Framework · 08
Pain Tolerance Framework
Quantify your challenges — show stoppers, quality of life, time horizon — so others can understand and help reduce them.
The Pain Tolerance Framework may sound intimidating, but it’s actually a powerful tool that helps you quantify your challenges in a way that’s measurable, comparable, and easy to share with others. Quality of life is important in how we live, and recognizing the flip side of that — pain — is an essential skill. Learning to effectively communicate these insights in terms others can understand, address and eventually help you reduce is crucial for building a high-performance culture.
When we are asked to explain what is painful for us, troubling us or causing our work to be inefficient, we have the tendency to rant on many things. Understand that as this happens the listening party may be struggling to listen and understand everything you are saying! The Pain Tolerance Framework asks you to breakdown this monologue into 3 critical parts.
Show Stoppers
- Anything that is preventing you from completing your task or objective in a way that you cannot avoid it by any means. Rarely are we faced with show stoppers, but when we are, they are priority to relieve.
Quality of Life (QoL)
- Most problems impact our QoL and should be framed as such. It is critical to focus on first sharing what is impacting your QoL, how it impacts your QoL and why a change would make a difference to you.
- Often we gravitate to creating solutions for QoL issue but this should be reserved for the end or in some cases done by someone else on your behalf. Consider the solutions you come up with may create QoL pain or even show stoppers for others.
Time Horizon
- Once you’ve established the issues at hand start to peg them against your organizational goals — often these are around growth.
- As an example, our CFO experienced a lot of pain monthly when it came time to bill our customers. She has a long list of QoL issues and we were able to peg them against our growth goals by asking her, at what customer volume will this QoL become a showstopper? We then planned a product roadmap around this measurement.
Frame your pain in three parts
Vocalizing it is half the relief. Walk it through — show stoppers, quality of life, time horizon — and leave with a clean version you can share.
Enable JavaScript to use the self-check.