The PIANOS framework: Six keys to extract order from chaos
Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. – Benjamin Franklin
Imagine a team racing to launch a lifesaving medical treatment into uncharted markets. Each specialist juggles their own tasks while willing to jump in and help their teammates at a moment’s notice. To succeed, they must learn together, evolve their methods, and transform uncertainty into a clear pathway forward. In other words, they must extract order from chaos.
In every complex endeavor - from delivering reliable, reusable rocket launches to complex system & software development - balancing creativity with structure is what turns fractured efforts into breakthrough outcomes. This article introduces the PIANOS framework - six interlocking forces that can guide any team from fragmented ideas to sustained progress. You can jump to the description of the framework directly if its rationale is not of interest.
Diagnosis
The Yin-Yang symbol (Figure 1) represents balance and harmony in Chinese philosophy. It illustrates the idea that opposite forces - like light and dark, male and female, or order and chaos - are interconnected and interdependent. Instead of being purely opposing, they complement and complete each other. This situation is an interplay between order and chaos.
The swirling halves show that each force contains a bit of the other (represented by the small white circles), meaning that within darkness, there is light, and within light, there is darkness. Too much order constrains innovation, too little risks precious resources. Adventure lies along the margins (the yellow boundary between regions), as do rewards, both in fulfilling real needs, and in learning how to mitigate the effects of the ever-evolving chaos. This suggests that balancing efforts across this frontier is essential in all aspects of life. But how can this be done when building new things?
“First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about… Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.” Plato, Phaedrus, 265D
Such is the nature of building new things; ideas must be elaborated into substance.
In this blog, I use the term production to refer to the act of producing goods or services which have value and contribute to the utility of required capabilities. The term ‘production’ has an etymology that connects it to the act of bringing something forward into existence. It is derived from the verb producere, where pro- means "forward" and ducere means "to lead or bring." It refers to both acts of unprecedented creation (through engineering new things) and manufacturing (assembling previously designed things).
Over time, the use of production has expanded to include the creation of goods, artistic works, and even abstract concepts like ideas or energy. How should we open the black box of production, and what kind of aids are helpful when we do?
Competing prescriptions
There are plenty of competing frameworks. The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, which has its roots in the scientific method (Hypothesis-Experiment-Evaluation) and Bell Labs’ Shewart Cycle (Specification-Production-Inspection) come to mind, but all lack needed context.
Professional societies also offer guidance. Since 1969, the Project Management Institute has championed plan-driven methods that are supposed to produce a robust project plan and, unfortunately, may bring an accompanying bureaucratic overhead. Many other disciplines, like systems engineering and software engineering, echo significant elements from PMI’s framework. Figure 2 captures the major processes in the Project Management Body of Knowledge Guide (PMBOK), with planning processes getting most attention, and plans being the primary output.
There are ten core elements of the planning process: scope planning, scope definition, activity definition, resource planning, activity sequencing, activity duration estimating, cost estimating, schedule development, cost budgeting, and project plan development. In comparison, there is only one executing process and two controlling processes, so the primary output of project management is the project plan, which risks becoming bureaucratic. Quoting the PMBOK:
The definition and management of processes is key to plan-driven methods. For that reason, plan-driven methods are almost always associated with process improvement. The processes need to be defined, standardized, and incrementally improved to provide the data needed to control and manage their operation. Such processes generally include detailed plans, activities, workflow, roles and responsibilities, and work product descriptions.
Limitations of plan-driven methods
There is nothing new about advocating for planning. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s famous adage, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, is from the 1800s. In 1996, Mike Tyson defended his WBA title against Evander Holyfield at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Holyfield had a strategy to use body punches and superior reach to control exchanges and his strength to disrupt Tyson’s rhythm and balance. When asked about this strategy, Tyson famously said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Despite being a 5-to-1 underdog, Holyfield stunned the boxing world by winning via 11th-round TKO, becoming a three-time heavyweight champion. A good plan is better than a bad one. I’ll explain how to recognize the difference in a future post.
These plan-driven methods don’t fit all situations. Lean and JIT (Just-In-Time) methods emerged from industrial engineering with a queueing-theory backbone, pushing teams toward dynamic flow and customer focus. Well-established professions typically build their concepts around theoretical foundations. In The underlying theory of project management is obsolete, the authors recognize that production has many manifestations:
… competing theories of production (projects are just special instances of production) have existed even before the emergence of project management. Another concept of production was presented already in the framework of early industrial engineering. The flow view of production … is embodied in JIT and lean production. In a breakthrough book, Hopp and Spearman (1996) show that by means of the queueing theory, various insights, which have been used as heuristics in the framework of JIT, can be mathematically proven.
While Lean concepts rely on this theoretical foundation, and have recently gained traction among startups, and have had their greatest success fighting ‘big company disease’, through a focus on customer concerns and a systems approach across collaborative teams. Their biggest contribution has been helping to change thinking from a static plan-oriented focus to a dynamic flow-oriented model.
One of my favorite books evaluating improvement frameworks is Balancing Agility and Discipline. It describes the tension between these two competing worldviews:
The agilists rail against the traditionalists and lament the dehumanization of software development by “Taylorian” reductionists who worship process. The establishment has responded with accusations of hacking, poor quality, and having way too much fun in a serious business. True believers on both sides have emerged to proclaim their convictions with near-messianic stridency, raising the perplexity level of software developers and managers trying to evolve their success strategies.
Neither Agile nor PMBOK provides the universal flow-oriented viewpoint for production that is offered by Lean (an extension of the Toyota Production System). However, Lean lacks the planning disciplines of PMBOK and the strong emphasis on customer collaboration through iterative development cycles of Agile. A Lean-Agile hybrid has thrived in industries that require both operational excellence and rapid innovation. It features adaptive planning with feedback loops, pull-based scheduling, visual management techniques, and continuous improvement concepts with a customer-value focus across cross-functional teams. Let’s break down the features of each of these, drawing from this analysis:
I will be writing about my experiences with each of these frameworks in future posts. But one must always separate a framework’s theoretical capability from its utility to execution since the latter is the proof of the pudding. However, even a hybrid approach isn’t a panacea; common pitfalls include overhead and complexity, potentially fragmented communications, dilution of core principles, tooling challenges, inconsistent metrics, and the ever-present resistance to change. Examples cited in the literature include:
Teams using sprints but still following rigid upfront planning, losing Agile’s adaptability
Isolated Agile adoption in which Agile is adopted locally but is not supported or compatible with other departments frameworks, creating delivery misalignment
Organizations cherry-picking practices and adopting Agile rituals (like stand-ups) without embracing its principles, often resulting in limited adaptability
Lean’s reliance on accurate forecasting clashes with Agile’s responsiveness, especially in volatile markets.
Each of these frameworks also fails to promote some of the best thinking and behaviors necessary for success; for example, planning is indeed essential, but its utility can evaporate as soon as inevitable problems induce drifts from that plan.
Instead, I am suggesting consideration of an alternative framework that could provide an over-arching structure that draws on the best-of-class from each of these traditional frameworks and offers potential as a universal framework for all work, in the same manner as the word ‘endeavor’ in my writings covers both temporary and ongoing pursuits. This means the underlying ideas could benefit both professionals (be they engineers, scientists, etc) and regular dudes doing everyday things.
Accelerating progress
These frameworks all pursue progress towards realizing goals. But none provides a universal structure that combines disciplined planning with adaptive flow. Further, their prescriptions are often oversold, failing to provide adequate guidance to cover challenging situations that many projects encounter, while being overly prescriptive for straightforward tasks.
Rather than forcing people into difficult choices from among these frameworks, it would be preferrable to have a meta-framework that pulls the best of class from each and provides viewpoints that are complementary and have broad applicability, spanning the range from setting up a lemonade stand to training large language models.
Introducing PIANOS
In 1916, Albert Einstein warned against letting old ideas become unchallenged dogma. He argued that real progress means dismantling worn-out concepts and replacing them with systems that better serve our goals. Inspired by that spirit, Figure 3 introduces six interacting viewpoints for organizing the actions necessary to achieve progress for any endeavor, using a representation that is simple enough to serve as an icon for this site, while still communicating several powerful ideas:
Efforts to change our world involve tradeoffs between needing unprecedented innovations within unfamiliar environments and needing disciplined replication of prior successes
Methods employed in such efforts must enable rapid accommodation to changing environments while assuring that adequate fitness is delivered
Methods should also encourage iterative refinements which deliver adequate utility at an acceptable pace for customers
Too much order constrains innovation, and too little risks precious resources
The overall visual concept shown in Figure 3 represents an iterative collaboration among agents pursuing progress. The framework which depicts their viewpoints is captured in the mnemonic “PIANOS”. These viewpoints are conceptual in this representation but will be developed further in the sections of this blog which are linked to and correspond with each viewpoint:
Production - Production is depicted by the inner Ying-Yang symbol in swirling black and blue, overlayed with three interconnected elements interacting to perform these functions:
Exploration - traversing an unfamiliar region of a landscape to gain knowledge about that environment
Evaluation - assessing attributes (characteristics, volume, or value) of a situation within a particular context
Transformation - following a course of action, order, or plan to translate goals and inputs into desired outcomes
Exploration activities are represented by the red gear in the diagram. The yellow gear depicts the evaluation actions necessary to accomplish focused elaboration, verification, and refinement. Finally, the blue gear depicts the successive incubation, transformation, and maturation of capabilities suitable for entry into service. These colors correspond to the classic ‘stoplight’ charts used in reporting the status of activities.The interactions among these cogs represent interlocking cycles - with both exploration and transformation activities interdependent on each other and upon their corresponding evaluations - to drive cycles of progress.
Production is the foundation for all these viewpoints and can be thought from multiple contexts:producing the means of production as inputs for a production system of interest
presenting an overarching production process comprised of lower-level, separate interacting processes of that system of interest
utilizing the output of one production as inputs to downstream processes to the system of interest (like distribution, installation, support, etc).
Surrounding this cyclical, reentrant production process are five broader forces: Innovation, Adaptation, Navigation, Orchestration, and Synthesis, each employing a distinctive color symbolizing the agents responsible for guiding these three production gears towards structured progress:Innovation - researching, experimenting, and engineering novel capabilities and solutions into existence
Adaptation - enhancing the suitability, resiliency, and efficacy of capabilities within dynamic environments
Navigation - analyzing, elaborating, and exploiting effective pathways to progress over a capability’s lifecycle
Orchestration - collaboration across viewpoints to assure performance, exchange data and control information, and respond to feedback so that intended outcomes can be achieved within environmental constraints; these interactions occur at both the holistic level and in lower level subsystem through coupling
Synthesis - iteratively configuring, aligning, and tuning existing capabilities to enhance and assure their fitness for use
The producers and consumers of critical exchanges
Figure 4 provides an overview of key relationships necessary to integrate these viewpoints into a cohesive whole. There is no start or end to actions here, as this diagram depicts relationships, not flow. These relationships span the full range of endeavors but to keep the representation as simple as possible do not account for the competition, challenges, and constraints imposed by the external environment. The dynamics introduced by those dependencies will be developed further in future posts.
The figure exposes my bias for action and belief in the power of comprehensive data and process architectures. Such architectures are sources of clarifying definition when are properly realized. The relationships impact both the nature of the tools used by communities of practice operating within these viewpoints, and the communications and information management challenges that present themselves in such environments. This structure also lays the groundwork for thinking about opportunities for improvement. But each element must be instantiated with the specific actions appropriate to the context and goals being pursued.
As Figure 4 indicates, activities are always the hubs of value-generating action, and the nature of these activities must be considered carefully, especially with respect to the agents who are to perform them and buy off their implementation. The term ‘agent’ is used rather than ‘people’ (or aggregations of people such as organizations) to reinforce the idea that some functions may be performed by humans and others by algorithms.
In practice, slips and delays from these activities (indicated by double slashes across a flow) play a big part, as indicated in figure 5. These delays represent one of the biggest challenges to proactively address using current techniques.
Analyses of these interactions can reveal potential gaps in concepts and explore the expected outcomes under various initial conditions and operational strategies. As these relationships must be instantiated in a concrete (rather than abstract) context, they will manifest as a more complex and diverse structure than the elements represented in this portrayal.
The power of these forces is evident from their integration:
This framework provides a reusable structure that - once elaborated - enables comparisons across endeavors from a common structural context. Simulations based upon these ideas could thus provide participants with opportunities to perform such tradeoffs, improve their understanding of different situations, and practice alternative responses, all in a safe learning environment. I will unpack this opportunity further as sufficient interest arises.
The PIANOS framework invites teams to embrace the adventure along the yellow boundary - where innovation meets discipline, and ideas become impact. Whether you're navigating swirling chaos or aligning for breakthrough execution, these six forces offer a structured path forward. Sign up for continuing posts to discover how PIANOS turns fragmented efforts into sustainable progress, helping you orchestrate bold outcomes with clarity, creativity, and purpose.