The FRANK Method
One method, two halves, in order.
Every engagement has an investigation and an intervention, in that order. The investigation finds out what is actually happening. The intervention turns that finding into changes people commit to and are held to.
01 / How the two fit together
An investigation with nothing built on it is a document. An intervention with nothing under it is a guess.
This is the question we are asked most often, in one of two forms. Either: is the investigation part of the FRANK Method, or separate from it? Or: when someone says FRANK, do they mean the whole engagement, or the five letters? Here is the honest structure.
Four phases. What happened, and why.
Preserve the scene, listen, trace the cause, score the defences. Diagnostic work. It produces a written position on what is actually going on, whether or not anything is done about it afterward.
Five stages. What changes, and who owns it.
Frame, reflect, articulate, name, kickstart. This is the half with the acronym. It takes what the investigation found and turns it into commitments a board can hold someone to.
So: FRANK names the second half. The full engagement is both, run in that order, every time.
02 / Where it comes from
Aircraft accident investigation, and one observation about power.
Neither of these is a management theory, which is deliberate. Management theory comes from the same field that produces the failures we are called in to look at.
ICAO Annex 13, Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation
Investigators are not permitted to ask whose fault it was. Not out of kindness: because it does not work. Fire the pilot, and the next pilot sits in the same seat, in front of the same faulty instrument, trained on the same rushed schedule. The accident recurs. So the question asked instead is: what did this person believe to be true, at the moment they acted, and what made it impossible for them to know otherwise? That question, applied to a boardroom instead of a cockpit, is the whole method.
What happens when the rank in the room disappears
There is a repeatable pattern: the moment someone senior removes their title and steps into their own organisation as a nobody, the truth they hear changes, and it changes immediately. Not because people were lying to them before. Because telling your boss bad news carries real risk, and removing the boss removes the risk. This is not a technique we run on client work. It is the proof behind the method's starting assumption: hierarchy itself filters the truth, before it ever reaches the top.
Put together: the investigation borrows its discipline from a field that proved blame makes outcomes worse, and its starting assumption from watching what changes the instant hierarchy is removed. Neither idea is ours. Applying both, together, to one leadership team, in a bounded and independent way, is.
03 / The six disciplines
Six named disciplines, put to two jobs.
The Swiss cheese model and situational awareness are often introduced separately, so it is easy to miss that they come from the same discipline: human factors, the study of how capable people make sense of complex systems under pressure. Situational awareness explains what went wrong inside one person's head, in the moment. The Swiss cheese model explains why the system let it through.
Aviation
ICAO Annex 13
How to trace a chain of causes, with blame formally excluded from the terms of reference.
Adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 1951, under the full title Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation. It is the international standard aviation uses to investigate a crash. Used in the investigation, Phase 1.
Human factors
Swiss cheese model
How to map weaknesses across several defences and find where the gaps line up.
Set out by James Reason in 1990. Every defence, strategy, communication, oversight, has gaps. A failure happens when several gaps line up on the same path. Used in the investigation, Phase 4.
Human factors
Situational awareness
How to separate what a team saw, what it understood, and what it expected next.
Set out by Dr. Mica Endsley in 1988. Three levels: perceiving the data, understanding what it means, and predicting what happens next. Most executive failures happen at the second level, not the first. Used in the investigation, Phase 2.
Safety science
Restorative just culture
How to keep people talking once the uncomfortable findings are on the table.
Developed by Sidney Dekker. Asks what the system needs to learn, rather than who deserves blame, which is what keeps a team honest once a finding gets uncomfortable. Used in the intervention, Reflect.
Flight deck training
Crew Resource Management
How to measure whether junior people can safely challenge senior ones.
Developed after well-trained flight crews kept making avoidable, fatal mistakes because a junior officer would not challenge a captain. Used in the investigation, Phase 4.
Reliability engineering
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis
How to score what is left over, by severity, likelihood, and how easily it is spotted.
A register kept after the intervention closes, scoring each remaining risk so a gap that starts reopening gets caught early rather than found the hard way. Used in the intervention, Kickstart.
04 / The investigation, in full
Four phases. What happens, in what order, and why.
This is the summary from The Investigation, with the operational detail added below each phase, so you and whoever runs point on your side can read it once and not need a second call to walk through the process.
01 / Weeks 1–2
Preserve the scene
We collect what already exists before anything moves, and agree in writing that nothing gets restructured while we are reading it.
Why we ask for no clean-up first
Restructuring, announcements, or tidying up all change the evidence we are about to read. Just as investigators freeze a crash site before moving the wreckage, we ask for roughly two weeks with nothing rearranged, so what we find is the real thing, not the tidied version of it.
How the work is announced internally
Never as "investigating a problem." The moment a workforce hears that phrase, people manage what you see instead of showing you what is happening. The engagement is framed as understanding the current operating landscape, which is accurate, and does not put anyone on the defensive before a single conversation has happened.
02 / Weeks 2–6
Listen properly
One-to-one sessions, the same question set for everyone, and the two rules that actually answer "how do you get people to tell you the truth."
The single-source rule
Nothing said in one session becomes a finding by itself. If one person says a colleague is dropping the ball, that is an accusation, not evidence. It becomes a finding only once something independent confirms it: a second person, a document, or a number. This is what keeps the investigation from becoming a place people settle scores.
The verbatim rule
Nothing is paraphrased. If someone says "we decided" in one sentence and "it was decided" in the next, that shift from active to passive is data, and it tells you exactly where ownership disappears in that team. Summarising the gist of what someone said would destroy the one signal that matters most.
Why people actually talk
Not because the conversation is persuasive. Because two things that usually make people perform rather than answer honestly are removed: nobody is being evaluated, and nothing said is attributed to them by name in what leadership sees. Confidentiality is not a courtesy here. It is the mechanism.
03 / Weeks 5–9
Trace the cause
A dated timeline, and a rule against stopping at the first plausible answer.
Following each symptom back four levels
Every symptom, a missed target, a wave of departures, is traced backward until we reach something that would have changed the outcome if it had been different. Most investigations that stop too early stop at the first human error they find, which is a symptom, not a cause.
Trigger versus condition
The trigger is what happened last: someone sent the email, someone missed the deadline. The condition is what had been sitting there for months or years, waiting for any trigger to set it off. A failure like this usually rests on 7 to 12 small factors, not one big one, and removing the person who happened to be holding the trigger fixes nothing.
04 / Weeks 8–12
Score the defences
Strategy, communication, trust, accountability and escalation, each scored on what was actually found.
Where Crew Resource Management comes in
Specific, observable habits are checked: does an instruction get repeated back, or does the room nod and let it drift. When someone junior raises a concern and is overruled, do they raise it a second time or drop it. Does the team know it is overloaded and call that "busy" instead of naming it as a risk. These are the same checks used to explain why well-trained flight crews still made avoidable, fatal mistakes.
Why one weak defence is not the finding
One weak defence is survivable, and most businesses have one. The finding is the path where several defences are weak at the same point, because that is the path with nothing left to catch it.
Findings are written up afterward as system statements, never individual names, and handed over as a set of documents you can act on immediately or hold for later. What that looks like is on The Investigation.
Want to know whether this applies to you? Start with 90 minutes.
Book a call No fee · Written outcome05 / The intervention, in full
Five stages. The order is not negotiable.
Find out what is really happening. Then fix what is causing it. An investigation with no intervention is an expensive document. An intervention with no investigation is a guess.
Frame the Reality
We put the facts and the evidence in front of the team as one shared picture, so the conversation afterwards has somewhere solid to stand.
Reflect on Alignment
We check whether what the team actually did matches what it agreed to do. The question is what the system was missing, not who is at fault.
Articulate the Impact
We put a number on it: delay, rework, replacement costs, slow decisions, penalty exposure. A board can act on a finding it can price.
Name the Adjustments
We agree exactly what changes, who owns each change, and how anyone outside the room could tell it was done.
Kickstart Realignment
Twelve weeks of putting the changes into practice, tracked against the register, with our support withdrawn on a schedule you can see in advance.
Why this order
Naming a fix before agreeing the facts produces compliance, not change
Ask a team to commit to new behaviour before they have accepted what actually happened, and you get agreement in the room and nothing different by Friday.
If you skip straight to Name, you get a team nodding along to commitments they have not really tested against their own account of events, because nobody has yet had to sit with the uncomfortable, undeniable version of the facts. That produces what looks like alignment in the workshop and evaporates within a month. Frame has to happen first because a shared set of facts is the only thing in the room nobody can argue with, everything after that is built on it. Articulate has to happen before Name because a team that has not seen the cost in real numbers has no urgency to change anything specific, only a vague sense that things could be better.
06 / The distinction that decides everything
Could not see it, or chose not to act on it.
This is the one judgement call in the whole method that a purely technical framework cannot make on its own. It is where an aviation-grade investigation stops being enough by itself.
The leader genuinely could not see it
The system filtered, softened, or simply never delivered the information that would have changed the decision. This is fixable, and fixable quickly: once an independent investigation puts the unfiltered picture in front of a leader who was genuinely operating in the dark, they are usually the most motivated person in the room to close the gap.
The leader saw it and chose not to act
Acting would have cost something: a bonus, an ally, an uncomfortable conversation with someone they would rather not confront. This is not an awareness problem, and no investigation fixes it. It is a governance matter, for the board, not for us. Treating it as if more information would solve it is not just ineffective. It lends false legitimacy to a choice, not a blind spot.
Telling the two apart is not a technical skill. Aviation science and reliability engineering will show you where the gaps in a system are. They will not tell you whether the person standing next to a known gap chose to leave it there. That judgement takes a different read on a room: incentives, coalition politics, who protects whom and why, the kind of reading political intelligence work produces, not a checklist. Pairing that read with the evidence from a blame-free investigation, so the judgement rests on verified fact rather than instinct, is the specific gap this method closes.
07 / Where this has been used
Six cases, disguised. Each teaches a different failure point.
The full write-ups live on The Record, with what is altered and what is not stated plainly there. Here is which part of the method each one demonstrates, so you can go straight to whichever failure looks most like yours.
Three strategies
Tracing a symptom back through 22 months to one ambiguous briefing nobody questioned.
The escalation route
A fix that was a deadline on a form that already existed, not a new committee.
Four years of clean audits
A finding that existed nowhere in a document, only in what people would not say.
The structure that kept changing
The same gap surviving three redesigns because nobody had scored what actually blocks a decision.
The curated brief
A leader's own pattern named as a system statement, not a personal fault.
Signed off three times
A contradiction that only surfaces when you set what was approved against what was actually released.
08 / Before you call
What people usually ask on the first call, answered here instead.
If you or the person you would send to a call with us reads this section first, the call itself can start further along.
Q1
How do I know if this is actually worth investigating?
A rough test: sit down five people on your leadership team, separately, and ask each one what the strategy actually is right now. If you would get five different answers, there is something here.
The other test is cost. Missed targets, people who have left, board time spent asking questions nobody had a clean answer to, if you can point to a real number against any of those, that is usually enough to justify the 90-minute preliminary call, which exists precisely to answer this question properly before either of us commits to anything larger.
Q2
Why cannot our own Chief Risk Officer, or Head of Transformation, just do this?
Because they report into the exact structure that is hiding the problem.
Chief Risk Officer
Measures compliance against written policy. Cannot measure the gap between what a policy says and what people actually believe is true.
Transformation Director
Owns delivery of the strategy. Too close to the outcome to be the one who tells the board the strategy itself is the problem.
Head of People / CPO
Reads sentiment well. Usually lacks the board-grade financial framing to make a cultural finding land as a business case rather than a soft complaint.
None of this is a knock on any of those roles. It is a structural fact: you cannot ask someone to audit the hierarchy that sets their own bonus.
Q3
How do you actually get people to tell you the truth?
Confidentiality that is structural, not promised. Nothing is attributed by name, and nothing becomes a finding until a second, independent source confirms it.
The full mechanics of this are in Phase 2 above. Short version: we are not there to evaluate anyone, we say so plainly at the start of every session, and we mean it structurally, not as a reassurance. Nobody's name goes into a finding. That is usually enough, on its own, to get an honest answer to a question that person has never been asked directly before.
Q4
Will not people notice you are there, and manage what they show you?
Yes, if we announce ourselves as investigators. So we do not.
Phase 1 exists to prevent exactly this. The engagement is framed internally as understanding the current operating landscape, which is true, and does not put anyone on the defensive before we have had a single conversation. This is not disguise, it is the accurate description of the work, stated in language that does not trigger perception management.
Q5
What happens if the findings implicate the person who hired you?
They are written as system statements either way, and named only when the leader chooses not to act on what they have been shown.
See systemic versus wilful blindness above. If a sponsoring executive's own behaviour turns out to be the root condition, the finding still describes the pattern, not the person, and gives them the clearest possible route to change it. What we will not do is soften a finding to protect whoever is paying the invoice. An investigation that does that is not independent, and is not worth having.
Q6
What if we disagree with a finding once we see it?
Say so, and point to what you think we got wrong. That is what Frame is for.
Every finding is built from verbatim evidence and corroborated by more than one source, so disagreement usually means one of two things: either a piece of context we did not have, in which case tell us and we will revisit it, or a fact that is uncomfortable rather than wrong, which is precisely the moment the Frame stage exists to hold. We would rather have that conversation directly than write a softer finding to avoid it.
Q7
Where do we start, if we are not sure this is the right kind of problem?
The 90-minute preliminary call. No fee, and it ends with a written position either way, including the honest answer that there is nothing here.
This is the actual first step for everyone, regardless of how the conversation started. Book it here.
09 / What this is
A bounded, independent investigation, then a structured intervention.
12–16 weeks, priced as a fraction of any internal role companies usually hire to try to solve this instead, and gone once the register is handed over.
One distinction we are often asked about, and are still working out the cleanest way to state publicly: what is the difference between Frank Tsuro's own advisory and speaking work, and FranklySpeaking as a practice. For now, the short version is that FranklySpeaking is where the FRANK Method itself lives and is delivered; Frank's own site covers the wider advisory and speaking work built around it. More on this soon.