Thinkers50 2022 Radar Linkedin Live with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is an innovation expert and executive advisor, whose research has been featured in multiple global publications. Prior to his business career, he served for four years as an officer with the Danish Royal Guards.

Thomas champions the importance of solving the right problems and provides the tools to do so, with special emphasis on framing and reframing the problems we face.

In this Thinkers50 Radar 2022 LinkedIn Live series in partnership with Deloitte, Stuart Crainer hosts Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg in a discussion on the fine art of problem-solving.

Transcript:

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, welcome to the Thinkers50 Radar 2022 series brought to you in partnership with Deloitte. I’m Stuart Crainer, and I’m the co-founder of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking and sharing the leading management ideas of our age, ideas that can make a real difference in the world.

In this weekly series of 45 minute webinars, we want to showcase some of those ideas to bring you the most exciting new voices of management thinking. Our guest today fits the bill perfectly. He’s the Danish born author and thought leader, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. Thomas is a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem solving. His books include Innovation as Usual, coauthored with Patty Miller, and most recently, What’s Your Problem?

Thomas has shared and refined his reframing method with some of the leading organizations in the world, including Microsoft and the United Nations. The format today is that Thomas is going to explain what reframing is and share his latest thinking. Then we’ll have a discussion fueled by your questions, so please post your questions as we go along. Thomas, welcome. The virtual stage is yours.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Fantastic. Thank you, Stu, and hello everybody. Great to have you on online here. The central idea I will want to focus on today is a missing link in the way we think about solving problems, and that’s problems in the workplace, but also global problems or problems at home for that matter. The missing link has to do with the fact that we tend to think problem solving has two components, the ones you can see behind me here, like you analyze a problem and then you solve it.

There is though a third and critical part of this, and that’s the notion of how we frame problems, or if you want it in another way, the question, are we actually solving the right problem? What I found consistently, framing is not a new idea. It’s and old idea. Yet, despite us having known about this for more than half a century, people still don’t understand the difference between framing and analysis.

To quickly introduce you to this, I’m going to share two things. I’m going to share a quick example of this. Then I’m going to show you a real world case where you can see the power of framing problems correctly. This is a crucial skill. It is a big issue in my mind, how much we spend on basically solving the wrong problems, like falling in love with the wrong solutions sometimes if you will.

An example, I’d like you to match that you are the owner of a building, it’s an office building and your tenants in the building, they are complaining a lot about the elevator. Like it’s slow and they’re really tired of that, so now they’re threatening to break their leases because of this slow elevator. What you’ll notice here is that the problem isn’t presented to you neutrally, somebody has already framed the problem for you and said, “Well, the problem is that the lift is slow,” and here you see two different mistakes.

Inexperienced problem solvers. What they do is they jump straight into solution mode. They say, okay, the problem is that the elevator is slow. How do we make it faster? Let’s brainstorm on that. They show up with an analysis of, hey, we could put in a bigger engine that pulls it up faster. We could tweak the rhythm, we could buy a new elevator and here’s the 15 providers of new elevators that this one is the cheapest. They don’t notice that they have been trapped in a solution space.

The interesting mistake though, is the second one. That comes back to the difference between framing and analysis. This is a mistake that even really experienced clever problem solvers often commit, that mistake is to ask why is the elevator slow? Going in and saying, “Okay, now we can do a root cost analysis on this and ask why five times,” and so on. What they never notice is that they did effectively get trapped in the first framing of the problem.

What’s an alternative? Well, if you ask a really experienced landlord and oh, okay. Yeah. People are complaining about slow elevator. Well, why don’t we put up a mirror in the hallway, because what happens when you put a mirror up anywhere is of course that people go, “I’m busy, I’m busy. I’m … oh, that’s beautiful,” and they forget time. Centrally here, you’ll notice how the mirror example here, it really showcases something important, that sometimes you don’t want to necessarily to tackle the first framing of the problem. There may actually be a better problem to solve. In this case, like thinking about, wait, is the problem really the speed of the elevator, or is the problem that people are waiting?

Then if that turns out to be the problem, well, then we can go in and fix it with a mirror, or maybe there are other ways of dealing with it. This is the central idea of reframing. Of going in, not jumping into solution mode, not necessarily even getting trapped in analysis, but through the first delving deep into the first problem. But taking that first mental habit of saying, taking a and saying, “Wait, is this necessarily the right problem to focus on? Is there another way of thinking about what might be going on in this situation?”

This is a very simple example of it. I’ll suggest that you actually try to remember this because it is an amazing way of just explaining it to other people. If you’re in a meeting and you need to get somebody to start thinking differently about the problem, the slow elevator story can often make them understand why you are asking questions about out their problem. But what I’m going to show you now is one of the most thought provoking cases that I ran into during my research on the book and so on, where you see how thinking differently about a problem can sometimes change an entire industry. This is an industry that don’t know if many of you are with it. It is a little bit of a side show industry, if you will, unless of course you are working on. It has to do with dogs.

This is a case from the US where there has been for decades, an issue with shelter dogs. What is that issue? Well, about 3 million dogs every single year enter a shelter. Historically, about half of those have been adopted through the work of volunteer groups and shelters and so on, which means that something like more than a million extra homes are needed for dogs every single year. COVID may have helped this a little bit, as you many of you know, there’s a surge in interest in dogs when we had to stay at home. But it’s a good question how that’s going to go now COVID may be hopefully on the wane, this problem may be about to get worse than ever.

What I want to show you with this is how people think about the nature of the problem and what types of solutions they then jump into. A lot of people think about it as an issue around motivation or awareness. If that’s your take on it, well, your solution will typically be some type of advertising. You go in, you create a campaign. This is an example like here’s a dog, it’s clearly not in a good place. You can help. Really just trying to change people’s motivation or their awareness about this problem. That’s not a bad approach. This actually, I mean, this works and this helps every three year getting some dogs adopted, but it’s not enough, and it hasn’t been enough for decades.

Now I’m going to introduce you to a woman who has basically upturned this industry within the last five years. That woman you see here, her name is Lori Weise. She is based in Los Angeles. He is the founder of a rescue group that’s called Downtown Dog Rescue. Lori started looking at an interesting statistic in this space. The statistic was well, when you’re looking at the animals that come into a shelter, 30% of those are what’s called owner surrenders. An owner surrender. That’s not a stray. It hasn’t run away or anything. An owner surrender is when the owners of the dog comes to the shelter and deliberately hands over their dog, say, “Here, take it.”

Now you can probably imagine, if you work in this space, if you volunteer that you love animals, you’ve dedicated a good deal of your time to help them. You probably don’t have a good impression of those people, right? I mean, they’re bad people. This is your thinking about this. We have a big problem with a lot of people. They should never have had a dog, bad owners, big issue, core to this whole thing.

Here’s something fascinating. Once you get trapped in a specific way of thinking about the problem, then you start creating solutions that may go against your goal, what the industry … why? It’s because there’s a widespread belief in the idea that a ton of people are bad, should never have had a dog. Well, then they create screening. I’m going to show you a form now from an animal adoption center.

This is basically the form you have to fill out if you want to save a dog potentially from dying. All right, here we go. We would like to have a ton of things here. You can see references, veterinary references, name of your employer. They may actually come to home and check whether you have the proper setup to take care of a dog. Here is what Lori did differently, because she, to some extent, she recognized that this, it’s well intended, but it also means we are creating barriers to adoption, which is our goal.

So what Lori did to test her thinking around, wait, what what’s really going on with this problem? She set up a learning experiment. That learning experiment was in Los Angeles. She found one shelter. She took one of her people to ask them to stand in front of the entrance to the shelter. Then when a family came and wanted to handle with their dog or another pet, “Would you like to keep it if you could?” First data point, three out of four families said yes to that. Most people who handed over an animal to a shelter did not in fact want to. They are often in tears when they were doing so.

Then when the staff member asked, “So wait a minute, what’s the problem? Why are you handing it over if you don’t want to?” It turned out a huge under recognized issue in this didn’t have to do with bad owners. It had to do with economics, with poverty. A lot of these people had had their dogs for years. They had taken good care of it. They loved it as much as we love our dogs, but they were also in a financial straight so dire that when a new landlord for instance comes … they have to move to a new building and the landlord comes and says, “You know what? You have to put down $150 deposit to have the dog here.”

That’s not money they can get access to. We are talking people who sometimes struggle to feed their own kids. It’s food insecurity as it’s called. It is just not an option for them to put $150 on the table to house a dog. Once Lori realized that this was a huge issue and was the cause of many of the adoption issues they saw. Then she said, “Well, instead of spending our money on helping dogs that are already in shelters, can we just help them stay with their first family? Can we go in, put down the deposit of $150? Most of those will get back and thus help and rethink what’s going on here in a different way?”

When Lori looked at the numbers after start running up and setting up a proper program with us, she found that she could go create pretty amazing savings. They used to spend around $85 per animal they helped. This reduced it to around $60 per animal they helped. So, a pretty dramatic increase in the number of pets they could help for the same amount of money. For those of you who are interested in this, if are in the shelter world or similar, well, you can read more about this case in Lori’s book. It’s on Amazon called First Home, Forever Home.

I show this because for me, it’s such a potent reminder of the notion that we sometimes get trapped in the way we think about problems, and once we’re trapped in them, we fall in love with the ideas or we somehow get locked into it. Once in a while, if we can develop the ability to get better at this practice of going in and saying, “Wait, are we even solving the right problem? Is there something here about the stakeholders or the customers or whoever we are dealing with that we don’t understand?” Then we can sometimes create dramatic change and maybe not even needing new technology. Like, Lori’s solution didn’t have to do with an app. It didn’t have to do with Bitcoin, blockchain, whatever. It was just about having greater empathy with the people she was trying to help.

That’s the introduction. That is the quick crash, 10 minute lightning introduction to what reframing is about and how the effect can play out in the real world. The intent now, as Stu mentioned, is to delve into questions, so please fire away what you might have into the chat. It could be a question. It could be an observation, it can be anything. Stu as well, Stu will mastermind the rest of the session here so we can go deep. Stu, over to you.

Stuart Crainer:

I think mastermind might be overstating it, Thomas. We might have to reframe that. But presumably from what you’re saying, the cost of getting it wrong must be enormous. I mean, the dog examples, $85 to $60, but that must be multiplied many, many, many times in different situations.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah. I mean, there are several scenarios here. The dog example is interesting because we were solving the problem, but we just hadn’t discovered a better way to do it, so to speak. You can consider that like a lost opportunity. What’s worse, I think is when we fall for the wrong problem. And how big of a cost is that? Well, imagine you go to the doctor and the doctor gets the diagnosis wrong. Well, if you go next week again, and they get the diagnosis right, you’re probably good. So if you can discover it quickly, that’s great.

But if you don’t discover it quickly, if you start somehow to get locked into the original diagnosis, well, then you wake up without a leg and it’s, “Oh, sorry, it wasn’t your leg. It was your liver.” So that’s a metaphor a bit, but that happens in organizations. We go in, we start to fall in love with the solution. We create milestones, we tie our bonuses to it. We build organizational structures to support it. And then sometimes we realize oh, oh, this is actually not what we should be focusing on, but then it’s often too late. We are committed and it can be a really, really expensive exercise to try to turn the ship around, if you will.

Stuart Crainer:

A couple of questions coming, a couple of points. They’re quite complicated actually, because it’s a complex issue, isn’t it?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

It is.

Stuart Crainer:

And it shouldn’t be, I suspect, but Michael DeCamp says, “What question can we ask to see if a solution has been baked into the problem frame or problem statement?”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

A brilliant example, and Michael, great to see you here. There’s an issue here Michael is pointing out, right? That sometimes when you ask people, “Hey, what’s the problem?” They have actually put a solution into the problem statement. Well, the problem is that, you’re an idiot and you should be not an idiot. That’s exaggerated, but let’s take a specific example, a startup and the startup is not selling the new product really. It’s not going that well. Then somebody says, “You know what? We really need to find a way of finding more money for the marketing. We need to market better. Maybe we need a new campaign.”

What they don’t realize there is maybe this isn’t the marketing issue. Maybe it’s actually because there’s something about the product of service that they haven’t gotten right yet, and posting more money into marketing is just going to exacerbate the startup’s problems because they’re spending resources that don’t really matter. So getting in, starting to develop this habit of looking at problems and starting to smell, wait a second, has somebody actually baked a solution into the problem? Really, really important thing to try to observe.

Stuart Crainer:

Sean De Waal has an interesting point, “The solution to a problem depends on what the solution is, not on what the problem is,” that’s a solution focused approach.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Exactly. I think there’s this beautiful thing happens sometimes. Well, not so beautiful when it has real world consequences, but really it is that you have, again, fallen in love with the solution. Then you retroactively construct your understanding of the problem based on that. And this you’ll see in a lot of places where people, for some reason are committed to this either commercially or ideologically or maybe they just fell in love with something, so critical thing.

Even just being aware of it, when you start, it’s almost as like a spider sense you develop. When you run into problems, you start to develop this sense of what’s going on. If people are doing this, or people are baking in a solution, as Michael mentioned before, so really important observation.

Stuart Crainer:

So basically it’s a question of returning to first principles with a clear mind. It reminds me of Clay Christensen‘s idea of jobs to be done.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

It and jobs to be done. Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Cutting away all the clutter and just really focusing on what the problem is. Because as you say, there might be a better problem to solve. But that’s really difficult, isn’t it? An organization when there’s all the clutter of … you got the clutter of other people, you got the clutter of how things have always been done or how you’ve always solved things.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah. Two observations here, like jobs to be done is a great example of how you can use all this thinking specifically with regards to customers. That’s the domain we see jobs to be done getting used in when you are a startup or a company trying to help or develop something new for customers. One of the insights I’ve had here is that we don’t take that mindset beyond customers. Like when we are dealing with problems that are inside an organization or globally, or a looking at your own family, whatever’s going on there. We forget about that. We don’t necessarily think about, like even jobs to be done. Like, what is my sister really trying to do here? When you are having a family conflict with your sister. That basic thinking, actually trying to expand that into other domains of thinking is really, really important.

Now you mentioned, so you mentioned the complexity of it too, right? I weirdly enough found that the solution to complexity is not more to have a really thorough framework, and this may sound a little counterintuitive, but when you look at the history of people trying to create frameworks for this, very often they have created these very big elaborate methods. They’re like the broadsheets A3, tons of different elaborate frameworks, but the second a framework becomes elaborate you don’t really use it a lot.

So, one of the counterintuitive things I discovered was you are actually often better off teaching people how to do this in a few minutes using a very few rules of thumb for doing this, because then they get to use it much more compared to thinking of it as a big demanding exercise that you can only do twice a year, if you will.

Stuart Crainer:

Who should be involved in this? Is it something where you should involve as many people as possible? To some extent, I’m thinking, no, you want to narrow it down because the more people, the more complicated, the more possible responses there are. Are there optimum amounts of people to be involved?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

I think of this from a very pragmatic angle in the sense that more diversity is good, but what do you have time to involve? For some problems, you literally just have maybe 15 minutes to think about this. Then your option is to turn to the person sitting next to you and just run it buy him. For more important problems you do want to invest the energy in pulling in diverse perspectives.

Why is that so critical? We talk a lot about diversity, but one of the central things you see in problem solving is when you have a problem, theoretically, you are the person who knows the most about it. But in reality, we are often too close to our own problems to see them clearly. One of the most powerful shortcuts to spotting your own blind angles, if you will, is to pull in people who are further away from this. People who think differently, people who have different backgrounds, and so on. That’s one of the most clearly seen in the research, the power of diversity is just helping get different perspectives early in the process before you get locked into a specific viewpoint. General rule, the more important the problem is to solve the more effort you need to put into pulling different people into the room or the virtual discussion with you.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s great to see on our virtual discussion, we have somebody joined us from Nepal for the first time. I’ve noticed somebody from Nepal. And Albert has just joined from Namibia, and very nice to have you on board. Interesting point from Ruth Gotian, who I know, in that. We can recommend a wonderful book, the Success Factor, and Ruth says, “I wonder how reframing the problem could help build critical thinking, curiosity, the search for gaps in thinking and understanding reduced burnout and higher engagement.”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah, so Ruth is, I don’t know if you know, if you followed Thinkers50, you know that Ruth and I were both nominated for a prize and Ruth actually won it, so she is certified smarter than me. And classically of Ruth, she has put out a very clever observation here, namely, what this can do. Because you’ll notice what’s happening here.

And there are some links here, for instance, to psychological safety, Amy Edmondson‘s concept. But what you’ll notice when you have a problem, you have a discussion. It’s a difficult discussion. We often tend up sitting here and there’s somebody here who’s trying to help us, and they are firing away solutions at us. “Hey, could you, maybe you could?” You know that. Then what happens is people put up a screen. You just throw up the defense barriers because there’s something in us that resists when people just offer solutions most of the time.

This is a fundamentally different thing. This places you almost the same side as the person, you can even do that physically, and you start to explore the problem together. Once you get to that, then you can often see a lot of positive effects on the way you work together with people where it becomes a more collaborative thing.

I don’t know if it’s a full panacea to all the issues here that Ruth put up, but it can really help. And this, as you’ll notice is a method that you can use on almost any question you’re facing, whether it’s a strategic issue or whether it’s like, “Hey, our team is not really working,” or I have a relationship in my life that’s difficult to deal with, or whatnot.

Stuart Crainer:

A number of people have brought up the issue of asking questions, and it might relate to Hal Gregersen‘s work at MIT about catalytic questions. Afzul says, “You need to pull in people who will ask the questions that the problem owner won’t.” Michael DeCamp follows up by saying, “Question storming sessions.”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Exactly. Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Question storming sessions, are they a thing?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Well, this builds on … you mentioned Hal Gregersen and I love his work on, he calls it question bursts. It’s built originally on some work that was back in the 1987 thereabouts by John Rowland. He called it quest storming, of lots of different terms. Question storming to me is the practice of pulling in people, as Afzul mentioned, and have them ask questions of you without trying to answer them immediately. Because if you go in into a traditional Q&A, well, you get four questions and then spend four answers. If it’s a lecturing type, they’re just going to use the question as a bridge to lecture even more.

Question storming, question bursts if you like that term, is really about trying to coral in as many questions as quickly as you can. This can be a couple of minutes you use on it to really try to get the width and breadth of different perspectives on this thing. It can be really powerful in person. It can be even better on a virtual setting because there everybody can just use the chat to type in, versus in a room you still have to listen one at a time, if you will. So really powerful practice, I suggest you try it. There’s a little bit of a guide on my website, how to reframe. I’ll show that later, if it’s something you’re new to. You can also check out how Hal Gregersen’s amazing obstacle, it’s called Better Brainstorming. I think from 2018 thereabouts.

Stuart Crainer:

Ruth has a follow up comment, “I just hang out with people who are smarter than me and listen to their brilliance.” I think the key word there, Ruth, is listen, because listening is a really underestimated and underused skill, but necessary if you’re going to reframe.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Something I’ve noticed, building on that. I run workshops on reframing with companies all the time, and it is really noticeable to me, if you give somebody a chance to talk with two people about their problem for five minutes, notice the talking to listening ratio. There are people who will spend four of those five minutes providing ever more detail, and there are people more in Ruth’s spirit that will go in and say, “Hey, here’s like 30 seconds of context. Now I’ll just listen.” Those are the people that maximize the value of the those five minutes and get more different perspectives than the talker. I’ll invite you personally, maybe to try to observe your own talking to listening ratio when you are in a discussion with people.

Stuart Crainer:

Mathieu comes back with an interesting point. He says, “Questioning the question of my boss can irritate him a bit, even if I’m convinced 200%.”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah, well, Mathieu, I have bad news for you there. Your boss hates you. But I have have a great example here. Well, okay. First observation, you’re pointing out the issue of resistance. What do you do when people resist your questions about the problem? There’s several different strategies. I mentioned one, which is to share the slow elevator example. You can also make them aware of my book. That helps to legitimize a discussion around this. Or if you think the tension is between the two of you, sometimes you can actually just get a third person into the room who makes the same point. Maybe you won’t get the credit for that, but you’ll get it done, so there are some ways of dealing with resistance.

Now, since you mentioned the bad boss, I can’t help but share this story. Beautiful example from Robert Sternberg, who’s one of the key creativity researchers. The story is of a boss, and he’s a quite horrible boss. The real protagonist here is one of his people, a manager who who’s kind of like, he loves the company he’s in, but the boss is just so horrible that he’s decided to get out of there. So he goes to a head hunter and he says, “I’d like to find a new job as similar to my old job as possible.” The head hunter says, “Not a problem. There’s a ton of demand in the industry for experienced executives at the moment, I can find you job very quickly.” Now the story might have ended there, and according to Sternberg, this is a real story, but the man went back and spoke to his wife about this. The wife was somebody who was actually trained in reframing and thinking creatively about problems, and they found a smarter solution.

The next day the manager goes back to the head hunter and he says, “Here’s the CV of my boss. Can you potentially find a new job for him?” According to Sternberg, what happened was that the head hunter found a new for the boss, the boss, not having any idea what was going on, accepted the new job and the manager got promoted into his old boss’s job. A beautiful example of rethinking your approach to problems, what your real goal is, and measure that might help you in this situation if boss turns out to be recalcitrant and resistant to your advice over time.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s about finding a better problem to solve, and the problem is finding another job for your boss. There’s a number of comments about simplicity and complexity. Because you’re caught between, I know you’ve answered this, but Robert might have joined us later and he says, “Complex problems demand complex solutions, your thoughts?” Then another comment from Philip John about, “Breakdown complex problems into smaller bite size pieces, keep things simple.” I think there’s always that simplicity and complexity battle at work in this sort of thing.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yes. When I started thinking of this, I thought exactly that thing like complex problems need complex solutions. Then weirdly enough, I just kept running into stories akin to Lori’s story, where when you’re looking at Lori and her impact on industry, that wasn’t a complex solution. It was maybe difficult to truly discover it, but enacting it once you had realized it worked, that actually requires very little except for a mindset shift within the people. So sometimes I think we can get lucky and find relatively, the magic balls, they are sometimes out there.

Having said that, of course there are problems, climate change, where the magic bullets seem to be a little bit few and far between, and in those cases some people use the term wicked problems. In those cases, it really becomes, in this case, a humanity wide issue where you try to develop a portfolio of approaches and there, I think you’re right. Complexity does matter. Now, it is a rich topic, so we can stay there on the complexity or not. But that was just a quick, initial reflection.

Stuart Crainer:

A point from Anastasia in Greece, we don’t get many people listening from Greece, so it’s nice for you to join us, Anastasia. “Do you find that meditation practices, which in essence impact on neurological state can be practical tools?”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Interesting.

Stuart Crainer:

I suppose that, I mean, what you are saying to Thomas is people faced with a problem rush in and solve the same problem, they identify it’s the same problem they solved before, so can more meditative practices make them think differently?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

First, I haven’t actually looked at research within this, so take my answer here as a guess more than anything. To the extent meditation helps you develop a more contemplative approach, I think that’s exactly right. You go in and you maybe have a habit of not being immediately impacted by whatever happens, but saying you stay in a zen-like state and you’re like, “Wait a second. Let’s just spend a couple of minutes thinking here.” So to the extent that’s true. I think that’s spot on.

The one danger I see potentially is if meditation turns into rumination, if you have a habit of you have a problem and you know what, you’ve just sat and thought about that for ages and you keep circular, like moving around on your head. One of the key things I found, and this is a very simple advice if you have a problem right now is describe the problem to somebody else, like get hold of a good friend, deliberately ask them not to try to solve it with you, but just to explore it with you, and just state the problem to them.

You can try to write it down beforehand, if you need to get your own thoughts in order. It is so weird to me to have observed that people can walk around with a problem for five years and still actually be fussy around it. It’s nebulous, unclear until you put it into words or into writing. That’s when you start maybe opening the door to solutions. Simple practice here, starting to share your problem with somebody else.

Stuart Crainer:

Rik Spann, who’s always making helpful comments, draws attention to the idea of generous listening, which is a really nice idea I think, and would actually help the world generally. I think a good question, Thomas, I think is who is good at this? You must come across organizations and individuals who are really good at figuring out how to reframe naturally.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Well, I think … I’m not sure I can point to a commonality. I think, Rik, your guess around jazz musicians … and I actually, even anybody who’s core job depends on listening carefully, I would imagine advice columnists, therapists, coaches for that matter, they are more attuned to this. There’s one challenge I want to throw in there, which is generous listening is easier when you have time, and don’t generally have time. So an interesting observation I made is if you try to be too much in the almost contemplative mindset, if you work in a regular workplace, somebody’s going to hurry you along pretty soon. So it can actually help if you develop a practice of, we’ve got to do generous listening or reframing or whatever, but it’s going to be a limit. We’re going to time box it. It’s only going to be five minutes, because that, as long as we know …

Imagine that I’m really at like a type A, I want to make things happen and so on and I see one of my teammates just going into thinking mode. Now, I’m going to be a lot more com comfortable with that if I know it’s only for five minutes. My big fear is that they get trapped in analysis and they just sit and think forever instead of moving forward. Figuring out how to do generous listening, practicing that, practicing reframing, but also practicing and establishing a habit of doing it in short and increments of time. That can really help when you’re dealing with tense situations or people who have a lot of drive or you’re just busy.

Stuart Crainer:

Philip John says, “Another way to reframe is, how will a solution to the problem benefit all the stakeholders?” That’s reframing the solution, isn’t it? Broadening the potential solution.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Exactly. I think in the business space one really good resource here is Ron Adner, his book, The Wide Lens, one of his central ideas is that innovations or really anything doesn’t happen in isolation between two people. It happens in an ecosystem. Unless you actually understand the impact on all of the major players, well, you may run into trouble. Super great example from that book is Michelin introduced a new set of tires that wouldn’t go flat and they had figured out the entire ecosystem in terms of introducing it, everybody thought it was going to be the big hit. Except when you looked at these service stations, the people who actually changed the tires, they had very little incentive to do it. They had to install very complicated, expensive machines in order to get it done. Because Michelin had not understood that, they thought just normally they’re just, secondary players, but in this new ecosystem created by the innovation, they were actually critical.

There’s a story there in the wide lens that where basically this sunk the whole thing, that you didn’t understand the wide lens or the full ecosystem of stakeholders, if you will. Really great point, you’re never just looking at one person, even if it seems that way. There’re always hidden actors in your space somewhere.

Stuart Crainer:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. Isn’t it? Ron Adner’s work is actually much recommended. I think he’s got a new book out as well. Thomas, what should people do? What are the key takeaways you like to give to people, to put to work in their own organizations, their own situations?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Critically, I’d say two things. First, just understanding what we’ve spoken about here, the difference between framing and analysis and sharing that with the people you work with. Because this is going to be difficult if you’re the only genius in the room. It’s a lot easier if people have just been introduced to this and they understand why you are spending time seemingly just exploring the problem, if you will.

Then the second piece of advice is try to practice as much as possible. This is partially, it’s something you need to know, and partially it is a craft. Instead of saving this for your big strategic problem coming up in half a year, go back this week, find anything that you’ve been dealing with for a while and try to actually sit down and spend a little bit of time reframing it, whether it’s that your son doesn’t want to play the tuba, or your impossible boss as Matthew, or, you want to write a book, but you can’t get started what’s going on, or like any problem, just try to sit down and practice reframing a little bit more. The more you do it, the more you become great at doing it on the fly when it really matters.

Stuart Crainer:

Do you find you apply the ideas in your own life?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

I do a good deal. There are stories for my dating life I’m not going to share here. Exactly. But I would say even when I wrote the book, I think initially for instance, I thought, “Oh, I have to gather all the knowledge that we have around reframing,” and that would’ve become this very heavy tome of useless knowledge. What clicked for me was when I thought, “No, my job is to make this as accessible as possible in as simple way as possible.” That’s the problem we haven’t solved with reframing, making it super simple and accessible so you can use it in on an average Wednesday afternoon in a meeting for five minutes. That was one of my big shifts in terms of reframing something I was doing.

Stuart Crainer:

Rik Spann’s come back with the development of his ideas about jazz and generous listening. I think there is quite a lot in that, in the comparisons with jazz and your ability to come up with solutions and see problems and solutions in a different way, in a spontaneous way as well. Which is interesting, I think.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

I completely agree. I only say, why is it always jazz getting all the credit? What about heavy metal? Like Norwegian heavy metal? Aren’t they listening?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. I think that’s a matter of taste, Thomas. Good and bad. But I think the issue you raised about the time scales and time pressures are really interesting, because in some ways, what you are saying is you need to prioritize. You need to be able to identify the problems that demand the time and the space to be able to reframe. And not all problems are created equal.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Exactly. There are many problems we could attack, but probably only a few of those will have a real lasting impact. So the ability to go in and just question your initial understanding of the problem, it can really, really help in terms of discovering those other avenues before you get locked into a specific approach.

Stuart Crainer:

I mean, you work with organizations throughout the world, and do people respond in different ways? Do CEOs identify this as an issue? Do they really sympathize with it and middle managers really like it? I mean, who responds best to it?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

I think the consistent thing I’ve seen is that everybody enthusiastically agrees that this is a big problem for their colleagues. Oh, yeah. My people do the us all the time and their self-insight might not quite be at the same level. So beyond that, I’d say this is typically most impactful when you’re not at the very front lines. If you are in a factory and you are putting together something on a assembly conveyor belt, your problems tend to be of a different nature. That’s not always reframing, that’s the right thing there. But the second you move into anything that has to do with other people, with complex fussy problems, well, then this is helpful. I’ve yet to meet a group that have not found this to be useful, no matter where in the hierarchy or in what industry they worked on.

Stuart Crainer:

So, where does your research go next?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Still to be determined. I am in that phase, I think of myself as a truffle pig. When I go out and sniff around on the forest and my nose sometimes catches something interesting like it did with reframing. I’m in that phase where I’m rummaging around in the forest and trying to figure out what’s coming up next.

Stuart Crainer:

Looking for metaphorical truffles.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah, exactly.

Stuart Crainer:

We’re out of time, Thomas, but can we finish with one more slide from you?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Yeah. What I’m going to share here is if you want to delve deeper into this, if this is something you think could be helpful to get better at, well, a couple of resources some you have to pay for, like the book, but others are free. The book itself is basically a step by step guide. There’s a ton of real world examples of this, and there’s also actually some stuff around Mathieu’s question with how do you handle a boss that doesn’t want to listen or resistance and so on.

So you can delve deeper into that. It is coming out in 13 languages. You can see some of them here below. And if you want to sniff to this before actually spending $20 on a book, there is a website, howtoreframe.com. It has a checklist with some strategies you can try to apply when you’re reframing. It has a bunch of the history of this. So if you’re interested in the research, you can delve deep into that, and a few other things. It’s all free. You don’t have to sign up or anything. Just check that out.

Finally, you can always follow me if you want to find out what the truffle pig ends up finding in the forest. Or if you just want to reach out, I am Thomas Wedell on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever you will. That’s pretty much it.

Stuart Crainer:

Thomas, thank you by very much for joining us. I can’t get the idea of the truffle pig out of my head at the moment.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Apologies.

Stuart Crainer:

I can recommend the book, What’s Your Problem? Thank you very much, Thomas. Thank you everyone for joining us from throughout the world, and next week we’re talking with Vanessa Bohns about her new book about influence. Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you all again. Thank you.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Thanks.