I have been working with a client who is stuck in the challenge of trying to solve for too many things at once. He finds himself paralyzed in the decision process and not sure how to prioritize and proceed in order to gain traction again to move forward. An easy place to find oneself in today’s world of ever increasing complexity, interconnectedness and information at our finger tips.
He came to me today after a long night of pouring over alternatives and digging ever deeper into the research and data available to him. The deeper he dug, the more options he provided himself, the greater the complexity of the problem became and the farther away he got from knowing what he was actually trying to solve for. This is something I have written about before in my post on Too Much Information.
The danger in doing excessive data mining, beyond getting stuck in it, is the risk that you just becoming a picker as a result of providing too many alternatives to consider. Much like the experience of trying to pick the right toothpaste at the pharmacy, how can you possible decide given all the choices? In a situation like that you generally just pick something that speaks to you based on some random criteria, which is probably not really all that important to you but at the time made sense and got you out of the overwhelming feeling of too many choices.
So rather than spend too much time listening to all the alternatives my client he had created for himself we focused on talking about what it was he was actually trying to solve for. The Decision Quality process I work with calls this the frame for the question. The process and my experience with it tells us that without a solid foundation to work from it is really hard to make a well thought out and informed decision. How do you know you have a solid frame? Well you move it around and you talk it through with other people, team members, partners, allies or coaches.
The best way to move a frame around is to shift how you are solving the problem intentionally. A few easy examples are as follows:
1) Altitude – look at the problem up close or from far away (Is it a brick, a wall or a cathedral?)
2) Political – look at the problem from the left or the right (What is the Conservative or Liberal approach?)
3) Another – look at the problem from another person’s perspective (How would your partner, customer or competitor solve for this?)
For you visual folks out there, like me, that would like a picture to help get this concept, take a look at these two pictures to see how different the focus of the frame is when I slightly shifted where and how I took the picture.
The goal in exploring the frame is to get clear on what you are trying to solve for. This exercise only grows in significance as you add others to the decisioning process. The more people there are involved the more important getting a clear frame that everyone agrees on and understands becomes. Take the time to explore your frame early on. Work to generate lots of alternative frames and pay attention to the words you use because they matter a lot. Make sure you and anyone working with you are clear on the language and the meaning and then land on the frame that you and anyone else involved agrees is the problem you are trying to solve.
Having done this exercise with my client today, he was able to leave the meeting with a much clearer purpose and sense of direction for what he is solving for. His clarity was the result of being able to answer the following four critical questions that I believe all frames should address.
1) What are you solving for? A clear concise statement where words matter
2) Why does it matter? A statement about why this frame is the right one
3) What does success look like? If you solve the problem this is what will happen, the more measurable the better.
4) What is 800 Pound Gorilla? Call out the biggest obstacle to your success.
So I ask you, what decision is getting the best of you right now? If you are stuck, do yourself a favor and shift your frame. In my experience you will be surprised how much clearer the picture becomes.