reframing

Sensemaking and strangemaking

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At the 2012 Association of Professional Futurists Professional Development day in Toronto, July 2012, we explored design thinking and its role in futures. In the orienting discussions that led off our design work, we talked about the roles futurists play in helping people explore our changing world and what it means. And that role is a frequent topic of this blog, too.

I had not before used the term “strangemaking,” but our design-focused presenters, including Greg Van Alstyne, of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Strategic Innovation Lab, and Lloyd Walker, Precurve, who is a long-time futures colleague, talked about how part of the work of foresight is “strangemaking” which designers sometimes refer to as meaning to make the familiar, strange.

Exploring the future should include strangemaking. And then, on the other hand, it should also include sensemaking. I guess that looks like a contradiction, but the view is clear: when an organization is too focused on what it knows, too narrowly following and building within the familiar, it needs to think new thoughts, try new ideas, and so make the familiar strange for a while.

Meanwhile, most organizations are confronted with an awful lot that is strange or unclear. Usually that is what lies in the blurry periphery of what they know and can see and understand. For them, a big need is sensemaking. They need help, help that a futurist, among others, can offer, in getting clear on the changes surrounding them and in finding new ways of thinking about their interests, their stakeholders, their markets, and so on.

So, on balance, what is my job as a futurist? I think it is to draw the strange in for a close look, let it be strange and new to people, but then before long to help them understand it.

So let’s help people:

1). Make the familiar strange, by showing some surprising but plausible ways it could change, keeping the focus on what isn’t true today but what could be true in the future. That will even mean spending time looking at extreme possibilities.

2). Make the strange familiar, not by avoiding it, or ignoring it, or trying to force it into something it’s not, but rather by framing up a view of the future in a way that helps people understand and interpret it.

That balance of purposes is a thought that futurist Peter Bishop, the leader of the University of Houston Futures Studies in Commerce program crystallized for our Toronto gathering. It’s not sensemaking or strangemaking, it’s both. Thanks Peter!

Sam Adams and the art of persuasion

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I am ever-more convinced that at the core of getting people to effectively explore their future is the ability to communicate and persuade people about change. So as I finished an excellent biography of Sam Adams this past week, I was struck by his approach to persuasion. It’s not hard to argue that he was critical to inspiring and launching the American Revolution—he was world-class at persuasion.

Here are, in brief, the techniques I’ve observed in learning about his political life.

Arm and Induce – enable people to discuss and learn more about, and understand the issues, rather than just telling them what they should believe. Thus Adams published pieces outlining the facts, ways the argument could be construed, points of view, and so on, and let people come to their own conclusions.

Draw implications – explore, non-judgmentally, what the outcomes of particular situations and changes could be. Lay out the possibilities, again, without suggesting a certain conclusion or a singular way of understanding the situation. This is like building a set of scenarios and offering as objectively as we can, a range of views of the future. Thus Adams opened up the questions at hand, broadened the views taken, and showed the possible meaning and implications of actions taken by the British Parliament and Crown.

Frame / Reframe – create new, better ways of understanding the issue, most often by opening up the question to a broader context and a deeper view into the future. Thus Adams didn’t only draft responses to the Stamp Act of 1765. He didn’t make it simply about an undue tax or cost burden on the colonists, he raised the issue to a fuller view of the colonies’ rights to self-government and implications of taxation without representation. This added a moral focus to a fiscal one. It inspired thoughts of self-government.

Build a network of allies and advocates – get more people first exploring the issue and then, presuming the merits of a particular point of view, aligning to support a cause or take a stand. Thus Adams got patriots in each colony to build “committees of correspondence” and ultimately legislative bodies independent of England to explore what people in the newly-emerging states wanted. This built a constituency in every colony for thoughts of greater self-government, and ultimately a home for talk of independence. It led directly to the formation of the Continental Congress.

Be patient – In all this work Adams restrained his natural impatience with a situation he was deeply unhappy about. He knew that patience was essential. As he started this process in the 1760s, few of his fellow colonists were ready to think about independence. They needed time to learn to think about profound change, and accept the scarier parts of it, but also gain comfort with a vision of life very different from what they were used to. He had to be patient.

We can draw lessons from this for foresight in society and in our organizations. Perhaps the core lesson is that it is not enough to simply insist you your view—opinions aren’t strong on their own. You have to bring people along.

Don’t just answer the question you are asked

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wrong questionInnocently or not, you are often asked a specific, even narrow question. Your natural tendency is to answer it, on its own terms, as asked. This happens all the time in organizations grappling with change. Most of the time, the asker is only trying to get the answer they think they need. They assume they are asking the right question.

But you may well need to change the question.

It’s colud be the wrong question

It probably rests on old thinking

It’s most likely based on conventional wisdom

It may be too narrowly focused, or focused on the wrong question or issue

It’s view is probably too narrow and too close to the action

So you need, often if not always, to change the question. Usually, that means to open up the thinking behind it, to put more up for a re-think.

Framing and reframing, part 2: emotional connections

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Emotional framingMy Leading Futurists LLC partner Jennifer Jarratt and I believe one of the most critical things we do for our clients is reframing. Over 22+ years working to be more effective as futurists, we’ve learned that truly helping people understand the future means not just reconceptualizing things (nearly any good business consultant does that) but connecting in meaningful ways to their worldview. Reconceptualizing can make an intellectual connection, but reframing can make a stronger, emotional connection.

That means helping people think about change from a personal, human, emotional perspective. Offering a compelling look at the future is not about explaining “how would that work?” It’s about answering “how would that affect me?”
 
The work of George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at Berkley, has helped us surface and examine how we do that, why it matters, and how we can do it better. Lakoff’s book, The Political Mind, is particularly valuable in understanding the importance of frames and how people react to them.
 
Lakoff defines a frame as “a conceptual structure used in thinking.” [Link] He explains that it is the emotional content of a framing that connects most strongly to people.
 
In The Political Mind, Lakoff explains the centrality of framing in politics. While perhaps the stakes are higher in political battles than in exploring the future, we believe the ability of people to break through to new insights on the future is essential to having a successful future.
 
Let me share an example of reframing of the kind Lakoff explains so well. I mentioned this situation in a related reframing context in a previous post, but the case also distinctly highlights a central part of reframing: the power of an emotional hook in how something is framed.
 
The Janney Elementary/Tenleytown Branch library public private partnership (PPP) was an intense issue in my community in Washington DC over the past few years. It was a proposal to combine a commercial real estate development on Wisconsin Avenue, NW in Washington, DC with a redevelopment of the public branch library and adjacent public elementary school. The land to be used for the commercial development would have included the city’s land where the now-demolished library is intended to be rebuilt, and part of the adjacent elementary school property. The sites would have been joined and reworked, with a new library, retail space, apartments, and garage parking for the elementary school staff. The developer was to contribute to renovating and adding on to the 1925 elementary school building.
 
In our neighborhood debate, a group that opposed the PPP framed the core of the issue as a “land grab” with the city surrendering land to a private developer, irrevocably. There are detailed technical arguments that can be, and have been made on each side of the issue. It’s quite possible for pro-PPP people to explain the potential deal not as a land grab, but as a multi-million dollar benefit to an aging, over-crowded elementary school. But the “land grab” notion was a stronger framing than any that had come up from proponents of the PPP. It connects in people’s minds to stealing—in this case, a corporate entity, the real estate developer, in cahoots with the city government, stealing from our children.
 
What happens so often in political debates is that one side comes up with framing that resonates with people’s emotions well, and the other side tries to counter that framing with a technical discussion of facts and truths. This is what has happened in my neighborhood.
 
Emotion usually wins out over the facts. A few days ago (March 16, 2009) the city relented and killed further discussions of a PPP on the site. So, perhaps the opponents who framed this as a “land grab” won the argument with their well-framed opposition.
 
In exploring the future, we need not see framing a simply a crass appeal to emotions. We can see it as a way of more effectively breaking through to people’s consciousness with ideas about a changed world. In our thinking, then, we specifically put the emphasis on reframing—recasting the situation with a new way of looking at it that can alter how people think about the possible and desirable future. Sometimes that means showing a new side to an issue, balancing people’s fears with ideas that suggest how a big change could be a good thing.
 
Effective work in foresight then, means not only depending on technical explanations and a wholly logical appeal to people. That’s why I’ve written so extensively here about the importance of stories, the value of images, the power of other voices, among many others.
 
As Jennifer and I work further on our concepts around reframing, we’ll publish ideas here and at www.leadingfuturists.biz. We’d of course be delighted to hear your ideas about this and we’re ready to help you in your exploration of the future any time.
 
Here is my take on some people who are really good at reconceptualizing and reframing. 
 

Framing and reframing, part 1: our mental frames shape how we see things

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Tenleytown DC, library lot and elementary schoolFor nearly any problem, question, topic, or issue you face, you need to ask yourself: "What point of view do I bring to this question?" Then ask: "Has that blinded me in any way?"

Our mental framing on any given question can be hard to loosen. When I first visited Tucson, Arizona, where I planned to go to graduate school, I flew to the Tuscon airport, and, having come from the north, got it in my head that the airport was on the north side of the city. I lived in Tucson for two years, and despite all the evidence to the contrarary, including each day’s sunrise and sunset, I could never seem to shake my initial mis-impression. The sun always seemed to be rising on the wrong side of town.

That shows how powerful a mental framing or first impression can be, and often the stakes are much higher than a grad student being momentarily unable to find his way around. (A couple of years ago, after 23 years’ absence, I again visited Tucson, and the same mis-apprehension reasserted itself–the sun insisted on rising on the wrong side of town).

In a more serious example, in my neighborhood, an issue has evolved over the past few years about the city’s plans for rebuilding a branch library and whether to do that as part of a public private partnership (PPP) involving the adjacent elementary school property (see picture) as well. A developer wants to build apartments on the site, while also accomodating the branch library, and parking for teachers and library patrons. In exchange for that, the developer would pay for some of the school’s modernization and expansion. This issue has been contentious–yesterday morning, in fact, a crowd gathered at the site (an empty lot) and demanded the public library be built now, without the PPP.

Neighborhood activists have framed this issue as a question of whether or not to allow a real estate developer to get involved with the library and school renovations. But the overall debate includes the premise that the school needs to be modernized and expanded, and that its student population will go up.

The lens through which both sides see the question is how best to serve the community and the students at the school, with a large and growing student population. Discussing the situation that way has held off or submerged any discussions of the possibility that we could leave the student population size as it is, or lower it. Intense debate about a part of the situation that was particularly emotional blinded nearly everyone to other questions about the plans.

Often when you face a futures question you have to step back and say, "hey, maybe we’re not asking the right question."

That’s often a the role of a futures-minded person in the group. The tendency is to respond to an issue or question as it was posed. But often it’s important to reframe that question. There are nearly always old arguments, philosophical differences, and vested interests that shape the way the question gets discussed. But are we even asking the right question?

In future posts, I will expand on the concepts of framing and reframing in foresight–this is an area where my Leading Futurists LLC partner Jennifer Jarratt and I are working intensively.

Image: John B. Mahaffie

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