Basic Technologies
Cavanaugh Leahy & Company
BASIC TECHNOLOGIES SERIES # 2
Reframing
Cavanaugh Leahy & Company offers consulting to organizations, leaders, and teams seeking to successfully and quickly solve the problems of major change. We believe that the answers are in the organization; we help our clients find them.
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Reframing is valuable
(Note: As motivation to readers, somewhere in the text of this article are the clues to the whereabouts of a $1,000 cash prize. Find them and be the first to call (212) 555-1212 to claim your winnings!)
What's reframing. You started to look at this article with a certain idea of what it contained. You automatically adopted an emotional state appropriate to what you conjectured about the piece; studious, bored, hurried. The idea and state may have arisen from your past experiences reading similar looking pamphlets. That was your frame.
Then you read about our motivational prize. Now you were invited to look at the situation in an entirely different way; there's money to be made here in a competition. Our little note changed the entire meaning of the experience. Even if you decided that our note was a joke (it was, sorry) you still reframed. You looked at the circumstances in a different way.
Reframing is important in a business world that increasingly realizes the importance of preconceptions, mental models and organizational visions. Every day the business press is filled with stories of people who looked at some difficulty in their company and fruitfully saw it in a way that others had heretofore missed. Those people practice what Epictetus preached nearly 2000 years ago, "It is not things themselves which trouble us, but the opinions that we have about these things."
What is reframing?
Reframing is gaining awareness as to how we got those opinions and trying on some others. Reframing arises from the understanding that the significance we attach to an event is in part connected to independently verifiable facts and in part concocted by us through our mechanisms of perception and interpretation. The hard part is separating which of those is which.
Reframing is very common. The kid who is convinced by his mom that cleaning up his room is really a game has experienced reframing. The Arkansas football players forced to stand up in the locker room and tell the story of how they will defeat heavily favored Oklahoma are reframing. (They pulled off the upset!) The restaurant equipment salesman who realized that selling image along with hamburgers was the key to franchising knew how to reframe magnificently. The designer who saw a shirt not just as a garment but as statement of the brand being worn reframed very profitably. Reframing is challenging the way in which you look at things, to induce yourself to look at the situation in a new frame and to behave congruently.
Frames
The word reframe suggests framing again, only this time in a different way. What is likely to be different? The events or phenomena that you choose to pay attention to, the assumptions that you make about why things are happening and how they will end up, the meaning you attach to what is occurring, the actions you cue and adopt unthinkingly, the direction you take. Framing happens all the time. We could not live without this faculty; it is how we make sense of the overwhelming stream of 'reality'. However, there are moments when challenging and changing the frame are useful. The old frame is holding us back, acting like a pair of blinders cutting down both what we see and what we do. Any rider will tell you that blinders are great when you want a horse to run around a track but not as useful in the open field.
Perceptions
When consultants or teachers introduce the idea of reframing, they often use puzzles or optical illusions as illustrations. Faced with challenges such as drawing a single line through 9 dots without raising one's pen from the page, participants come away from such sessions as they might from a magic show. They are faintly amused or mildly impatient; they would certainly wonder what this has to do with their jobs.
(Hint: if you are one of the few managers not yet subjected to this exercise, try going outside the box suggested by the dots to create a bigger zigzag.)
The intent of this diversion is worthy. Such exercises can demonstrate the power of perception: the way in which we see things. There is no box around the dots. However, our perceptual mechanism, trained to find certain patterns quickly, supplies a 'phantom' one. The problem is that we equate perception with reality. The reason why the 9 dot puzzle is hard for many people is that we cannot get beyond our perception of 3 parallel rows of 3 dots as a box. We supply the outline and the quite imaginary boundary. Most of us (and that includes those consultants who still use the exercise) cannot imagine that we may only see what we are prepared to see. Reframing starts here with questioning what we see: is it complete, accurate, illusory, one-sided?
Perceptions into assumptions
Perception leads to assumptions and beliefs. We hold that seeing is believing and find it very troubling to accept otherwise. Richard Fobes in the Futurist magazine tells a story of the difficulty of seeing the world differently. In the early days of Federal Express, there were frequent delays in transferring packages at the central exchange location in Memphis, Tennessee. The transfers were barely completed in time. The Managers operated using their usual frame. You paid workers for a shift and if there was still more work to do you arranged overtime. The frame had worked for many companies. Fobes continues, "Federal Express managers found that employees weren't working as fast as they could, but efforts to encourage them to work faster failed. Finally, managers learned that employees were intentionally stretching out the job to earn overtime pay. This understanding led to the fresh perspective that management was using a pay system that rewarded slowness. Once this insight arose, a solution was easy to create. The workers were guaranteed pay for a specific number of hours, but they could leave early if they finished early. Within a month, the delay disappeared." The managers' perception was that workers were moving too slowly. They failed to see beyond the physical reality to the motivational one. Their incorrect assumption, therefore, was that the cause of the slowness was in the workers and not in the pay system they themselves had imposed. Why didn't the managers see that in the first place? Why did they initially cling to their faulty assumptions?
Barriers to reframing
The biggest barrier to reframing is our skepticism. (Managers confronted with scenarios that would force them to abandon their assumptions often react with denial or anger at first.) We resist the notion that there are either alternative ways of looking at the phenomena of our life or that they might hold any advantage. This resistance is a good thing in many ways. We would not want to be constantly trying on new frames so that we never moved to action. The skepticism however represents the opposite extreme: we never examine our assumptions, judgments, and perceptions. We do not believe that there is an advantage to investigating that process by which one climbs from directly observing data to building overall assumptions to making decisions and drawing conclusions.
The Ladder of Inference
Those elements mentioned above¾ observable data, cultural meanings, assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs¾ are put together in the Ladder of Inference created by Chris Argyris of Harvard University. Rick Ross in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook described this 'ladder' as "a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction often leading to misguided beliefs." But don't just look at the ladder. Consider how you ascended it the last time you were in a traffic jam, for example. What was the data? The culturally shared or personal meaning? The assumptions and conclusions? Let me tell you mine.
I live in a small Hudson River town. A two lane street is the only north -- south route for miles. One summer evening, construction clogged the road. A green Jaguar kept edging up the shoulder behind my car as if preparing for a sneaky blind side passing maneuver. The movement, make and color of the car were the data I selected. My meaning that I added instantly is that people who drive sporty Jags are of a certain type: ostentatious, filled with entitlement and impatience. Those moves also provoke certain assumptions in traffic jams in the Northeast: the person wants to barge ahead, to gain advantage. I then drew the conclusions that this driver thought that I was a stooge, the sort of guy he could take unawares. I nudged my car over as a result of all this framing. I had raced up the Ladder of Inference to the belief that guys in Jaguars think they have a right to pass poor souls in peeling gray Tauruses.
Then I looked again in my rear view mirror catching details I had ignored the first time around: red hair, glasses, beaming grin. This was one of my good friends. He was driving his brother's car and wanted to get alongside me so that he could say hello. He was a peach of a guy. My actions based on my assumptions were inappropriate. I had a frame and ¾ until forced ¾ never considered the basis of those assumptions and perceptions.
For more on the Ladder of Inference follow the link at our action learning knowledge map There is also excellent information available at these related web sites at our collection of links.
Examples of Reframing
That's just interesting psychologizing, you say, with no relevance to business? Try these three examples on for size:
1
IBM engineers had always been taught to pay great attention to the machines they produced. (Remember their full name??) They and their managers saw the computer business as about the boards and tubes they placed in large metal shells. Bill Gates looked at the data in a different way. He reframed the computer business as about the programs that went inside those machines, flimsy little floppies. The rest is history. There are still chips and wires in metal boxes but what counted most in that environment was not the metal but the mind of the machine.
2
The frames of California-based Nissan Design International designers initially hampered the primary configuration of the Infiniti J-30. They presented their original designs and could not understand why their Japanese colleagues did not respond more enthusiastically. The Americans tended to look at the car as a whole. They cared most about the horizontal lines. One secretary finally blurted out that the prototype had an ugly face. The designers "discovered that their Japanese colleagues were far more sensitive to the front-end or 'face' of the car than they. The proposed design of a slightly down-turned grill and narrow headlights gave the car's persona a sour appearance to the Japanese designers, reducing its appeal." Their perception style was different; they paid attention to different data than the Japanese counterparts. The meanings and assumptions that they composed both from looking at the car and observing their Asian colleagues proved to be false. Their reframing made the car much more popular in Japan that anticipated.
3
The Cholera Epidemic of 1854 in London (as described by Edward Tufte) presents another example of beneficial reframing. The data was five hundred fatal attacks in just ten days in a particular area of the city! The cultural meaning was that when people in proximity die like that contagion was the reason. The inhabitants jumped up the ladder of Inference to an assumption that it was the people already infected who were giving others cholera. Two-thirds of them moved away.
Those inhabitants believed that "Cholera spread through the air or by some other means ... [it was even] speculated that cholera vaporously rose out of the burying grounds of plague victims from two centuries earlier." Further data (or perception) to confirm the assumption was that the water in the area when initially examined had no impurities. John Snow, however, reframed the problem by constructing a graphical display that marked deaths from cholera on a map of the area in relation to the surrounding water pumps. This reframing that seems obvious to us now allowed Snow to see that it was one particular pump that caused the epidemic. Once he removed the handle, the cases and deaths ceased. The business implication? The incident changed forever the notion of workplace safety and health; people started looking at the environment in entirely different ways, they stopped believing that occupational diseases happened by magic or because of moral lassitude.
Reframing as widening the frame: pay attention to more data
There are many different kinds of reframing. (You can say that even the frame by which you understand this concept can constantly be altered.) Sometimes reframing is a matter of expanding your horizon. Consider this example. You are a five and dime store owner in a small town in Arkansas. You know what the revenues generally are. You say that you want your store to be the best in the state within five years. To do that the revenues must triple! All of the assumptions about what such a store can achieve in that locale tell you it's impossible. But by getting away from those assumptions and holding off on any conclusions about the limits of a situation, reframing occurs. The frame is enlarged. Whatever data the other store owners paid attention to, there must have been facts that they ignored for Sam Walton succeeded in that quest. He reframed what it meant to be a store in rural United States through what Porras and Collins call his "big hairy audacious goal." To set such goals¾ large ideas beyond what others have ever thought possible¾ is one kind of reframing.
Harry Beckwith in his book Selling the Invisible points out that in a business sector where companies seem to be identical, savvy marketers will start to pay attention to more data. They realize that "the more alike two services are, the more important each difference becomes ... Prospects look for signals in seemingly trivial differences: the decor of the lobby, the color of the business card, the heft of the brochure, even the smell of the salesperson's cologne." The marketers reframe by paying attention to more data.
Reframing as changing the frame: construct a different context
Consider our disease-fighting hero Mr. Snow above. The frame for cholera was airborne contagion. He changed the frame to specific sources of water. There are many examples of changing context in business. Consider Wall Street in the last few hectic years. The old frame simplistically was you looked at the profit and loss statements of a company. The new frame is that there has to be growth in revenues. Thus in this reframing you have Internet businesses that are losing money with rising stock prices. Conversely, you have businesses that are still very profitable with plummeting share prices because they are perceived as stagnating. (Not all reframing is necessarily good by the way!) The financiers changed the frame: value is not about P & L, it is about growth. So you have a CEO like Arthur Martinez of Sears shift strategy from closing stores to trying to open new ones while he proclaims, "You can't shrink your way to greatness!"
One of the best examples of changing a frame was the Avis advertising campaign of the 1960s. The frame was that the biggest was the best. You competed to be able to say you were #1. Hertz prospered from that perspective. Avis came along and reframed; We’re #2, we try harder. The frame was changed from one of paying attention to size to one that pays attention to effort. Avis sales soared in that period.
Reframing as moving the frame: pay attention to different data
Just as a hummingbird or a dog pays attention to different data in our backyard than we do, so too can people and businesses. For example, many jobs in the mass production era were solved by breaking them down into parts and applying great quantities of manpower to them. IT developers discovered almost by accident that this did not work. Some of them did not have the resources they needed for their projects. When those resources did become available after some initial success, the development did not proceed as smoothly. They discovered a truth that shattered the machine era assumption. Success is not related to the number of tasks; it depends upon the amount of communication required in a task. Break down tasks so that there is minimum need for communication or pay the most attention to the "precision of communication." Louis Fried in Managing Information Technology in Turbulent Times states this as one of the rules of project management: "Any task that takes more than ten people cannot be done." Fried says seriously, "The ideal project team consists of one person capable of doing everything¾ that minimizes the team coordination necessary." Another example of looking at different data and challenging assumptions.
A general approach to reframing organizational interventions: the Model for CompanyÔ
In business, we are often faced with decisions about what to do next in the company: what action should we take to make things better? The Model for Company used by Cavanaugh Leahy & Company shows the way in which many managers and leaders frame these considerations. Simply stated, the Model holds that managers tend to focus their attention on certain phenomena that is consistent then with the assumptions they hold about what to do. The figure below is divided in quadrants. If you favor the Organize quadrant, then you pay attention to what plans, org charts, metrics, or procedures exist. Your choice in a dilemma may very well be to call for more systems. If you operate out of the Communicate quadrant, you might pay attention to how much and how well people are exchanging information, to their expressions of their values. Your data is the number and duration of conversations perhaps. You might call for a meeting or a survey of employees.
Model for Company
provides a simple way to look at issues and interventions in companies. Many people tend to primarily ‘go to’ one of the quadrants. There is wisdom in checking out all four for any major business difficulty.If your preference is the Think area then you might focus on the beliefs and feelings of individuals. You ponder the signs of individual reaction in someone’s body language and utterances. You might allow individual employees seminars to reinvent themselves, to increase their knowledge or change their attitudes. Finally, if you are tied to the Resource quadrant, your attention is to what people are being paid, what powers they have, what physical equipment is present. Your choice of action might be to buy a new kind of supply chain management software or a server or a new CEO. They sound very different but they are all resources: the collective means of an organization.
The Model for Company allows leaders and managers to see their existing general frame. Which of the above actions are they predisposed to embrace? Reframing as moving the frame might mean shifting to one of these other quadrants, paying attention to different data, considering different interventions. Unfortunately, we can fall into the trap of mentally inhabiting only one of the quadrants. Checking out the others may prove strange and even difficult. (For online help on using the Model for Company, click on htttp://idt.net/~tjell and go to [fill in blank])
Reframing and problem-setting
Reframing holds great advantages for managers. The track record on business decisions demands its consideration. As Paul Nutt points out, "Based on a large research project in North America, ... only about half of managers' decisions are successful, and ... managers themselves are often unaware that the way that they go about making decisions is the main cause of failure."
Reframing then forces you to go back to before the problem was even set. As Daniel Kim writes, "Problems are nothing more than a formal statement of a set of assumptions about the world." Choosing to call something a problem is part of the frame. Paying attention to some pieces of data and not others is also part of the frame. Similarly, whom you choose to involve in a decision or the number of options you are willing to consider are also part of framing. This might seem like obvious common sense but research shows it is actually rare.
How to Reframe
There are many ways to give yourself a chance to reframe situations and dilemmas. Here are six general steps that have proved helpful to other managers:
Karl Weick in Sense Making declares the advantages of premises conversations among managers: what their real preferred outcome is for a situation and how they think that the group or the individual is going to get there. This forces reframing by stepping back from the pursuit of the task and asking why and how that target and that means was embraced. Certain questions often follow; they may seem dumb or obvious but reframing means questioning the most seemingly unassailable assumptions:
"In business, metaphors may provide a frame for decisions: some companies describe their actions as if they were doing battle or playing a sport. This overarching frame for the business can influence the decision-making process. For example, a company that uses basketball as a metaphor is likelier to emphasize decentralized decision making than a company that thinks of itself as a football team, with its concern for predetermined plays called by the leader. If an opportunity does not fit into the metaphor, its potential may be misperceived (misframed) by managers."
This identifying might also turn up traditions or stories that are the source of certain frames. The traditions can be as familiar as a that of a region or as particular as those of an individual company. AT&T's traditions had its managers see the world in a particular way even as the markets and competitors changed dramatically. There is a great power in looking at the situation in a particular way because that exclusive view has proved profitable up until this point. The problem is that you are looking backwards while working forwards. The data you are missing because of the filters imposed by traditions could prove crucial.
Argyris and Schon speak of Model I vs. Model II behavior. Model I is about being in control, minimizing losing and maximizing winning. avoiding negative feelings for yourself or others is more important than the truth. In Model I, you advocate your views without encouraging inquiry by others. You are defensive. In Model II, you expect and even invite others inquire into and to confront your actions and the assumptions and selection of data that support them. Model II is about getting to the best possible course of action. (Our action learning web site has more on Model I and Model II at [give web page address].)
Model II conversations can open up the flaws in current frames as well as considerations of new ways of looking at a condition in the company. The essential tool for everyone here is the Ladder of Inference. Follow it back down the rungs from actions taken to the beliefs, conclusions, assumptions, and actual data. Remember that this is touchy work. Our belief systems are individual. You or your colleagues may find their examination to be difficult and even stressful.
Pick somebody: uncle, parent, friend, hero. Give them the same data that you have. Now go up the Ladder with them and see what differences might exist compared to your own experience. Reflection on this can provide additional ways of not only looking at the current state of affairs but also of guarding against certain automatic tendencies on your part. For example, how would Tom Peters approach this problem? Steven Spielberg? Norman Schwarzkopf? Mother Theresa? I'm serious. There is data that each of these that pays attention to what you routinely miss. Maybe that's the way it should be or maybe you are missing an opportunity.
"What if ... " can be a powerful phrase in a group of inquiring managers. By imagining a different future from the one you expect, you can wend your way back to the assumptions that cause you construct your current expectations. You may find that the new scenarios have something to them. Arie DeGeus credits the scenario work done at Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1960s with forcing the top managers there to reframe the situation. When the oil embargo arrived, they alone among major oil companies had admitted to such a possibility and made preparations. They reframed the circumstances of their business to admit to something that had never happened before. In the process, they discovered that they held many assumptions that were not supported by data.
Gary Hamel writes of the importance of increasing the number and diversity of people who are involved in creating strategy within companies. Why? The smaller group may have started sharing all of those assumptions, ideologies, and traditions that we mentioned earlier. Get some people who do not hang out with you to join in. Repeat the earlier steps with them in the room. You will likely invent a new set of assumptions and conclusions. Then you can take the best from their contributions while offering theme the benefit of what you have invented.
At Cavanaugh Leahy & Company, we refer to this step as recognizing that the answers are in the organization. This is very difficult for people to do. They may view the business world as an arena for individual effort rather than group collaboration. The reality is that there is nothing that reframes a situation for us more clearly than the well-articulated views of others and the necessity to explain how we put our own frame to those same people.
There is substantial material for discussion here. Look at the processes that you have followed. Question how you have set the problem and what parts of the ladder played a role in that decision. This step allows for specific conclusions on dilemmas that have resisted settlement. Tom Sawyer did this in a very homely way. The objective was the whitewashed fence. Rating as something undesirable had led nowhere. Aunt Polly was not letting him out of it and his friends made fun of his predicament. Turning it into a privilege was classic reframing.
The above steps are a suggestion. You may in applying them find your own approach. You will reframe reframing. The process then is both continuous and particular. It depends upon the circumstances and it is forever changing because we are constantly using frames to make sense of the world. Through permitting ourselves the time and space to consider the data, assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs that compose those frames, we give ourselves a richer sense of a larger world. We may also allow our company a whole new range of actions to achieve success.
How Cavanaugh Leahy & Company helps groups and individuals reframe
Designed and Facilitated Meetings
References