As a songwriter, I've always felt that it is impossible to write a song unless I have a certain depth of understanding and connection with the subject of the song - usually obtained through long involvement and experience with that subject. The more involvement and experience I have, the better the song will be. If I'm writing a song about washing dishes, it helps if I've washed dishes before, the more times the better. If I'm writing a song about service, I darn well better have some experience with service. In some few cases, one may obtain some depth of understanding about a subject by understanding another person's experience and involvement with it, but it would be very unlikely that a person would write an insightful song about a subject without either personal experience or deep consultation with someone who has such experience.
It is the same with designing web pages. Whatever purpose I want the webpage to serve, as a designer I must either know that purpose intimately or else have deep consultations with someone who does (in most cases the client). If I'm designing a webpage to sell books, I had better have experience in the literary market; if I don't have that experience, it is inevitable that the basic assumptions behind my design will be flawed in a way that will render whatever I design quite useless.
It shouldn't take more than a moment to realize that this concept applies equally to our lives and activities as Bahá'ís. If we want the things we do to be in line with the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh, then we must have a certain depth of understanding of those teachings. And if we want the things we do to serve the needs of the Faith, then we must have a depth of understanding of the current plans of the Faith as delineated by the House of Justice. If we are not personally and actively involved with those plans, if we are not consulting with the people who are involved in them, then any action we make will be crippled by faulty assumptions about what is needed. I think this is one of the implications of the description of these plans as a "framework for action." It is not just that the core activities can be seen as fitting into or forming some sort of framework, but that everything we do must fit into the framework of a deep understanding of the core activities of the plan - and in most cases this must mean our own direct involvement in those activities - otherwise, it would be foolish to expect anything we do to serve the needs of the Faith.
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