Cognitive Flexibility: Framing Opportunities

A lot of companies use the saying “It’s not a problem, but an opportunity” but when done incorrectly, it can lead to more issues than it solves.

Simply naming problems as opportunities, without showcasing what they can help achieve, can damage relationships with the team - break trust, create frustration, discourage communication, and lead to thinking we cannot understand the problem.

Let’s discuss how to properly frame opportunities and what role cognitive flexibility plays in this.

The Problem

In tech and in management being genuine is key. Just calling a problem an opportunity is not sufficient. Even more, it can appear as disingenuous. People can assume that their issues are dismissed, unimportant, that they do not have support, are not understood, and they must bear the consequences alone. They assume (sometimes rightfully) that they must find ways to fix it without talking about it, because it could bother other people, and single them out as the “negative” ones, who still see it as a problem.

Not acknowledging a problem can mean denying the reality of the people around us. It also means that instead of working together openly to fix it, we do not allow the space in which the problem gets discussed, understood, tackled.

We must consider not just the cost of not properly solving the problem, but also the toll it takes on the team and how this impacts the company long-term.

The Approach

Instead of downplaying problems, it's essential to acknowledge their impact and address them transparently. Cognitive flexibility, the ability to view situations from multiple perspectives and find different interpretations, is instrumental in this process.

It enables empathetic understanding and facilitates effective communication. It is an important part of management & leadership as well as product management, UX research, and product design.

Moreover, cognitive flexibility allows for problem reframing, leading to innovative solutions and even finding opportunities. A classic example of problem framing is the elevator issue: the elevator is slow; but if the problem is reframed, we find that “the wait for the elevator is annoying”, which leads to creative, lower-budget solutions than replacing the entire elevator.

While reframing problems can yield opportunities, some issues are just problems and cannot be transformed into opportunities.

Despite our tendency to lead a life of comfort and our struggle to avoid failures, learning how to accept and handle them helps build resilience, paving the way for growth and innovation, both on a personal and professional level.

A team that can acknowledge that things fail has resilience. A team that has resilience is a team that will tackle more and more interesting challenges, that will aim for more aggressive metrics, and do so in a way that is compassionate to the people around them, the people they are building for, and themselves. It is a team that is stable, accountable, and fast.

Conclusion

Rather than labeling every problem as an opportunity, it's crucial to foster a culture of transparency and resilience within teams, to achieve a seamless collaboration that leads to self-managing teams. Addressing problems head-on builds trust and cultivates a collaborative environment conducive to innovation, which is vital in the fast-paced tech environment.

Cognitive flexibility can help us find the best ways to understand the problem and support the team in coming up with solutions.

As an exercise, take time to reflect on problems and employ an exercise of cognitive flexibility to understand whether genuine opportunities exist. Consider where your reaction to the problem comes from to remove bias and look at it from different points of view.

For further discussions on building resilience and managing challenges in tech, consider booking a coaching session here: https://calendly.com/carminb/cbt-coaching-session-tech