It's All About How You Frame It

It's All About How You Frame It

We all encounter issues of varying complexities. Regardless of the sophistication of these issues, I have learned that the mindset we start with plays a huge role in how effectively and efficiently we resolve these issues. Through my daily experience as a scrum master at a bank, professional mentorship, reading books (TeamIng by Amy Edmondson) and therapy, I learned framing.

Framing to me is a Jedi mind trick I use to help me and the people around me look at problems with a different perception, especially one that can help find a resolution for the problems more effectively and efficiently.

Framing took a lot of practice. I had to be intentional and I even sought help from both my work mentors and my therapist whenever I was stuck in problems. Through external help and my sheer experience of overcoming my hurdles, I have learned that framing can be done effectively in 2 general steps:

1) Sit in the problems and validate all your current feelings.

2) Decide which perception we choose to view the problem with

Step 1 is the importance of sitting in the problems and validating how you feel. As much as problem-solving is an objective task, jumping straight to brainstorming on a resolution isn't an effective long-term solution. I realized that if feelings about the current problems are not acknowledged, immediate solutions could lead to us being less effective and efficient in resolving problems.

Emotions left unchecked play a huge role in distorting our perceptions. Hence sitting down and validating how we feel allows us to make our emotions to be another objective data point that we can use for the next step, which is to decide which perception we want to choose.

When we sit with our emotions, we minimize the discord that surrounds our perceptions of the problems. And when we minimize the distortions, we can see that there are multiple ways we can look at the problems (i.e. perceptions).

This in turn can help us look at all the various perceptions and help us choose the perception that makes the most rational sense for us to view the problem. (Note: How we choose is subjective on the situation we are in, and if I find a pattern I will definitely write a blog post about it in the future).

In my personal life, I learned that framing a personal issue of mine helped me feel better about myself and recover from some setbacks. Last year, a fire broke into my apartment when I brought my dog out for a walk. In the process, I lost most of my belongings (laptops, furniture, kitchen equipment) and was going through multiple things. After going through a whirlwind of fire investigation and belongings recovery, I took some time to sit with the feeling of shock, misery and loss and cried. I even held my dog close and was afraid of what could happen next.

This took a whole day or two to process in the hotel room I was in. However, 2 days later, I decided to focus on budgeting what I have, looking at what I could recover, seeking therapy to deal with fears of fire and other unexpected noise, what I needed to buy and how the fire was helping me get new materials that could help me out. I have survived the fire, and I feel that a year later I am more resilient to issues and can cook normally and even not get scared of fires.

At work, framing has helped me especially when I am working with a team that deals with complex projects daily. A team I am working with has been overwhelmed with a lot of work and were having struggles with managing their work. Before implementing anything, I first spent a session with the team to acknowledge the current state of work via a retrospective. Many folks on the team have said that they were fearful that they may not be able to complete their work in time and as such felt that overworking now would help them meet a deadline.

This allowed us to have further conversations in realizing that the problem was the uncertainty in meeting deadlines given the scope of work. With further conversations, the team realized that they can frame too much work as an opportunity to experiment with implementing Work in Progress limits (WIP limits for the agile enthusiasts) and use that policy to manage their workloads. At a given time, the team was working on only 5 issues at a time instead of 20.

Over time, the team was even able to meet their project deadlines without anyone feeling like burdening themselves. All it took for the team was a change in perception about who was actually managing the flow of work.

Eventually, what framing helps us do is make us differentiate what control we have over the problems thrown at us. When done well on an individual level, framing can influence how others around you view the problems around them. This in turn can either help or harm others and yourself, depending on the frame you choose.

Always remember to focus on what you can control, and frame your problems around them. And please do remember to take the time to acknowledge your feelings.?

要查看或添加评论,请登录

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了