An analytical framework

Five variables for reading any situation.

Every human situation — a war, a classroom, a kitchen table — is structured by the same five variables. PLITO is a disciplined way of asking what each one is doing, and what their interaction produces.

P People Who is present, who is absent, and who is centred? What interests, identities, and relationships are in play?
L Labour Who does the work? How is effort divided, valued, made visible — or hidden?
I Ideas What beliefs, theories, and knowledge systems are operating? Which are treated as natural, and which are constructed?
T Techne What tools, techniques, and technologies shape what is possible here?
O Objects What materials, artefacts, and things are involved — and why do they matter?
Why a framework

Meaning is a structured outcome.

Most analysis fails not from lack of information but from lack of structure: we notice what we are already disposed to notice. PLITO counters this by requiring the analyst to pass every situation through all five lenses, including the ones that feel irrelevant. The variable you are tempted to skip is usually where the situation is actually being decided.

PLITO is deliberately a heuristic, not an equation. It does not predict; it discloses. Its claim is modest and testable: a person who systematically asks the five questions will see more of a situation than a person who does not.

Applications

One framework, every scale.

The same five questions apply to high-level diplomacy and to a child's homework. That range is the point. Three applications, with more in development:

Geopolitical

Conflicts Map

An interactive map of ongoing conflicts, read by attention (revealed, forgotten, invisible) — with a full Labour-led PLITO analysis of the DR Congo.

Open the map → Narrative

A Child Learns Algebra

A full walkthrough: one ordinary scene re-read through all five lenses, showing how mundane becomes analytically rich.

Read the demo →
Honesty

A framework that scrutinises itself.

PLITO's first test case is PLITO: who designed it, from what position, doing what labour, assuming what ideas, with what tools, producing what objects? The Limits page sets out openly where the framework's boundaries, tensions, and open questions lie.

Status · graded, not smoothed What is proven here is modest and mostly elementary mathematics; the substantive claims are posited identifications laid over an order the analyst chooses — definitive downstream of that choice, contestable at it. Two premises are named wagers, not theorems. PLITO is a disciplined vocabulary, not a derivation, and every reading it produces is made from a posited, contestable position — including the ones on this site.
About & contact

Behind the framework.

PLITO grew out of work in critical-thinking education — teaching students to read situations, not just texts. It is developed and maintained as an open, evolving project: the framework, its applications, and its limits published in one place. It is used in one-to-one and small-group teaching, in curriculum design work with schools, and as the analytical spine of the applications on this site.

[Your name] — [Two or three sentences: your background in education, critical pedagogy, and curriculum work; how PLITO emerged from teaching practice; what you offer.] For teaching enquiries, curriculum consultation, or to propose an event or conflict for structural analysis: [your contact email].