The ability to frame an issue is a facilitation skill that is sorely lacking in organizations today. I’ve seen teams go round and round trying to make a decision without success because they didn’t have a clear grasp on the problem they were trying to solve. As a leader, you can help propel discussions forward in an effective way by framing the issue toget them unstuck.
As individuals, we generally approach an issue through the lens of our own personal biases and desired outcomes. In their recent Harvard Business Review article, Lisa Zigarmi and Julie Diamond share five steps to effective framing to help you address these biases head on:
- Identify what is impeding progress.
- Look at the situation with curiosity.
- Name what you observe to others, without judgment.
- Set an intention with others for learning.
- Invite reflection and input from others.
The authors apply these steps to hypothetical scenarios similar to ones you may be dealing with on your own teams: a recurring performance issue and a team experiencing gridlock. You can follow their examples to see how this five-step process can work for you.
“The practice of framing . . . is simple because the steps are easy to learn, but it’s hard because we have to go against our conditioning. When we meet an obstacle, our typical reaction is to either push through it or take the path of least resistance by ignoring it. In both instances, we fail to define the problem properly. And more often than not, we implicitly define the blockage through our filter of desires, in terms of what we want to happen. Our biases and emotions halt our curiosity and inhibit our capacity to seek out new information and invite help from others.”
By owning our own perspective and then inviting others in, we broaden the possibilities and can solve problems collaboratively.