The Power of Framing

On reframing behavior change, failure, success, problems, and engagement.

Two weeks ago, every morning for five consecutive days, I was waking up to the sheer pleasure of getting on Zoom and being "back to school" to take the elective course CUSTOMER INSIGHT with Professor Ziv Carmon at INSEAD. The course was a deep dive into how to better understand and influence people - our customers, colleagues, friends - and ourselves! Through many practical examples, case studies, and discussions, we explored human limitations, key methods of influencing customer perceptions and behaviors, as well as the tremendous power of understanding what makes people tick.

The Relativity Theory

One of my key takeaways from the course is the power of context and framing. Everything in life is relative. Most people don't even know what they want until they see it in context. This relativity helps us make decisions. And the same relativity can plunge us into jealousy and envy. Relativity is at the core of the immense power of framing. During the course, we saw again and again that it was possible to influence behavior by shaping the context in a way that exploits our natural limitations and biases, appeals to our emotions, makes us tick. Sometimes, it's just about a careful choice of words, like in this video: 

Reality and Frames

In "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Daniel Kahnemann talks about frames and reality and highlights that

the large changes of preferences (and action) are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem.

He illustrates his thesis with a simple example. Italy and France competed in the 2006 final of the World Cup. "Italy won" and "France lost" both describe the same outcome, the same reality.  Do those statements have the same meaning? The answer depends entirely on what we mean by meaning.

(1) Meaning can be reality, a state of the world. In this sense, the meaning of "Italy won" and "France lost" is exactly the same.

(2) Meaning can be seen as what happens in your associative machinery while you understand it. In this sense, "Italy won" and "France lost" mean different things. Two logically equivalent statements evoke different reactions, and those reactions prevent us from being reliably rational.

We can use the power of framing for reasons good or bad. And when it comes to ourselves, the way we frame our beliefs can be our deliberate and powerful choice. In this article, I evoke five framing choices that I find extremely powerful in the pursuit of positive outcomes.

1. Framing Behaviour Change

If we want a behavioral change - personal or corporate - to happen and stick, it needs to become part of our identity and self-image.

"Here's to the crazy ones…" The brilliant "Think Different" campaign deliberately did not show a single image of a product. It was designed to celebrate the creative spirit: not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the computers. The campaign addressed not only the customers, but also the employees, and it moved the focus from the superficial - product, features, etc. - all the way to the core, to the identity. Steve Jobs was saying:

We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign.

The shift from the superficial attributes to the core values is what makes the change stick.

James Clear in his book "Atomic Habits" distinguishes between the three layers of behavior change:

• Changing your outcomes. It's about what you get, tangible results: losing weight, running a marathon, quitting smoking.

• Changing your process. It's about what you do, about your habits and systems.

• Changing your identity. It is the deepest level, it's about your beliefs, your self-image, your worldview.

From: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Many behavior changes we want to achieve in the corporate setting do not happen because we address only superficial layers - outcomes and processes. All the initiatives may sound just right, yet if at the core we continue to perceive ourselves in the old ways, the change efforts are doomed to fail.

The change will stick only if it becomes part of our identity if we FEEL differently if we BECOME different persons. And to change WHO we are we need to change WHAT we do: we decide the type of person or company we want to be and prove it to ourselves with small wins. Every action becomes a vote for the type of person we want to become. Change is not about HAVING or ACHIEVING something, it's about BECOMING someone.

2. Framing Failure

While we want to make a positive change a part of our identity if we want it to stick, for failure we want exactly the opposite: NOT to let the failure define us. 

There are two ways to frame a failure in our minds. One is to see a failure as an action (I failed), another is to frame it as our identity (I AM a failure). As a parent, I sometimes may be upset with the ways my kids behave. There were multiple times when I caught myself carelessly and casually saying something like  "You ARE stupid/careless/lazy" instead of "I find YOUR BEHAVIOR/ACTION stupid/careless/lazy". The difference may seem superficial and inconsequential, yet when "You ARE…" criticisms accumulate over time, they really can shape how the children see themselves… The choice of words does matter. 

In a corporate setting, we can be just as careless in criticizing others. It's much easier to dispatch labels - "He is a total idiot / This team is useless / This approach is hopeless" - rather than to focus on a concrete action or mistake, trying to understand the root cause and exploring how to make it better next time. Negative labels, accumulated over time, create a toxic environment.

In her book "Mindset", Carol DWECK distinguishes between the two mindsets, two sets of beliefs that we can have about ourselves and others. In the fixed mindset, we believe that a person's qualities are carved in stone. In the growth mindset, we believe that anyone can cultivate their basic qualities through effort; we believe that anyone's true potential is unknown and it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training. The choice of mindset is critical in how we deal with failure: it is the growth mindset that helps us not to let the failure become the part of our identity:

Even in the growth mindset, a failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.

In the growth mindset, failure, when it happens, is an opportunity to learn.

Failures are inevitable: we all make mistakes and screw things up from time to time. I like the story told in the book "The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors that Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders". It's about a person who got promoted to be the CEO of the company after having orchestrated one of its largest acquisitions. A year later, the acquisition proved a total disaster. This person had to tell the board to expect a huge write-down, to convince the leadership team to stick around with reduced compensation, and to deal with the disastrous consequences of the acquisition. Interestingly, when he was talking about this strategic mistake, he never used the word 'failure'. Instead, he calmly described the facts and challenges, how he reacted and took ownership, and what he took from the experience into every decision to come.  Within the next four years, he turned the company around in a spectacular way.

Errors aren't fearsome embarrassments but inevitabilities that provide the most reliable laboratory for future improvement. Research points out to a tangible benefit of not dwelling on the concept of failure: CEO candidates who used the word failure in talking about their mistakes were half as likely to deliver  a strong performance in the seat as CEOs who did not. Successful CEOs learned to take mistakes in stride and take ownership for them as the necessary scars of battle.

 3. Framing Success

This topic is personal and hugely important. We might need a lifetime to figure it out. Below, I have selected a few ideas that frame success in a way that resonates with me.

Changing the world is a big job. And the best place to start is to change at least one person's world for the better. The following quote comes from "How Will You Measure Your Life" by Clayton Christensen:

The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become a better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage - a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. There are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.

Another quote that echoes the above comes from "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work":

The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It's no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it's all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING. A thousand revolutions promised all at once. Come on… If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. Set out to good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won't, and if you do, it's not going to be because you said you would.

Another principle that strongly resonates with me is the focus on systems instead of on goals. Instead of chasing by all means "big hairy audacious goals", we might be all better off building better systems in the first place, and success will be a by-product of it. To quote "Let My People Go Surfing":

Like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process.

And finally, for me success means balance. Long time ago I stumbled on this quote from "In the Company of Women" and it stayed with me ever since:

I rely on the six touch points to make myself feel whole: kids, love, business, health, travel, spirituality. If I touch them all each day, in varying intensities, I am successful. 

4. Framing Problems

A problem well defined is half solved. I love the following two ideas that help (re)define a problem.

The first comes from the book "Think Like a Freak".

When we have a problem to solve, we rarely think about how we came to define the problem the way we see it. In all likelihood, our view of the problem (1) is heavily influenced by others and (2) focuses on the noisiest part of the problem that captures our attention.

The authors tell the story of Kobayashi - the Usain Bolt of competitive eating. In his very first contest, he went to double the world record of hot dog eating. How did he do it? By redefining the problem: while his competitors were asking: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi reframed the problem: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat? As there were no rules on how exactly hot dogs should be eaten, Kobayashi endlessly experimented with the ways to make them easier to eat: by separating buns from dogs, by dunking the bun in the water cup while he was eating the dog, etc… Fundamentally he viewed competitive eating as DIFFERENT from everyday eating. And in addition to that, as he figured out that the competitors were asking the wrong question, he refused to be anchored to the current record, rather, he saw it as an artificial barrier. 

The second idea that I like serves precisely this purpose: it's the idea of the job-to-be-done proposed by Clayton Christensen:

what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us…When a company understands the jobs that arise in people's lives, and then develops products and the accompanying experiences required in purchasing and using the product to do the job perfectly, it causes customers to instinctively "pull" the product into their lives whenever the job arises.

Fundamentally, this idea captures the difference between the output (a task, an activity) and the outcome (what we really want to achieve by performing this task) and focuses on empathy with the customer. People do not want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole; people do not need a designer bag or suit, people need a way to signal their status; people do not buy the analytical work consulting firm does to help make a big decision, they buy confidence and reassurance about a particular course of action.

The world's problems might be much more complex than eating hot dogs or drilling holes, yet it's really useful to well define, or if necessary, redefine the problem.

5. Framing Empowerment

I have been often asking myself a question why the traditional approach to employee engagement practiced in large organizations does not work - until I found a very interesting and unusual take on engagement in "What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader" by Alison Reynolds, Jules Goddard, Dominic Houlder and David Giles Lewis.

The term 'engagement' is often equated with 'buy-in', the process of getting people to support and commit to a top-down initiative. This classic approach to engagement often acts to undermine it: we treat people as a means to an end and seek only to 'engage' them in our agenda. People are human resources, staff that need somehow to adhere to the bright ideas the top management came up with.

• We treat engagement as a state to be managed rather than understanding it as the human condition - a need to feel connected to others and to our causes.

• We mistake anything other than complete agreement as 'disengagement'

• We focus too much on trying to convince others rather than learning from them.

Such 'engagement' simply does not work. What works then?

For the workplace to feel human we need to have genuine connections with others. Engagement is not a problem. People are naturally engaged. The hierarchical, controlling approach is getting in the way of engaged people contributing. Instead of engagement, we need encounter: learning from each other, sharing experiences, mutually changing through our interactions, moments of being seen and being heard, building a relationship, connecting informally and proactively, listening more, speaking less. Such an approach fosters learning and creating together.

Learning is more important than agreement

We need to create space in our minds and in our diary to embrace the unexpected that stems from an open, genuine and full-hearted expression of who we are and acceptance of who others are. We need to remind ourselves of what the Dalai Lama said: We are not human doings, we are human beings.

The shift from engagement to encounter means seeing people not as human resources, but as resourceful humans.