How the way you state a problem controls the answers you can see

The frame you put around a problem decides, before anyone says a word about solutions, which solutions are even thinkable. This is the most powerful idea in the week and the least noticed, because framing happens so early and so quietly that it feels like description rather than choice. When you state a problem, you are not just reporting it. You are drawing a boundary around it, deciding what is inside and what is out, what counts as the problem and what counts as background. Every solution you go on to find will live inside that boundary. Get the frame right and good answers appear almost on their own. Get it wrong, and you can be brilliant and hardworking and still trapped, generating clever solutions to a problem that was never worth solving in that shape.

The hard part is that a bad frame does not announce itself. It feels completely natural, because it is usually the first and most obvious way to describe the situation. Yesterday, we worked on catching bias in how you judge. Today is about catching it one step earlier, in how you state the problem in the first place, because a biased frame quietly poisons every good decision that follows it.

The slow elevator and what it teaches

The story in today's post is a real and much-loved example, popularised by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg in his work on problem framing. Tenants complain that the elevators are too slow. Framed that way, as an elevator-speed problem, the solutions are all about the elevators: faster motors, better algorithms, another lift, all costly and disruptive. But someone reframed it. The real problem, they suggested, is not that the wait is long, but that the wait is unpleasant and boring. Framed as a boredom problem, an entirely different and far cheaper set of solutions opens up, and the winning one was mirrors, which give people something to do while they wait. The complaints stopped. Nothing about the elevators changed at all.

The lesson is not that mirrors fix elevators. It is that the frame did all the work. Two honest, accurate descriptions of the same situation, slow elevators and a boring wait, led to two completely different worlds of solutions, one expensive and one nearly free. Neither description was wrong. But one was far more useful, and the only way to find it was to treat the first frame as a choice rather than a fact, and to deliberately try another.

Why does the frame have this power

Kahneman and Tversky showed that the same facts, described two ways, lead people to different decisions. A treatment described as having a ninety per cent survival rate is chosen far more often than the same treatment described as having a ten per cent death rate, though the numbers are identical. This is the framing effect, and it runs deeper than a trick of language. The frame decides what your attention lands on, what feels relevant, and what you quietly ignore. A problem framed around cost makes you think about money. The same problem framed around risk makes you think about what could go wrong. The frame is a spotlight, and everything outside its beam stays dark, no matter how important it is.

Frame around what people want, not what they lack

One of the most useful reframes is to move from the thing someone is missing to the outcome they actually want. Theodore Levitt, the marketing professor, put it in a line that has lasted for decades: people do not want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole. Framed as if they need a drill, you sell drills. Framed as if they need a hole, you might sell drills, or a cutting service, or a product that arrives with the holes already made. The frame around the outcome contains the frame around the object, and it holds far more possible answers. Whenever a problem is stated as the lack of a specific thing, a new system, another report, or more training, restate it as the outcome that thing was meant to produce, and watch how many more doors open.

How high should you frame it?

Every problem can be stated at different altitudes, and the altitude you pick changes what counts as a solution. Frame it too low, and you solve a symptom. Frame it too high, and it becomes so abstract that no concrete action fits. A team asked to fix a broken export button can frame it as this button fails, or as users cannot get their data out, or as we do not give people control of their own information. Each is a true statement of the same underlying problem at a different height. The lowest fixes one button. The highest could reshape a product. The skill is choosing the altitude that is high enough to open better options than the obvious one, but low enough that you can still act on it this quarter.

A simple way to find the right height is to move up and down on purpose. From any problem, ask "why does that matter" to climb up a level, and ask "what would that look like in practice" to climb down one. Do this two or three times in each direction, and you can see the whole ladder, then pick the rung where the good, affordable solutions live. Most teams never climb at all. They solve the problem at exactly the height it was handed to them, which is rarely the most useful one.

How to reframe a stuck problem

Reframing is a skill you can practise, not a flash of genius that either strikes or does not. When a problem feels stuck, or the only solutions on offer are all expensive and joyless, that is the signal to step back and work the frame itself.

State the current frame out loud, in one sentence, so you can actually see the boundary you have drawn.
Name the frame's hidden assumption. "The elevators are too slow" assumes the problem is speed. Say the assumption, then question it.
Go one level up to what is really wanted. Not a faster lift but a pleasant building. Not a report but a decision made on time.
Write the problem two or three other ways, around a different actor, outcome or cause, and see which frame opens the cheapest good answers.
Try the opposite. If the frame is how do we get people to use this, flip it to why would anyone not use this, which often surfaces the real obstacle.
Ask who sees this completely differently. The person from another team, or the newcomer with no history, often holds the frame you cannot see from inside your own.

The mistakes that trap you in one frame

Most framing failures come from never realising a frame was chosen at all.

Accepting the first framing because it sounds obvious, and never noticing that obvious is not the same as best.
Stating the problem in the language of your own function, so every problem becomes the kind you happen to solve for a living.
Confusing a narrow frame with a focused one. Narrowing too early feels disciplined but can cut off the reframe that would have solved the whole thing cheaply.
Treating reframing as wordplay. Changing the words without changing where you look is relabelling, and it moves nothing.

You will feel this in your next planning meeting

Watch for it the next time a group is stuck and every option on the table is expensive and unappealing. That is the signal, right there in the room, that everyone has quietly accepted one frame and is now competing inside it. The move is to say, gently, "Before we choose between these, can we state the problem a different way?", and then to offer one. Half the time, the room exhales because someone has finally named the box they were all thinking inside. Do that once, successfully, and you will never again reach for a solution before checking the frame it sits in, because you will have felt how much cheaper and better the answers get when the frame is right.

Go out and be successful. Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights | www.flotogbainsights.com

Tomorrow: How Do We Know? Testing the assumptions and evidence sitting underneath a conclusion everyone is sure of.