Reframe: See the Problem Differently

Most organisations are better at solving problems than questioning them. The longer a problem sits on the table, the more certain everyone becomes that they understand what it is. That certainty is usually what is keeping it stuck.

Reframing means examining the problem definition before reaching for solutions. Not ignoring the facts, but looking honestly at the lens through which you are interpreting them.

The frame you use to define a problem determines which solutions appear on the list at all. A business treating high staff turnover as a recruitment challenge will keep spending on job boards and onboarding. Reframing the question to “what makes people want to leave?” opens a completely different set of conversations and a different category of answers.

Every organisation carries inherited assumptions about what it is for, whose interests its decisions should serve, and what counts as success. Most of those assumptions were never chosen deliberately. They accumulated over time and now operate invisibly, filtering what gets noticed, what gets discussed, and what gets acted on. Reframing starts by making some of those assumptions visible.

Think about what it means when a body keeps returning the same symptoms regardless of what treatment is applied. The intervention changes. The symptom persists. That usually means the problem is not where it appears to be.

In the body map we use to read organisational health, your nervous system handles strategy, decision-making and your capacity to sense and respond to change. When an organisation keeps arriving at the same solutions despite shifting conditions, that is often a nervous system pattern. The signals are arriving. The interpretation loop is stuck.

Underneath that sits something deeper: your organisational DNA. The assumptions encoded in your culture, your norms and your sense of identity, things so embedded they have stopped feeling like choices. These shape what information gets picked up and what gets filtered out before any decision is consciously made. Treating symptoms at the surface without asking what the underlying assumptions are generating them is the organisational equivalent of treating a fever without looking for its source.

In 1998, marine biologist Mark Norman documented something off the coast of Sulawesi that no other known species had been observed doing. The mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) was shifting its body shape, colour and movement to impersonate different animals depending on the specific threat it faced. When damselfish attacked, it imitated a banded sea snake. When other predators approached, it became a flatfish or a lionfish. It had no fixed defensive strategy. It read each situation and changed its response accordingly.

What makes this remarkable is not the mimicry itself. It is the flexibility. Most defensive strategies in nature are fixed. This one was adaptive. The octopus had, effectively, learned to ask “what kind of problem is this?” before deciding how to respond.

The impulse to reach for a familiar solution is deeply efficient when conditions are stable. When conditions shift, that efficiency becomes a liability.

In the early 1970s, Finland’s education system was unremarkable by international standards. Rather than doubling down on testing and standardisation, Finnish policymakers reframed the central question. Instead of asking “how do we make students perform better on tests?” they asked “what conditions help children learn well?”

The answers were counterintuitive: less standardised testing, more teacher autonomy, a later start to formal schooling, and no ranking of students or schools. Within two decades, Finland had moved to the top of the PISA international rankings for reading, mathematics and science, a position it held for over a decade. (Sahlberg, P., Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Teachers College Press, 2011.)

The improvement did not come from doing more of what other systems were doing. It came from asking a significantly different question and following where it led.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s research on decision-making shows that how a problem is framed reliably shapes the decision that follows, even when the underlying facts are identical. In studies where the same medical treatment was described as having a 90% survival rate versus a 10% mortality rate, doctors made statistically different choices depending on which frame they were given. The data was the same. The frame changed the outcome. (Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A., “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science, 211:4481, 1981.)

This matters because it means that without deliberately examining your frame, you are not making neutral decisions based on the evidence. You are making framed decisions based on assumptions you may not know you hold.

Bring in perspectives you do not usually hear. Talk to frontline staff, customers, suppliers, community members: people who experience your organisation differently to how you describe it internally. Their frame is not wrong. It is different, and that difference is often where the most useful information lives.

Examine the assumptions beneath your decisions. Not just what you decided, but why that option appeared on the list in the first place. What did you take for granted? Who was absent from the conversation who might have complicated the picture?

Change who is in the room. The composition of a conversation shapes what becomes thinkable in it. Different people see different things. The thing you most need to see is usually the thing your current circle cannot.

Slow down before you move to solutions. Most teams rush past the problem definition because sitting with uncertainty feels unproductive. It is not. The quality of what you find depends entirely on the quality of the question you start with.

The most common resistance to reframing is not intellectual, it is relational. When the current frame was built by people still in the room, questioning it can feel like questioning them. That tension is real and worth naming directly rather than working around it.

A second difficulty: reframing without acting becomes a substitute for action. The conversation becomes the output. A reframe only generates value when it changes something: a decision made differently, a question pursued that was previously off the table, a voice brought in that was previously excluded.

Third, there is the power question. If reframing is only ever done by the senior team, you have replaced one fixed lens with another slightly different one. The most useful reframes tend to come from the people closest to the reality that needs to change.

Pick one problem your team has been looking at the same way for a long time. Before your next meeting on that topic, ask one person who is not usually in the room what they see. Do not brief them first. Just listen, and notice what it surfaces.

• What problem in your organisation has everyone already made up their mind about? What might you be missing as a result?
• Whose perspective is consistently absent from your most important conversations, and what might they see that you do not?
• What assumptions sit beneath your current strategy that you have never actually tested?
• If the symptoms your organisation keeps experiencing were pointing to a root cause rather than a surface problem, where would you look?
• When did a genuine shift in perspective last lead to a better outcome for your team? What made that shift possible?

The frame you use shapes everything that follows. The next action, Experiment, is where you find out which of your new perspectives actually holds up in contact with reality.

Disclaimer: This post was written in collaboration with Claude AI. It was used to help research some of the stories for our examples, and sense-check that what I have written is coherent and tonally consistent.