. This combination ensures that the project we choose isn’t just a fun experiment; it’s a strategically sound investment.

Frameworks as Culture Carriers

Ultimately, frameworks are a communication tool. They’re what we use to make sure our actions align with our mission.

When we are transparent and honest, we are clear on our Purpose.

When we are committed and smart, we are rigorous with our Process.

When we are clear and direct, we communicate our Performance metrics.

Frameworks are the guardrails on the racetrack. They don’t stop you from driving fast and pushing the limits of innovation; they just make sure that when you do, you stay on the track and don’t end up in a ditch. They empower your people to experiment safely because they know the boundaries and the agreed-upon steps for measuring risk.

If you don’t have a repeatable framework, you don’t have a strategy—you have a sequence of lucky guesses. And while luck can get you a few quick wins, it won’t sustain a high-performance organization.

So, the next time someone laughs at my love for frameworks, I’m okay with it. They can call it a buzzword. I call it the blueprint for business sanity and the key to turning abstract ideas into quantifiable success.

What are your go-to frameworks? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the present and future of intellectual property in the age of AI.

You will understand why the content AI generates is legally unprotectable, preventing potential business losses. You will discover who is truly liable for copyright infringement when you publish AI-assisted content, shifting your risk management strategy. You will learn precise actions and methods you must implement to protect your valuable frameworks and creations from theft. You will gain crucial insight into performing necessary due diligence steps to avoid costly lawsuits before publishing any AI-derived work. Watch now to safeguard your brand and stay ahead of evolving legal risks!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about using generative AI to improve your professional development for the year ahead.

It’s that time of year – the holiday season. In the northern hemisphere, it’s cold outside, maybe even some snow, and it’s that season people both love and dread: end-of-year performance evaluations. Many companies have started to step away from traditional annual reviews, which present real challenges. Trying to capture an entire year’s worth of performance in one evaluation suffers heavily from biases like recency bias – the one thing you did that upset your boss recently, or the great accomplishment that stands out, can overshadow a full 365 days of work and contributions.

So how do we make this process better and more fair for everyone? Start with data. What data do you have that’s under your control and available to you right now? Could you export all your emails from the year and put them into one comprehensive file? Yes, you can absolutely do that. Can you extract the conference call transcripts that your AI system has been automatically recording throughout the year? Yes, you absolutely can.

Could you put all this information into a system like NotebookLM and then ask it strategic, pointed questions about your actual performance? You can do that too, and it’s quite powerful. With the right performance review rubric, you can use generative AI to comprehensively analyze the full picture of your year – your accomplishments, challenges, and growth.

When you’re asked to perform a self-review – probably the most dreaded part of the evaluation process – you can use generative AI to assist instead of guessing or suffering from your own biases like imposter syndrome. Based on your transcripts, emails, conference call notes, and customer feedback, you can comprehensively document what you accomplished throughout the year.

The real beauty of using a system like NotebookLM is that everything is cited. You have the receipts for everything you did this year that mattered and made a difference. You have documentation, evidence, citations, and proof to support every claim in your performance review.

With that in mind, you can write a comprehensive self-review. Even if your company or boss doesn’t request a self-evaluation, doing one for yourself is valuable regardless of formal processes. This approach is especially helpful when you’re facing a blank page and feeling stuck, or when you’re struggling with biases about your own performance.

You might suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you believe you’re significantly more capable at something than you actually are in reality. Conversely, imposter syndrome can make you believe you’re far less capable than the results actually demonstrate.

When you use generative AI properly – with a tool like NotebookLM, your actual data, and documented evidence – you can systematically reduce both of these opposing biases. You can also address other cognitive distortions: misperceptions about your capabilities, recency bias, selection bias, and protected class bias.

Through societal conditioning and systemic messaging, you may have internalized limiting messages that you’re less capable because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity factors. The objective data you collect and document can prove these limiting beliefs wrong.

You’ll want to provide detailed instructions to a NotebookLM instance that will fairly and objectively review your year with exceptional levels of citations and clearly demonstrated, quantifiable evidence supporting every conclusion. A QA audit approach works exceptionally well for this type of performance review. The QA style brings rigor and structure to the evaluation. You might give it a strategic prompt such as:

Let’s do an objective performance self-evaluation for this calendar year based on the documents that I have provided. You’re going to do this in the style of a QA audit. Tell me, out of all the things we did and all the stuff that we accomplished and all the projects I worked on: What was good about my performance this year? What needs improvement from my performance this year? What things did I miss or forget about or fail to deliver this year? What things did I deliver that were unnecessary or counterproductive? What silent errors occurred – where even though I might have made a mistake, it was not detectable, but it’s still something I want to improve? What things did I fix and improve upon throughout the year and demonstrate growth? And finally, make me a list of the top 3 things I should work on to grow my capabilities and develop professionally in the next year. Cover both hard and soft skills, providing an evaluation for each of these dimensions.

We’re all biased about ourselves in some way – it’s just part of being human. This comprehensive, data-driven approach eliminates or significantly reduces recency bias and other common cognitive distortions that plague traditional evaluations. Beyond just earning a good performance review, you should use this evaluation framework to be truly honest with yourself about how you could grow professionally and develop your capabilities for the future.

Follow up with strategic questions like: Based on my hard and soft skills, what one skill should I invest the most in improving next year that will make the most tangible difference to my overall performance? What skill development will demonstrate my value to myself, to my customers, and to my stakeholders? These targeted follow-up questions help you extract the most value from your detailed performance analysis and create a clear roadmap for professional development next year.

The key takeaway here is this: take this prompt, gather your actual data from your various systems and tools, put it into NotebookLM, and work collaboratively with your technical colleagues if you’re having difficulty extracting the data from your organizational systems. Do your self-evaluation with the help of generative AI as your assistant, maintaining a critical eye towards genuine, meaningful self-improvement. You’ll get a far more accurate, comprehensive, and actionable performance review than if you relied on memory, feelings, and instinct alone.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

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One thought on “INBOX INSIGHTS, December 3, 2025: Frameworks as Sanity Checks, AI Performance Evaluation”

Z-Image says:

December 6, 2025 at 5:51 am

Interesting discussion about frameworks! Looks like the 5P Framework could be a useful tool to organize things and not get lost in the middle of so much information and technology.

One thought on “INBOX INSIGHTS, December 3, 2025: Frameworks as Sanity Checks, AI Performance Evaluation”

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Watch This Newsletter

Frameworks Aren’t Buzzwords; They’re Your Sanity Check

The Problem: We’re Drowning in Data and Possibilities

Why Consistency Is Your Competitive Advantage

The 5P Framework: A Guide Out of the Weeds

Applying Frameworks to Generative AI

Frameworks as Culture Carriers

Weekly Check-In Poll

One thought on “INBOX INSIGHTS, December 3, 2025: Frameworks as Sanity Checks, AI Performance Evaluation”

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