The Importance of Reframing Problems

How many times have you been told that something will unlikely work because the solution doesn’t reflect your organizations reality? That there is something unique about your historical performance, current circumstances or future outlook that make it unlikely that the same solution, successful elsewhere, will work ‘here’ in the same way? I happen to believe that there is some truth to this mindset, organizations are complex. That complexity is driven by its culture, its familiarity with successes, failures, its prevailing narrative etc. Therefore, if solutions are contingent upon situations can the same be said about problems?

As I have meandered through my career and experienced multiple organizational settings, I noticed that it was far more common that we are absolute in the way we frame out problems than we are about solutions. It was common place to hear about how department X or business unit Y was not delivering or was letting the side down. Very rarely did I notice intentional effort to try and reframe the problem so that it was viewed differently, and from this reframing an elegant solution appeared. I have also been guilty of being less than multi-dimensional in my thinking. Some of the techniques that have helped me think differently have been as follows:

1)    Listen more than you talk. Ask questions of multiple people, seek their perspectives and let this shape yours 

2)    Consider If the right question is being asked. Einstein once said “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

3)    Be ready to pivot to a new way of thinking. When digital cameras came out in the market place Kodak suffered as it was strategically embedded in delivering traditional cameras and photographic film. They were unable to move quick enough to their new reality

So, before you and your teams think through solutions, start with the problem and better still create a problem statement. Once you have this you will be able to generate more creative, strategically relevant and future proof solutions.