Inkuary Series: Analytical Frameworks

Dec 2025

Dear Friends,

This month I’m participating in “inkuary,” joining a group of twitter friends writing every day through this first month of 2026. Picking up an abandoned writing habit at the start of the year is simultaneously intimidating and grounding. There is a gravitas to the act of intention-setting, as it feels like I am writing the year into being.

I will also be an ocean away from home for half of the month, in a place where many writers before me have contacted their Muse (including my own muse — iykyk). I find myself in a lineage of intellectual mystics, self-aware enough to cringe a little, but shameless enough not to be deterred.

In my own fantasy for this trip, I imagine myself writing by hand every morning, listening for my thoughts in the island’s off-season quiet. I’ll go to a coffee shop each day for computer work, but writing in the villa is for my diaries only.

One of my intentions for inkuary is to write without using LLMs at all.

I think they are killing my ability to organize and communicate my thoughts. I think that they’re a crutch for my insecurity about my underdeveloped style and voice. And they’re preventing me from getting recognized as someone who is thinking about interesting things.

With LLMs we are often taking the all-too-easy route of getting the model to do our thought-organization for us. Why has breaking down problems, questions, or subject material and organizing our thoughts about it become such an uncomfortable process? Is it a mere attention deficit? Is it that the process has always been hard, uncomfortable, and will always be, so we were already primed for the easy route to be so attractive?

Because critical thinking and analysis are at the heart of the thinking and writing I want to do, I’m developing a series this month — Seven Analytical Frameworks from various knowledge work traditions.

One of my shticks on X has been to learn by teaching. Not teaching from a position of expertise, but naivety. As I “learn in public,” I play the same role as the student who raises his hand to ask the question everyone in the class also has, but no one else will ask. There are image risks to this role, but it’s one I think I wear well anyway.

If the problem is that we’ve forgotten where to start, and we lack processes for developing our thinking, these frameworks can guide us. They provide starting points and steps, from beginning to write through developing and concluding our ideas.

The frameworks I’ll be learning and writing about for this series are:

Premortem: Looks ahead to the end of a project or plan and assumes that it has failed, imagining what went wrong and detailing the possible explanations to surface risks. The end result is a risk register grounded in varied potential failure modes.

Fishbone / Ishikawa Diagram: Organizes a problem and its many possible causes into structured categories (often “people, process, tools, materials, environment, measurement”). Prevents root cause analysis from getting “stuck” in one frame.

MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive): Uses the concepts of “mutually exclusive” (two events cannot occur simultaneously) and “collectively exhaustive” (the set of ideas includes all possible options) for problem-solving.

Cynefin: A framework for “sense-making;” organizes decision-making ideation into five domains: clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and the central confusion. This provides a sense of “place” for thinking through the idea.

TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving): A Soviet method for invention that conceptualizes design challenges as recurring patterns of contradictions. Uses 5 basic principles and 40 inventive principles for problem-solving and innovation.

Six Thinking Hats: Breaks down thinking into six different types, each represented by a “hat” — Information, Emotions, Caution, Optimism, Creativity, and Process Control. Switches between the six modes to approach thinking about a problem.

ACH (and my amplification, ACE): Richards Heuer’s ACH, or Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, compares multiple explanations for a situation under analysis by testing each hypothesis against the available evidence. My amplification/adaptation is Analysis of Competing Explanations, which are specifically to explore “why?” questions.

Between my daily creative writing and this more intensive writing about problem-solving and analysis, I aim to strengthen my ability to break down my subject material, reflect on it deeply, and arrive at genuine insight. To develop ideas that add value beyond mere description.

I will also continue to write about the reasons LLMs are atrophying our ability think and write, even if we think of ourselves as intellectually rigorous. I want to track my experience with overcoming the urge to “just brainstorm a little” or “just outline the essay.”

I fear we are forgetting how to use our own voices. I also predict that a clear, strong voice will make even underdeveloped writers stand out among the sloppy noise in an overwhelming information environment. The reward is inevitable.

If you would like to join me and my friends for inkuary, you can RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/NvZKwxf9hzgnFAki6GLi

I’m looking forward to mutual accountability, editing & critique, and witnessing participants’ improvement over the course of the month. If you do plan to join us, please comment and let me know!

Until next time,

Marianne