The Transperience Actbook: Framing?Actions

Strategic planning is essential for success, but let’s face it: too often, it falls flat. Plans can feel irrelevant, disconnected from reality, or they are seen as overly complicated, leaving everyone wondering how to actually make them work.?

The reason for resistance to change is not limited to old habits and fixed beliefs. It can also arrive from an unwillingness to be squeezed into a too tight box with more command and control than flexibility and freedom.

Certainly, the path from strategic intention to tangible impact can be full of hurdles, leading to frustration and inefficiency. Sometimes even the most carefully designed roadmap leads nowhere, because the landscape is too strange, unpredictable or impenetrable, and people are too busy with their own tasks and challenges to care about it.

But having a strategy is still crucial?—?it shows where to focus and what direction to take. The problem is trying to force it into a rigid plan or project. That’s where framing actions can make a real difference.

Framing is about shaping change from the future you want, rather than clinging to the past. Instead of creating a fixed route, you build a flexible, dynamic space where your intentions can blend with circumstances and actions naturally follow. Such a space can take various forms and manifest itself physically, psychologically and socially.

From planning to?framing?

In the world of transperience, strategy is more than a growing list of things to do and spreadsheets to fill in. It is the source of inspiration and guide of decision for everybody involved. Staging the strategy makes it come alive and creates momentum. Framing actions will help you turn momentum into movement.?

In cognitive science, there is a concept called the framing effect. It shows how the way you present an option?—?as a gain or a loss?—?can dramatically affect how people respond. For instance, people are more likely to choose a treatment described as “90% effective” than a treatment described as “10% ineffective,” even though they’re the same thing.?

Similarly, when you frame actions positively and with purpose, people are more likely to embrace and act on them. Here’s how you can start using strategic framing:

• Define the intention. Make the overall purpose or goal clear. Whether it’s a dream, mission, or ambition, express it in a way that resonates.
• Engage attention. Focus on what matters most. Pay attention to the things with the greatest potential of making an impact.
• Integrate Meaning. Tie actions to a shared narrative that inspires everyone to get involved and contribute. Let this narrative inspire and guide personal choice making and action taking.
• Enable Freedom. Give people the space to act creatively within the strategic framework. This is where real innovation happens.

The framing process blends the useful and measurable with the emotional and intuitive to create space for collaboration and transformation. On the one hand, it defines the space by stating the reason for doing. On the other hand, it gives space to find meaning in the doing and grow with the flow.

By balancing frame and freedom, you give people the space they need to thrive, collaborate and experiment, without losing sight of purpose or important waypoints.

Form and hold a leaderspace

Framing actions is about creating a collaborative leaderspace where people can play to their strengths, learn, experiment, and grow. In a leaderspace, dialogue and co-creation flourish, and your team becomes more responsive and able to face complex challenges.

To frame a leaderspace, consider using the SPACE tool: make a storyline to give the overall picture of what’s going on and what’s intended. What is moving? Formulate a purpose that can create meaningful engagement. Why do it? Agree on the ambitions, conditions and expectations of the leaderspace, and you are good to go.

Once your leaderspace is set, here’s how to frame actions within it:

• Encourage agency: Give people the autonomy to act within the framework. This fuels both individual and team performance.
• Make it brain-friendly: Use neuroscience principles to break big goals into smaller, achievable steps. Make it easy, fun, and rewarding.
• Practice, practice: Regular repetition turns new behaviors into personal habits and social routines that stick.
• Create strategic events. Let impactful moments transcend into decisive momentum and meaningful movement.
• Nudge and trigger: Use structure to support the desired culture, for instance by meaningful organization and purposeful interior design.
• Merge Ecosystems: Promote collaboration across teams, departments, and even external partners.

Framing actions is not just about following a plan; it’s about balancing frame and freedom so your team can make meaningful contributions and adapt as needed. It’s about creating an space where strategy becomes a lived experience.

By framing actions, you can connect vision to action, intention to impact, and philosophy to performance. The application of strategic staging and purposeful framing will help you navigate complexity, embrace change, and achieve sustainable success.

This article is an excerpt from the Transperience ActBook (in the making). Transperience means transformation through experience.