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How You Frame the Problem Is the Problem
How many problems do you stumble across every day? What do you do about them? How often is the problem a function of what someone else did or didn’t do? Albert Einstein had something to say about the problem of problems. You might have heard this one before: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The example in Chapter 2 of compliance officers auditing outdated regulations is a case in point. Asking compliance-control people to adjust compliance procedures is likely only to generate more compliance procedures. Problem solving requires a certain kind of imagination; problem prevention requires an entirely different ability. Einstein had another interesting take on the subject: “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”
UNLOCK YOUR INNER GENIUS
Take a look around you. Do you see anything that didn’t exist 5,000 years ago? I know: what a dumb question. But go ahead, look around. Do you see phones, computers, or electric lights? Perhaps you see airplanes, cars, or trains. No doubt you can see even more cool and exotic things that weren’t around 5,000 years ago.
Or did they?
Let’s take that computer or cell phone you probably have handy. Even more cool: what if you’re reading this text on a Kindle or Nook or iPad or some other newish technology? Was there anything required to build that computer, cell phone, or Kindle that didn’t already exist 5,000 years ago? The silicon was there; the oil that became the plastics was there; the copper or titanium and anything else you can name—everything was there, just waiting for someone to have the imagination necessary to come up with the idea that would require correctly assembling those basic parts. Sometimes all it takes is for someone with vision to frame an idea differently. Imagination and creativity often stem from someone’s looking at a familiar problem but with a different frame of reference.
HOW ARE YOU FRAMING THE PROBLEM?
In many respects, the only real workaround you will ever need may just be contained in this one simple phrase: how you frame the problem is the problem. When something happens to us, we frame it in one way or another before we can make any choices about how to respond. Even before we can set an intention, we need first to put the issue, problem, challenge, roadblock, hurdle, or opportunity into some kind of context.
You probably are familiar with the now clichéd observation that the Chinese character for threat is the same as the Chinese character for opportunity. Well, the reason clichés exist is that they’ve been proved to be true, or at least apparently true, by so many for so long. Anyway, if we frame a problem as a threat, we respond in some fashion ranging from defensiveness to aggression. If, instead, we frame the problem as opportunity, we may start to uncover options that were not previously apparent. The options might have always been available to us, but our mental framework might have blocked us from perceiving them.
As I stated earlier, the first workaround in just about any circumstance may be the need to work around your own self. If you frame yourself as the victim of circumstances, ineffective processes, stubborn counterparts, misaligned leadership, poor communication, or any number of other external situations, you may never manage to move, succeed, or experience the kind of satisfaction you would hope for on the job—or just about anywhere else, for that matter.
We have much to gain as well as to lose by how we frame our challenges. Frame yours well!
NATURAL FOODS, DELICATESSENS, AND GROCERY STORES
My friend Irwin Carasso has always been an imaginative guy with a pretty positive outlook on things. When I asked him about his ideas on workarounds , he told me that the notion of labeling something a problem was both a “problem” to be worked around itself and a form of self-imposed limitation. He put it this way: “The very nature of labeling something as a problem automatically sets it up as a block to going forward, in a number of ways. I always chose to look at problems more like puzzles and had fun finding a more creative way to deal with them.”
Irwin grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, and put in a lot of time working at his father’s grocery store before heading off to Northeastern University in Boston. After a year or so at Northeastern, he decided to return to Florida and attend college there. By then, he had developed a solid preference for natural and organic foods, a category that was only beginning to emerge back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As he would tell you, Irwin has always been adept at finding ways to get something at a better price. Natural foods were expensive, and on a college budget, cheap was good. He was able to get his father to order some products for him using his grocery connections, which got him to thinking that others in the area might have a similar interest. He persuaded his father to let him set up a small rack in the store and try selling a few natural grocery and vitamin products. You get the drift, I’m sure. Irwin soon had much more shelf space devoted to selling high-margin products.
Based on how well Irwin was doing with a modest amount of space, his father agreed to loan him $15,000 to open a natural foods store in a new wholesale unit he was planning to launch. Irwin called the store Tree of Life. The store took off like crazy, and Irwin took out another loan, this time to expand into wholesale distribution of natural foods. He proceeded to contact a variety of other small players, and in time, Tree of Life became the nation’s largest distributor of natural foods. Through Tree of Life, he soon was helping small companies such as Celestial Seasonings become major players, while also supplying little stand-alone stores such as Whole Food Store, located in New Orleans. (Yes, that Whole Food Store, which became the chain we now know as Whole Foods.)
Let’s take a look back at the seminal events of Irwin’s story. Here he is, living in St. Augustine, on a college kid’s budget, with a taste for expensive, natural foods. By reframing his “problem” (expensive foods available only through specialty stores) as something to be solved, he exposed the puzzle called food distribution and began to solve it. His father’s store provided him an outlet to supply his own needs at reduced cost.
Once he gained access to his own supply, it occurred to him that there must be other people in the same spot he was in. Then he put two and two together and looked at his father’s grocery store through new eyes. Much as with silicon for computers, or radio signals that became pagers that became cell phones, by appraising the situation from puzzle mind instead of problem mind, he was able to reorder what already existed into a very creative little business. Amazing, to say the least. His penchant for puzzles was the catalyst that helped an entire industry get off the ground!
In Chapter 2, we also talked about the difference between being “directionally correct” and “perfectionally correct.” Irwin did not come anywhere close to being perfect in anything, from his vision, to his ideas and plans, to his execution. He just had an intention (access to natural foods at a lower cost), which he was able to satisfy through a couple of small, incremental steps. As he did, he had the pleasure of seeing his vision and his intention grow.
There’s a lot more to this story. For now, though, let’s stick with the fundamental proposition: by framing his “problem” as a “puzzle” with a “solution” on the other side, this 19-year-old kid was able to become a leader in a brand-new industry. In the process, he met with the people who later started Celestial Seasonings Tea Company, Arrowhead Mills, and many other successful enterprises. His little idea of selling natural products on a rack in his father’s store led to a natural foods distribution company that helped countless other small guys with cool ideas to expand.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T GO HOME?”
You remember our friend Mitchell from the Introduction? He’s the guy who was paralyzed in a plane crash four years after recovering from the burns he received over 65 percent of his body in a motorcycle crash. Must be some kind of cat! Mitchell was hospitalized for months at a specialty care facility treating people with spinal cord injuries, where he encountered a lot of what could be perceived as problems.
Rehabilitation is lengthy and grueling, to say the least. What with all the time he had spent in and out of hospitals recovering from his nearly fatal motorcycle accident and now paralysis, Mitchell was both eager to go home and increasingly savvy in the ways of hospitals. He had been undergoing rehabilitation for months when he finally decided that home was where he needed to be. He had a chat with his rehab specialist, Beverly, and informed her that he would be going home in a week. Beverly checked the chart and commented that she didn’t see any notation to that effect and that surely the physician in charge would need to agree.
That promptly presented Mitchell with another opportunity to clarify his intention, take advantage of his ability to control what he could, and put in place an influence strategy for the rest. The first thing he had to do was enlist Beverly in the effort. That didn’t prove too difficult given the relationship they had developed.
The next workaround challenge would be the physician in charge. Every Monday, Mitchell and his rehab team would meet in a conference room to discuss his progress, air any issues they were facing, and decide on the next course of rehabilitation treatment. The physician in charge always took the seat at the head of the table, and everyone else clustered around the leader.
Monday came, and Mitchell arrived in his wheelchair much earlier than anyone else. He rearranged the chairs, moving the one at the head of the table to a position along the side, and placed himself and his wheelchair in the leadership spot. When people began arriving, Mitchell thanked them for coming as usual and invited them to take a seat. The chief physician arrived and appeared taken aback to see his customary spot occupied. Mitchell smiled, thanked him for coming, and asked him to take any open seat.
Once everyone was in place, Mitchell began by informing the group that he would be running the meeting today. He then delivered his somewhat startling announcement: “I will be going home next week. Let me thank you for all your invaluable assistance in my recovery and rehabilitation. Any questions?”
The physician responded that he didn’t think Mitchell was ready to go home and began to poll all the specialists in the room for their opinions on his readiness. At that point, thanks to a combination of Mitchell’s intention and the preparation he had done with his rehab supervisor, Beverly reframed the question for the team: “Mitchell is not asking if he is ready; he is telling us he is leaving. The real question for us becomes, ‘What do we need to do in order to assure that he is ready to go home next week?’”
Need I add that Mitchell went home? He returned a year later for some additional rehabilitation, having learned that there were still things he needed to learn. Did he regret leaving early? Not in the slightest! And the way he got out was by simply reframing the problem from why he couldn’t leave into what would be necessary to make it possible. Sometimes—in fact, just about all the time— the only real issue is how you define the issue.
THE PRICE OF WALNUTS
As you may assume, my friend Irwin had many opportunities to apply his approach to problem solving as he built Tree of Life from a corner store into a leading distributor of natural foods. His preference for puzzles over problems led to creative solution after creative solution. Here’s another he shared with me a few years into the distribution business:
Years ago, when I used to do a lot of my own bulk buying of nuts and fruit commodities, shelled walnuts were getting really tight, and we did not have a good supply lined up for the year. I was training Sam, an experienced employee, to do our buying. He came in to see me late in the afternoon one day and told me he could not find any walnuts at a good price. This was the kind of challenge that I liked.
Since I always worked late and typically bought all my nuts out of California, I got out a Thomas Grocery Register and started looking up nut suppliers from around the country, but mainly in California. I started making a few calls. Within two or three hours, I had tracked down a walnut supplier who had about a half of a truckload of walnuts left. I managed to buy his whole supply of walnuts, which was more than we would normally use, but the price was too good to refuse, and I knew I could easily sell them.
In this instance, Sam had been out in the market trying to buy and wound up losing his own perception as he talked to everyone about how bad the crop was and how tight the market was. In that situation and that kind of business, I always was pretty good at maintaining a pretty factual and clear perception, and that gave me the ability to look at things much differently from my employees and often reframe things in company meetings in order to shift the energy and feeling in the company into a different direction.
It was the very nature of someone’s coming to me with a problem that got me excited and challenged to have fun with finding the solution. I think we both know, perception has a lot to do with how we move forward in our lives. Perception in this case did not include the word problem; it was more like a game that I liked to play.
THE LAST THING A FISH NOTICES IS WATER
At the risk of dating myself, I’m rolling the clock back a few decades with this next example. Personal computing was just coming about, and a couple of companies had missed the mark badly. For instance, take the now hilarious statement by Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
Oops.
I had an early “portable” computer, alternately referred to as a “luggable” or simply “the sewing machine.” It was at the outset of my consulting career helping organizations figure out what they needed to do in order to execute their strategies more efficiently, if not more effectively. One of the major computer manufacturers got wind of the work my firm was doing in aerospace and how our approach helped shorten development time lines while still ensuring superb quality. We were invited to the company’s research facility, where internal engineers were working on developing a laptop computer.
When we arrived on the scene, we discovered that they did, in fact, have a prototype laptop already in existence. The only problem was the size of lap that you would need in order to use the monster—it weighed in at 34 pounds! As we snooped around the labs, we found an entire storeroom stuffed with competitors’ computers, many of the luggable variety. Each had been cataloged relative to its technical specs, capabilities, and perceived shortcomings. That storeroom was our first clue as to what the issue might be.
Our engineer guides then took us to the workbench where the members of the engineering team went about designing their laptop. Each engineer sat in front of a workstation with a huge computer screen. Each screen was divided into quarters, and each quadrant was the size of a normal monitor. Each quadrant displayed data and design ideas from entirely different databases, each of which was powered by an entirely separate computer!
Can you see the issue we began to see? Here we had an engineering team designing a laptop using tools and technologies that only the most sophisticated technology companies could access. Whenever the engineers started putting their gear together with a combination of design specs and technical specs, they kept running out of room. The machine they were designing was just too small.
Sure, the world had yet to develop much in the way of today’s miniaturization capabilities; however, that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that the engineers were trying to design something that would work for what they thought were important computing needs, not what the traveling businessperson might need. No sooner did they come up with a prototype than they discovered just one more feature they couldn’t live without.
We went back to our management sponsor and pointed out what we had learned. The response? Well, suffice it to say that the managers didn’t see what we saw, most likely because they swam in the same ocean as the engineering team.
There’s an old Zen saying that the last thing a fish ever notices is water. Kind of obvious, really: if you live in water your entire life, how would you ever notice unless it dried up? The problem was that both management and the design team were comfortably ensconced in their everyday milieu while trying to design a computer for someone who would never come close to approximating the computing environment that the team found commonplace.
Workaround: Reframe the Problem
We took the design team back to the storage room and asked each member to grab one of the “luggables” from the shelf. We then sent them on a two-week road trip, each flying alone around the country, staying at different hotels, and working from odd locations. Part of the assignment was to design the next-generation laptop using the luggable instead of the comfortably complex systems back at the lab.
When they got back to the lab two weeks later, they all had stories to tell about challenges they had faced. Would you be surprised to learn that the team quickly discovered numerous “requirements” that they could live without while on the road? That led to the next prototype’s coming in at 17 pounds. Now, that is not exactly light, but compared with the 34-pound-monster predecessor, it was featherweight.
By taking the members of the engineering team out of their normal routine and having them reframe the problem via direct experience, we were able to work around their natural tendency to keep looking for new features, all of which were pretty easy to add in the accommodating confines of a superbly equipped lab. As soon as they began to live and work in an environment approximating that of their eventual users, they quickly hit upon features that weren’t so necessary.
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
Have you ever purchased fresh soup at a grocery store? Ever wonder how it is that grocery stores decided that offering their own soup and other prepared foods was a good thing? Sure, it all seems so convenient now that thousands of establishments sell these kinds of foods. However, the idea didn’t start with customer service in mind! It really stems from a common problem all grocery stores face, something they call “shrink.”
Here I have one more story to share about my friend Irwin. He eventually sold Tree of Life and decided to open a small grocery store in Santa Barbara, California, called Lazy Acres. True to form, Lazy Acres featured natural and organic products and quickly became a destination shop for consumers from miles around. As a grocery store owner now, Irwin was faced with another set of problems/puzzles: waste.
Grocery stores throw away otherwise fine produce every day on account of cosmetic damage. Many shoppers refuse to buy fruits or vegetables that have been bruised or that bear some other kind of natural “imperfection.” Produce can also suffer cosmetic effects from causes such as light exposure and the natural gas emitted by ripening fruit, which accelerates ripening. In the trade, this situation is often referred to as “shrink,” and it can amount to 5 percent of a store’s produce.
Everyone in the grocery business is concerned about the shrink “problem,” and people have taken a wide variety of measures to try to lessen or prevent it. At Lazy Acres, wasted product, or shrinkage, was running at a rate of around 320 pounds a day, or roughly $5,000 a week! How’s that for a workaround challenge worth puzzling over? Most attempts to address the situation usually end up proving costly, such as having employees weigh and measure your purchase for you right in the produce department or using specialty packaging and display units.
Here’s how Irwin arrived at the creative workaround for Lazy Acres: First, he had all those veggies to deal with. Then he noticed that the deli and meat departments were producing their own waste, primarily in the form of bones from roasts, turkeys, and other meats. One day, the shrinkage puzzle merged with his love of cooking, and he discovered a natural workaround for all that waste—soup! No one cares if the carrots are bruised in soup, and bones are a large part of the flavoring.
By approaching the shrink “problem” as a “puzzle,” Irwin was able to not only “solve” the problem and “prevent” it from ever again being perceived as a problem but also turn shrink into a profitable source of value for his customers. Soup! By reframing shrinkage as a puzzle rather than a problem, Irwin succeeded in generating profits from something that otherwise would have been a loss. Using the cosmetically unappealing vegetables for soup, he transformed soup into the most profitable item in the store.
WORKAROUND QUESTIONS
When you’re confronted with challenging situations—problems, as the world would call them; puzzles, as Irwin prefers—the most important factor is what you are telling yourself about the situation. If you have challenges dealing with other people, other departments, or company practices, your ability to work with them successfully will be determined in large measure by how you think about them. Anything you label as difficult will be difficult; anything you call a problem will be problematic. Instead, reframe the challenge or problem into a solution waiting to be found. Much as with opening a jigsaw puzzle box, you will be presented with lots of pieces. As an aid, the box comes with a picture on it. Your task when dealing with the puzzles of life is to build your own picture.
If you need to get someone on your side, working with you rather than against you, start by considering what the other party is charged with doing in his or her job, and then begin imagining how that person can win by helping you. Mitchell succeeded in gaining early discharge from the hospital by pointing the discussion toward what the specialists could do to help him solve the puzzle of going home, rather than being stuck with the problem that they thought he had—needing more hospital-centered treatment. Here are a few questions that may be helpful:
1. What is the problem you are facing?
2. How is it impacting you?
4. What would it look like if the problem (puzzle) were solved?
5. How would you be impacted by a successful outcome?
6. How would the other people or groups be impacted by a successful outcome?
7. What can you do on your own to move forward?
8. How can you invite someone to “play” or help with the solution instead of being mired in the problem? (People much prefer to be seen as someone who can help rather than someone who is in the way.)