Reframing: a Critical Skill in Today's Economy

Reframing as a strategic thinking skill, therefore, offers the opportunity for the leader to position the problem, situation, or opportunity in a way that provides movement — or helps the organization or customer to move forward, even incrementally.

The tactic called reframing is a critical component of strategic thinking, the multi-part process for exploring data and reaching strong conclusions that are right for your business. Are you reframing to protect your business? Here's how . . .

At its most basic level, a company's strategy clarifies and leverages an organization's core competence into market value. Lots of effort goes into defining, clarifying, and updating a company’s strategy — effort that involves many external and internal variables.

Strategic Thinking is a very effective ongoing process for parsing the complex and often ambiguous data to arrive at sound business decisions. Strategic Thinking equips leaders for decisive action, even in times of high uncertainty. A key skill in the strategic thinking kit is called reframing — which involves challenging and revising existing conclusions to meet current conditions and evolving needs.

Many leaders, overly enamored with and overly invested in their last hypothesis, are unwilling or unable to shift in the face of new information. Strategic thinkers are continuously looking for both confirming and disconfirming data — they constantly seek improved information and reframe hypotheses and conclusions as necessary without getting stuck in old conclusions, beliefs, or paradigms.

The global economic meltdown presents leaders with a paradigm-shift challenge — and new ways to think about supply and demand, resources, and needs have become more important than ever. How do we go about leading successfully in such an environment? And what does success mean going forward? One thing is clear: Leaders are challenged to reach beyond their usual bags of tricks for solutions.

Often as we head into the root cause of a problem we begin to see that our original frame on the problem was incorrect or at least incomplete. Reframing supports the possibility that the leader actually does not know an outcome — but does understand how to re-position the challenge (and the business) for multivariate outcomes and impacts.

Reframing as a strategic thinking skill, therefore, offers the opportunity for the leader to position the problem, situation, or opportunity in a way that provides movement — or helps the organization or customer to move forward, even incrementally.

A Reframing Example: Cisco
Once again: Reframing is changing the paradigm, or rules of the game, to respond to the market and the overall economic environment, even when all the variables are not crystal clear.

Cisco CEO John Chambers recently commented on his company’s response to the global shift. In a Fast Company profile, [5] he framed the global economic downturn as an opportunity to come out ahead of the competition.

Chambers provided a slightly different example of reframing in two ways. His first reframe was to decide to make proactive, ambitious and optimistic cutbacks. His second was about reframing decision making in order to transform Cisco from a top-heavy, siloed functionally dependent model, to a decision-making theatre of cross-functional boards and councils. In the new Cisco, collaboration is both incentivized and required for survival. This is not an intuitive change, nor an easy thing to pull off, in a mostly engineering-dominated organization.

And what are the results so far? Cisco's boards and councils have enabled the company, in the midst of economic downturn, to pursue 26 projects a year instead of one or two, and created a flatter organization driven by speed to market and productivity.

Chambers may have exposed himself to both criticism and praise internally and externally. His choice demonstrated a keen aspect of reframing for today's leaders: anticipating beyond “market think” and truly matching the organization’s internal strategy with the external environment and strategy. In addition, his decision may have involved weighing best and worst possible scenarios, and then stretching beyond the most popular prevailing wisdom. He imagines an organization where "you won’t have to depend on the CEO anymore."

Cisco's story exemplifies the reframing challenge of the leader who wants her or his team, division or organization to survive the times: de-assemble down the paradigm that isn’t working, even if your people have loved it. It will be painful, and there will be bridge-building to do, but they will thank you later.

Reframing in Action
So, how does a leader practice reframing? The first step is to frame the problem or opportunity as you perceive it. Then it’s necessary to ask the group probing questions, beginning with these five:

1. How do you understand the problem or situation, now that you’ve heard me characterize and describe it?

2. How could we reframe that question, problem-definition, or decision?

3. What is another way to look at this situation?

4. Why do you think we continue to frame the issue in this way?

5. What might be the consequences if we don't look at this issue in a different way?

The answers to these questions will open a window on other possibilities.

To illustrate, take Procter & Gamble’s challenge from a few years ago: How to produce new top-line growth from an old consumer problem? P&G's customers had always wanted cleaner floors, and from P&G, the proffered solution was always stronger, better detergents. Then Craig Wynett, head of new ventures at P&G, and his team reframed the clean floor problem. What if the most important factor for getting a floor clean is not the detergent — but the mop? The result of this reframing was the introduction of the Swiffer, a floor-cleaning system that became one of P&G's hottest-selling products ever. This success would not have been possible without the new ventures team's willingness to reframe.

No Reframing? Best of Luck with That
A lack of reframing leaves a business boxed-in and limited, and possibly just wrong. Detroit's car makers failed to reframe their industry from a narrow SUV focus that worked well — for a while, and under specific circumstances. Due to a number of variables, including an unwieldy and outmoded frame, they found themselves underwater and nearly obsolete when gas prices soared. They failed to ask and answer the critical question, "What might be the consequences if we don't look at this issue in a different way?" and are paying the price — even more steeply than their Japanese competitors.

As you shape your business to adapt to the swirling currents of today's turbulent economy, your strategy needs to be about more than yesterday's understanding of tomorrow’s challenges. The business that is built to innovate knows how to create the careful balance between the completely unknown and the highly articulated business models. Really, the only way to get this right is to reframe the thinking of the leadership in all areas of the business, and then execute on this thinking with excellence.