A recent episode of 99% Invisible took a closer look at how libraries weed out books to make room for new ones.

Something you’ve probably never thought of, but it’s understandable that they’d need to.

Turns out there’s a trusty framework librarians use to decide whether to toss/donate a particular book.

And it’s called the MUSTIE framework, because of course it is:

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M - Misleading (inaccurate or out-of-date)

U - Ugly (physically banged up)

S - Superseded (by a new edition or better book)

T - Trivial (low quality or no discernible merit)

I - Irrelevant (to the library’s community)

E - Elsewhere (reasonably accessed otherwise in the system)

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Sure, it’s a cute acronym, but the thought and expertise behind it is what makes it durable.

Even to an outsider, it makes total sense, and when it's shared with you, it’s hard to come up with a better approach.

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Unless...you’re on a time crunch.

The podcast episode details such a time-crunch that occurred after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake badly damaged the public library, shrinking the available shelf space.

Short on space and time, librarians were ordered to sort through thousands of books with a much more blunt rubric:

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Green - Checked out in the last year

Yellow - Checked out in the last 2 years

Red - Not checked out in 2 years

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You can already see where this is going.

Implementing a brute-force mental model that tosses out decades of domain expertise is a dangerous game with sometimes irreversible consequences.

Yes, here we’re talking about book curation.

(Which actually led to a covert revolt of brave librarians!)

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But we see this all the time in this “break things” / DOGE era.

Or even closer to home, when your consulting clients operate under remedial rules-of-thumb rather than expert-informed strategy.

In most of these cases, your clients aren’t intentionally throwing caution to the wind - they’re doing the best they can with the knowledge they have.

And unfortunately they take expensive, misguided steps as a result.

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That’s where you and your domain expertise come in.

But you can’t just come in and tell them “do this, don’t do that” at every turn.

That’s not shareable, scalable, and more than anything, it’s a tough sell.

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Instead, a well thought out signature framework, informed and proven through your decades of experience can be both a vessel to telegraph your expertise, and a calling card.

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So, what’s the blunt, pervasive ‘red/yellow/green’ model your clients naturally fall prey to time-and-again?

What's that costing them?

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And what’s your own experience-based framework that would bring them better results?

That’s your ticket.

That’s your IP.

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💡

-Wes

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P.S. Extracting and visualizing your signature framework is part of the "Intellectual Headshots" sprint.

Less than a handful of slots are left for the rest of the year.

Check out details of the 1:1 two-week sprint and book a free consult here.