introduction
what’s your problem?
ARE YOU SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEMS?
We’ll start with a question. Answer it for your team, your workplace, your society, your family, or just yourself:
How much do we waste—time, money, energy, even lives—by solving the wrong problems?
I have posed this question to people from all over the world, and rarely does anyone think the answer is insignificant. If your own reply gives you pause, consider a second question:
What if we could get better at solving the right problems?
What difference might it make to your life—to the people and the causes you care about—if everyone got just a little bit better at barking up the right trees?
This book is about how to do that. Its purpose is to upgrade the world’s ability to solve problems. It does this by sharing a very specific skill called “reframing the problem,” or “reframing” in short.
More than fifty years’ of research has shown that reframing is an exceptionally powerful skill—and not just for solving problems.* People who master reframing make better decisions, get more original ideas, and tend to lead more remarkable lives.
Best of all, it’s not that hard to learn.* By reading this book, you will become a better thinker and problem solver. You’ll likely make headway on some of your current challenges, too—not later, but while you are reading this book.
To understand what reframing is, read on. A slow elevator is waiting for you.
THE SLOW ELEVATOR PROBLEM
Here’s the central idea of this book:
The way you frame a problem determines which solutions you come up with.
By shifting the way you see the problem—that is, by reframing it—you can sometimes find radically better solutions.
To see how this works, consider this classic example, the slow elevator problem:*
You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s old and slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem.
First of all, notice how this problem isn’t presented to you neutrally. Like most of the problems we encounter in the real world, someone has already framed it for you: the problem is that the elevator is slow.
In our eagerness to find a solution, many of us don’t notice how the problem is framed; we take it for granted. As a result, we start coming up with ideas for how to make the elevator faster: Could we upgrade the motor? Could we improve the algorithm? Do we need to install a new elevator?
These ideas fall into a solution space, that is, a cluster of solutions that share assumptions about what the problem is:
These solutions might work. However, if you pose this problem to building managers, they suggest a much more elegant solution: put up mirrors next to the elevator.* This simple measure has proved effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at—namely themselves.
A BETTER PROBLEM TO SOLVE
The mirror solution doesn’t solve the stated problem: it doesn’t make the elevator faster. Instead it proposes a different understanding—that is, it reframes the problem:
This is what reframing is about. At the heart of the method is a counterintuitive insight: sometimes, to solve a hard problem, you have to stop looking for solutions to it. Instead, you must turn your attention to the problem itself—not just to analyze it, but to shift the way you frame it.
A PROVEN, POWERFUL TOOL
The power of reframing has been known for decades, with people like Albert Einstein, Peter Drucker, and many others attesting to its importance.* Combining innovation, problem solving, and asking the right questions, reframing is relevant no matter what you do, whether you’re leading a team, launching a startup, closing a sale, crafting a strategy, dealing with a demanding customer, or doing any number of other things. It’s useful for personal problems, too, as people work to build their careers, improve their marriages, or make their stubborn children marginally less stubborn. You can use reframing on pretty much any problem you face, in any area of your life, to resolve dilemmas and find new ways forward. Or as I like to put it: Everybody has problems. Reframing can help.
And help is needed—because most people haven’t learned what reframing is, or how to do it. In fact, through my work, I have come to believe that reframing is the single biggest missing tool in our cognitive toolbox.
THE PROBLEM WITH PROBLEM SOLVING
Some years ago, a well-known Fortune 500 company hired me to teach reframing to 350 of its people. The session I taught was part of a week-long leadership program specially designed for the company’s most talented leaders. To get into the room, you had to be in the top 2 percent of your peer group.
At the end of the week, we surveyed the participants and asked what they had found most useful. Among all the things people learned across five content-packed days, the two-hour session on reframing topped the list.
It was not the first time I had seen that reaction. Over the last decade, I’ve taught reframing to thousands of people from all over the world, and almost everyone says it is highly useful to them. Here are some typical reactions, taken verbatim from the feedback forms:
- “New way of looking at things is eye opening.”
- “Loved it, absolutely opened my mind to a different way of thinking.”
- “Reframe is a terrific concept that I had not been exposed to previously. I will directly use this as I work with my team in the future.”
To me, these reactions were—and continue to be—deeply troubling.
Think about it: Why on earth didn’t these people know it already? How come a group of really smart people working in a global Fortune 500 business—the top 2 percent of the company—doesn’t already know how to solve the right problems?
In order to understand the extent of the problem, I surveyed 106 C-suite executives representing ninety-one private- and public-sector companies in seventeen countries. The result: 85 percent said that their organizations were not good at reframing.* Almost the same number said that their companies waste significant resources because of this.
This is a deep wrong. Reframing is a fundamental thinking skill. Frankly, this is stuff everyone should have been taught a long time ago. It is utterly crazy that we’re not better at it. And it frightens me to consider how many mistakes are made every day because smart, talented people keep solving the wrong problems.
That is the problem this book aims to solve.
I’ve distilled my work over the last decade into a single, accessible guide to solving the right problems. The book’s central framework is the rapid reframing method, a simple, proven approach you can use to tackle problems in almost any context. Crucially, the method is designed to be used quickly, as part of a busy everyday work environment: few of us can afford to take a slow approach to our problems.
I developed the method gradually over the last decade as I taught reframing to people of all stripes and seniority levels, helping them solve real-world problems. The strategies are based on prior research into problem solving and innovation. Beyond that, my selection of which strategies to include in the method wasn’t based on any overarching theoretical model. I just chose the strategies that consistently proved most helpful to people in rethinking and solving their own problems—and that at the same time were broad enough to be useful across a wide range of problems and industries.
I have also validated the strategies through research in which I’ve studied how people solved thorny problems “in the wild,” as an integral part of their day jobs rather than in a workshop setting. I have conducted numerous in-depth studies of how specific individuals went about solving hard problems and creating breakthrough innovations, working in everything from small startups to big, complex companies such as Cisco and Pfizer. While real-world reframing is certainly messier than a neat framework might suggest, each strategy represents approaches that have been used by practitioners to solve real-world problems and find new, creative ways to deliver results.
By reading this book you will:
- Get better at finding creative solutions to tough problems, at work and beyond.
- Stop yourself and your team from wasting time on the wrong things.
- Learn to frame big decisions more effectively, improving your hit rate.
- Future-proof your career and increase your value to your company.
- And most of all: make a difference to the people and the causes you care about.
Notably, the book is written for immediate application: as you move through it, chapter by chapter, you can start using the method right away to tackle your own problems. Here’s how the book is laid out.
WHAT’S AHEAD
The coming chapter—Reframing Explained—quickly shares a few key concepts along with a remarkable real-world example of reframing.
Part II—How to Reframe—walks you through the reframing method step by step, with special emphasis on what questions to ask. Some things we’ll cover:
- How a simple question—what problem are we trying to solve—stops people from falling in love with bad ideas
- Why expert practitioners look outside the frame before they dive into the details
- How rethinking their goals let a team reduce their workload by 80 percent
- How seeking and examining positive exceptions can lead to immediate breakthroughs
- Why looking in the mirror is key to solving interpersonal conflicts
- How two entrepreneurs used problem validation to spot a multimillion-dollar opportunity in two weeks
Already after reading part II, you will be fully equipped to use the method.
Part III—Overcome Resistance—is a resource you can consult as needed, offering suggestions for what to do when people resist the reframing process, when they won’t listen to your advice, when they fall prey to silo thinking, and more.
Throughout the book, I’ll also share lots of real-world examples of how reframing has led to big breakthroughs. These examples are mostly not about CEOs. Instead, most focus on what you might call “regular” people, in the best sense of the word regular. It’s not that CEOs don’t use reframing; several management scholars’ research has shown that they do, to great effect.* But serving as a CEO is a highly unusual job that has little in common with pretty much everyone else’s daily work. My interest lies with how we improve problem solving not just in the boardroom but in every setting where we encounter problems. In short, I want to democratize reframing. The stories and the people you’ll meet in this book reflect that focus.
You’ll also be introduced to the most important research behind the concept. For more than half a century, reframing has been carefully studied by academics and practitioners from a wide range of fields—operations, psychology, math, entrepreneurship, design, philosophy, and many more—and this book owes a huge debt to their work. You’ll meet some of the central reframing thinkers in the chapters ahead; many others are described in the endnotes. The book’s website, www
THE REFRAMING CANVAS
Finally, I want to introduce the reframing canvas.* The canvas provides an overview of the method’s key steps, and you can use it with your team or clients to reframe problems. You can download free, printer-friendly versions on the book’s website.
On the next page, you can see a high-level version of the canvas. Take a second to familiarize yourself with it, but don’t worry about the details yet. We’ll get there. For now, just notice that the method has three steps—Frame, Reframe, Move Forward—with some added strategies nested under the second step.
With that, let’s get started.
