Today we’re gonna take a look at framing, another psychological decision-making trap.
Framing occurs when we misidentify the problem, undermining the entire decision-making process.
Example: There is a small fire in your kitchen over your stove. You make the decision to put it out with a glass of water you had close by. Unfortunately.. it was a grease fire. So, the water only helped to take the fire to the next level. You had misidentified the problem. And so your solution didn’t work.. because it was made to solve a different problem.
In work this can happen on the regular.. your employees or co-workers will come to you for help to address a situation. They’ll present the issue, and we’ll develop a solution to solve that problem.
If we’ve made a framing error, then often times it’s a little later down the road that we realize that our solution, though maybe a good one for a different problem didn’t fix the actual problem.
The vast majority of the time, this decision-making trap is completely innocent. If you’ve got a good team, you can count on them to not intentionally withhold information from you while we develop a solution. The trap happens though, because often times we don’t see the whole picture. We’re looking at one frame, and it’s the wrong frame.
Best solution here.. When being asked to help solve a problem, make sure you get in some good questions. Don’t take it for granted that your team has already correctly identified the root problem. Do a bit of digging and after some more dialogue, then you’ll be well on your way to avoid this decision-making trap.
Stay tuned for the next video which will be framing part 2, where I’ll suggest some good questions to ask so you can avoid the framing error.
