 Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on reframing how to solve the right problems. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items so you know how to participate in today's event. You have joined the presentation listening using your computer speaker system by default. If you do prefer to join over the telephone, just select phone call in your webinar control panel and the dial-in information will be displayed. You will have the opportunity to submit text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the questions section of your control panel. Just a quick reminder that if your control panel does close up, simply click on the small orange arrow to open it up again. We will be recording the session and sharing it on YouTube within the next few weeks. I would now like to introduce our speaker, Thomas Wettel Wettelsborg. Thomas is a Harvard business press author and a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem solving. His first book, Innovation as Usual, co-authored with Patty Miller, was translated into five languages and got Thomas recognized as a top 20 international thinker by HR Magazine. Today we're going to hear about his new book, What's Your Problem? Which was just released in March. The book comes endorsed by Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Google's Eric Schmidt, among others, and Thomas has shared and refined his reframing method with companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Citigroup, and the United Nations. And now it is my pleasure to turn the presentation over to you, Thomas. Thanks so much, Elke, and welcome everybody to this Brightline webinar where we'll delve a little bit into this question that I explore in the book and in my research, namely, of solving the right problems. And we're actually going to kick off on that topic by running a quick handheld survey among you to try to get a sense of your own experience with this issue of whether people are solving the right problems or not. So I'd ask you to think about a specific scenario that I'm sure you encounter in your work again and again, namely, when somebody else comes up to you with a problem that they would like your help with, and that this might be your clients, it might be somebody internal or whoever you mostly help in your professional life with solving problems. And what I'd like you to consider, and I'm going to ask you to reply in the chat field here in a second, what I'll ask you to consider is when people come to you with problems, to what extent do they have the right problem? To what extent is your experience that the problem they present to you is, in fact, the problem that they should be solving? And I'd like you to consider three different categories for this. One situation is where they're effectively or essentially focused on the right problem. There may be some minor tweaks, but they are looking at the right problem. The second scenario is where you need some degree of reframing, meaning there's something about the problem that you actually need to help them understand. And then the final category, namely of whether significant reframing is needed. That might be the case if, say, the problem that they first present to you is literally the wrong problem to focus on. What I'd like you to consider is looking just as an average across your interactions with clients and colleagues. What is the rough ratio between this or the percentage if you will? So for instance, if you feel that generally, oh, this is split evenly between these three categories, you might enter in the chat field 333333. What I'm going to ask you to do now, everybody on the call, is to jump onto the chat and then write just a single line where you write in that format what your personal experience is with to the extent to which people solve the right problems. So I'll ask everybody to take 10 seconds right now, find the chat, and enter your reply. And then Elke, who's moderating this call, whose voice you heard before, will summarize a little bit what she's seeing in the chat. So please take a brief minute and put in your answer here. Very exciting. And Elke, are you starting to see? I am. Yeah, they're coming in. What would you say? You don't? Yeah. It looks like most people are 20, 50, 30. 20, 50, 30. That's roughly the distribution you're seeing here. And I'm sure you have various, there's some divergence between it. But that's an interesting response to me. And that's not incompatible with what I have generally seen. When I asked this question, which I've done of a lot of people, well, pretty typically there's actually a lot of weight in the second and third category. And that's important because what we're talking about here are the cases in which you caught it. What I'm worried about are all of the cases where we don't catch it or that may where people never come to you because they think they're solving the right problem, but they are in fact not. And I'd like you to consider how this extrapolates to the rest of your organization or your society. When you're thinking about the cost of this ability to, you know, or the lack of the ability to solve the right problems, what does that cost you when you're looking at your organization's finances? What type of time, energy and money are you wasting overall on solving the wrong problems? Or you might extend this both up and down, if you will. You can ask about our societies. How much do we waste on public expenditure programs that are headed in the wrong direction or just a very basic example, family conflicts and whatever we have. This issue, we have problems in all parts of our lives, of course. And this issue of not always solving the wrong problems is with us everywhere. The interesting question to me is, what if we could change that? Like, what if there's a way of actually making people yourself and others better at this issue of solving the right problems? And my argument, of course, is that there is such a way and it's called reframing. And reframing, it's a skill. I will go into a little bit more depth around what this skill is. But essentially what I want to highlight here is that reframing is interestingly enough not a new idea. Like, this has been with us for over 100 years. You see Einstein talking about it. Peter Drucker talks about it. What I'm going to share here are some of the mechanics of some of the details of what reframing is and how you can use it. What I want to highlight here is that the research behind this is pretty strongly in favor of the fact that this has a tremendous effect both on problem solving and on innovation. We're not going to go deep in the research on this call. But for those of you who like to do that, you will find it summarized on the book's website, HowToReframing.com, where I've outlined all the different scientific studies or the main ones that are into this, along with a lot of the historical evidence for reframing and who's been talking about it across history. What we're going to cover on this call is basically, first of all, a little bit about what it is I'm going to share an example with you. Then I'm going to delve into two different cases that highlight how to work with reframing and show some of the power it can have. And then finally, we are going to jump into discussion and kind of hear both your questions, but also your own take or experiences or reflections around reframing. So that was on the menu. Getting into what reframing is, I like to start with some of the first empirical evidence for the method. And that comes from a gentleman, some of you might know, namely Mikhail Csikszentmihal, he's a Hungarian psychologist. And he was one of the first people back in the 60s to start doing studies of what good problem solvers or good artists, good innovators did differently when they faced a problem. And what they found was basically, and I'm summarizing a lot of research here, both from Csikszentmihal and otherwise, most people, when they have a problem, what do they do? Well, they grab the problem and then they rush into the solution phase. What people who are good at problem solving and innovation do differently is basically three things. First of all, they go in and say, wait a second, before we jump into solution mode, what is the problem we're trying to solve? Then crucially, they do one more thing. Which is, ask the question, is there a different way of looking at this problem? This is where the actual reframing comes into the picture. Is there another way of thinking about what is actually going on in this situation? And then finally, and crucially, they don't do this for a week on a some remote mountaintop. No, they mix this with action. So this is an iterative practice that you do even for quite short periods of time. What you're looking at here might be five or 10 minutes with respect to how much time you spent trying to reframe the problem. So in essence, the behavior I'm talking about here, looking at reframing as a behavior, is a three-step process where, whenever you have a problem, instead of jumping straight into solution mode, you first frame the problem, then you spend a little bit of time reframing it, ideally with other people. And then you figure out, how do we keep momentum? How do we move forward? Because the big danger here, of course, is paralysis by analysis, especially smart people can get easily trapped in thinking too much about the problem and not keeping the pace, if you will. We're going to try to take a look at that, and I'm going to ask for your help again, by way of a specific case, namely, what I call the slow elevator problem. And the slow elevator problem is my preferred way of quickly explaining people what reframing is and why it's important. Here's the scenario. I'd like you to imagine that you are the owner of an office building, that your tenants are complaining about the elevator in the building, it's old, it's slow, it's annoying, they have to wait. And now several of them have come to you and said, hey, if you don't fix this problem with a slow elevator, we're going to break out leases, which would be bad for you. What you'll notice here is that, like in the real world, this isn't coming to you neutrally. Somebody has already framed the problem for you. They come to you and say, the problem is that the lift is slow. And if you jump into solution there, you get trapped in trying to come up with ways of making the elevator faster. Can we tweak the algorithm? Do we have to install a new motor? Do we have to go out and buy a new elevator, which might get expensive? The point of the method, and we're going to try it right now, is to take, again, a short break, again, even maybe five, 10 minutes, and try jointly to come up with as many different ways of seeing the problem as you can. So this is, effectively, it's almost like a formal brainstorming, but not on the solutions on the problem, on trying to figure out, are there different ways of looking at this problem? We're going to try this now as an experiment here online. What I'm going to ask you to do, again, is to use the chat window and to enter one, two, three, whatever you can come up with, different ways to look at the problem. So you might say the problem is that, whatever else you think the problem could be. So again, everybody now, I'm going to give you 10, 15 seconds to get started. Please find the chat window and throw in a one, two, or three suggestions for reframings, other ways to think about what might the problem be, what might be going on in this situation. So let's try it out, please write ahead. We'll give it 10 seconds again here and we are now going to have, as soon as Elke is ready, we're going to have her share some of your suggestions or perspectives on this problem. So Elke, feel free to jump in once you see some of the answers coming. Perfect. So Karen says, increase the frequency of maintenance checks. Maintenance checks. So Karen suggests there's an issue here with the maintenance schedule. What's going on on that front? Great, great, what else? Here's a fun one. How might we make the slow elevator ride more fun, exciting, engaging? Right. So there's somebody here who focus on the experience of the ride. How might we make it? And you can recognize here the wording, how might we? That's a very commonly used term and for instance, in design thinking. So the problem is around the experience, not necessarily the actual speed. What else? Alvaro suggests, why is it slow? Why is it slow? Alvaro is looking into the question of what's creating the slowness. Great, what else? Patrick suggests finding out why the tenants are dissatisfied. Interesting, different problems to focus on. Not on the speed of the elevator, but asking what's going on with the dissatisfaction. Why have people unhappy? Why haven't they been unhappy earlier? Did something change? Great question, what else? Mary Beth suggests, hours of the building may dictate when everyone is getting to the elevators. Very interesting, the timing, right? Is this an issue of peak demand where everybody has lunch at 12 o'clock and that's when the crunch happens? What else? Alice Starr suggests that people are bored in the lift as there's nothing to look at. Boredom, pure boredom, again, around the experience. Let's take one more. Kate says that the lift might be overloaded. All right, so there's a capacity issue or whatever is going on. What you have just tried now are the first two steps of the process. Again, whenever you have a problem, you very rapidly describe the problem. The issue is that the elevators slow, they're complaining and we might lose our tenants if we lose them. And then you jointly, we did it here with a large group and I'm sure we have lots more suggestions in the chat but you might do this just with two other people. You very rapidly go in and try to come up with other perspectives on the problem. And I've outlined some here. This is of course an exercise that I run a good deal of times and you can see here how by virtue of going in and trying to quickly reframe the problem, you start coming up with other perspectives not just in the problem but also other potential ways of solving it. I've outlined some here is about the stairs. Why aren't people using those? It's a way boring. Is it a people problem? The tenants are just idiots. Is it around the experience as somebody suggested? Like it looks old, is it peak demand? We all heard that one as well. Is the real issue here that they leave late for an important meeting? Or for that matter, and you can continue this. Is this about where on the floor people are located? Do we have a sales force at the top floor? And that's very inconvenient. They have to get in and out of the time. Is this a negotiation tactic? Is this a matter of them trying to lower the rent by pushing you on this? What I'd like you to notice here is first of all, you very easily get trapped in the first frame. The mistake people make here is that they look at this thing about the lift is slow and they never even question whether that is the right framing. They just spend all their time figuring out, okay, how do we make it faster or something? They're very solution oriented. Secondly and crucially, I want to highlight here that you're not necessarily looking for the real problem, which is something we normally talk about a lot. You might actually be looking for a better problem to solve. And that's important because most of our problems don't have just one cause or one like root issue that that's going on. Most of the problems we are facing are multi-dimensional, multi-causal, which means, this is good news in a sense, which means that there may be multiple different ways of trying to solve them. And the classical example is of course, this is a real world problem. And if you talk to building managers, well, many of them will suggest a solution to a different problem, which some of you mentioned around the experience, namely they put up mirrors in the hallway. So what happens is, put up a mirror, people arrive, they're like, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy. They look up, they see the mirror and they fall in love and they forget time. The point is here, the mirror is not necessarily the solution to this. The mirror might not work if the issue is that people are late for an important meeting. But the mirror is a memorable example of the key idea that sometimes by trying to reframe the problem, you can find a problem or a different problem that is much, much better, faster, cheaper, more effective, safer to attack than the problem you originally started with. Now, I wanna unpack this a little bit more because when you look at this, and I'll share you again here, the three-step process, there's a little bit of a black box involved and that is step number two because the first and the third step, we're pretty familiar with that, like state the problem and figure out how to keep moving forward. The mystery here actually comes in when you ask, how do we get better at the middle step? If you will, what is inside the black box of reframing and how can we get better at finding those useful different angles on the problem in the span of just a few minutes? That's one of the things I have looked at as I developed and tested my variation of this method with a lot of different companies and what I share in the book is basically under this a number of different thinking strategies that you can employ in order to do this. And the one I wanna highlight here, I'll share a few more along the way. What I wanna highlight here is the notion of looking outside the frame. What do I mean with that? What most people do when they start to look for different framings is to delve deeper into the original framing. So they ask the question, why is the elevator slow? That can bring interesting perspectives to light and we may have seen some of them here right now. But what's important is that that's not the only way to try to reframe a problem. And equally important, if not more important perspective is to go in and try to do what I call breaking the frame. And breaking the frame is about asking the question, is the speed of the elevator the right thing to focus on? Because you'll notice here the second you delve deep into why is the elevator slow, you're almost trapped in that framing, even though you look creatively inside, the ability here is crucial. And we know that a lot of from research that a lot of problem solving experts do this, they try to take a step back instead of delving straight in, they take a step back and they look for other ways to think about the problem. Now, I wanna share a little bit of cases around this. And the one you're seeing here that I brought two different cases from my research. The first one is around innovation, specifically it's a case from Samsung, which is focused on how reframing plays into innovation and finding rethinking customer problems. And I bring this up because those of you who are familiar with my first book, Innovation is Usual, you'll know that when you look at innovation, how we pursue it, we have a tendency of asking specific types of questions. We have a tendency of going in and saying, well, where do we find innovative new ideas? Where do we look for innovation? Let's look at new technology and let's look at the future. Like what's going on in our field in the research labs on technical advances and what's gonna happen a few years down the line. What I would suggest to you is that there's another side of that equation. Of course, those questions are important, but a lot of the practical innovation we're seeing in companies or in organizations, that actually has more to do with discovering old problems with the ability to look at customers and see a problem that they have, that they may not even themselves be aware of, that we may need to rethink what they really care about. And what I'm showing here, the background image is of course, of the story of the rolling suitcase. The picture you're seeing is from 1967. At that point in human history, we had not yet put wheels on suitcases that happened in the year 1972. Or in other words, in the span of human history, if you think about it, well, first we put a man on the moon and then we put wheels on suitcases. That is the de facto timeline of our history of invention, if you will. I share that as a quick example or as a precursor to the Samsung story because what Samsung had done was to focus explicitly in their innovation efforts on this question of discovering or rediscovering customer problems that we weren't serving properly. And the case you're seeing here, I wrote this up in a case called Samsung's European Innovation Unit. You can see some of the protagonists here. Luke Mansfield, who was the leader of the unit, Geron Wouter's part of it, and Ran Makasi as well. That was the core team that established this group. The case I'm gonna share is actually a little older and it's very interesting because it's around the space of camcorders. I'm sure you remember those before our beloved iPhones kind of took over the camcorder market. There are some interesting developments in this space around innovation. I'm sure you remember the default when you looked at innovation in camcorders for everybody in that industry were doing, well, they were adding a new button. Oh, well, how about a setting for low light conditions when it's also winter? And then you'd add another button to the camcorder. The Samsung store is interesting because they also added the button but they added the right button. And I'll share the story here. What they basically did was to go in and apply this principle of trying to discover customer problems that we weren't serving well. And specifically, they started to look outside the frame. So what most people do or did at the time, they looked at how do we make the experience of filming better? Like how do we make sure that people get all the footage that they want and they can use the camera okay and so what Samsung realized by looking outside the frame was that there's a big blind spot in the industry at that time and that was editing. Wait, when you looked at editing, people generally didn't have too many problems filming but most people found editing annoying. They didn't have the time for it or they just left it hanging there on the camera which was a key part of the user journey when you think of it. Based on that insight around an unmet need among customers, they did a very simple thing. They added a bookmark function. So the my clip button, which was the innovation was literally just a button that said, now the interesting thing happens. So you're filming two hours of some family excursion and whenever there's a memorable thing, you click the button so you can easily refind it so you can potentially use auto editing and so on. Now, you might think when you hear about this, that's a pretty basic idea. That that's not like an industry game changing idea. No, it was not. But crucially, many of the problems to solve that really work that create results, they're actually relatively obvious in retrospect and I'll show you the kind of difference that this made to Samsung's bottom line because this particular innovation took Samsung's, this is a loss leading industry. Most of companies in the space were in the red. This particular innovation turned Samsung into a profit or the camp corner division into a profit generating operation. What you're looking at here, the details are not important. What you're looking at here is a comparison between two different camp corners. The Panasonic's that's a competitor and Samsung's corner and there are two things to notice. The first thing is that the competitor's camera is actually more expensive to produce. The second thing is of course, that Samsung's camera that retails for 40 pounds more which is a lot in this industry. This has very thin margins. The point is here, when you can go in and identify an unmet need among customers or reframe what's really going on on their side, you can very often create significant value without necessarily having to completely reinvent your business model or your industry or whatever it is. There's of course examples of that too. I'm sure you're familiar with many of them but I think we overlook the simplicity and the power of very basic innovations that doesn't necessarily depend on new technology that might be as simple as we'd covered before around using old technology better or even as I mentioned here, putting wheels on supercases. That's the first case I wanted to share. I have one more case I wanna delve into and that shifts the focus a little bit namely towards the space of charity or volunteer work on nonprofits and so on. And specifically, I'm gonna talk about something that's been going on in the shelter dark space. I sometimes call this an industry is not entirely accurate. This is driven by volunteers by and large. What is the shelter dog problem? Well, the shelter dog problem is that when you're looking at the US, there's every year something like three million dogs ending up, and other pets too by the way ending up in a shelter. And through the efforts of shelters and rescue group and volunteers, we typically manage to get about half of those adopted which means we have a surplus problem here. We basically need more than a million new homes for dogs in shelters every single year. And that of course raises the question, how do we get more people to adopt? That is a problem a lot of people have tried to tackle. And there are some excellent efforts out there. I'm gonna show you a couple of them before I show you what I think is the central story with this. The classical thing I'm sure you've all seen is of course around framing the problem around motivation. When you consider what is stopping people from adopting shelter dogs, well, maybe it's that they're not motivated enough. They blindly go down and buy their pets from a pet store instead of going in and looking at shelters and rescues. If you frame the problem as motivation, what do you do? Well, you jump into trying to increase motivation for instance through advertising or through marketing campaigns and so on. You see an example here, classical foster dog, save a life. Here somebody is trying to appeal to your compassion for these poor animals and try to shift your behavior around where you get the dogs. That's one framing, that's of course widely used, but there's also a limit to how much compassion people really have. There's a limited, if you will, number of compassion dollars running around in general, there are many other good cases that we might consider or look at. One reframing, I saw this relatively recent, is going in and thinking not about the problem as motivation, but ease or ability. So how easy is it? If you're actually thinking of adopting shelter dogs, how easy is it to get access to them? And here there's a company called Backbox that I talk about in the book that they went in and looked at this and they realized it's actually difficult to see the dogs. If you're shelter, you don't have a lot of money, so you're not a main street, you are somewhere further away and it's not very easy to find them. And so what did they do if they had framed the problem around ability or ease? Well, they went in and created an app called Backbody which is effectively, if you will, basically Tinder for dogs. This story is quite a cute story. It created great results as well, but I'm sharing this to highlight something different. And that is one of the other strategies you wanna employ because what you will notice about both these things is that they focus on the same goal. They focus on how do we remove barriers to adoption so we can increase the rate of adoption. That's where we started out, but that's not necessarily the right goal to focus on. The strategy I have used this case to share is really around rethinking the goal. When you think about problems, mostly what we do is we focus on the obstacle. You know, there's you, there's something, you want to reach a good thing and then there's something standing in your way. For some reason in our minds, we are very good at kind of focusing on what's stopping us, but not necessarily as good as we should be at going into and saying, what does success look like? Is there a different goal to pursue that might be better than the one we originally have in mind? We don't question our goals. We don't often even really understand our goals. And that is a high leverage point you can set in when you're dealing with problems as well. The story here, instead of focusing on barriers to adoption, the story here is about a woman called Lori Weiss. And Lori Weiss is the founder and the chair of an outfit called Downtown Dog Rescue. It's not a shelter, it's a rescue group helping shelters and helping dogs in general. And what she realized was that there is a data point or an assumption in the industry that everybody took for granted without necessarily really considering whether it was true. The data point is that 30% of all dogs coming into a shelter are what's called owner surrenders. So this is not somebody we pick up from the street because the dog has run away. This is a case in which the owner of the dog deliberately hands over the dog to the shelter. Well-knowing that the dog might not make it out of there again. Now question, and this you can think about, of course, if you work in the space, you love dogs. Like you are really, really fond of dogs. And so when you hear about somebody who deliberately hands over their animal to a shelter in which they, again, they might get utilized in there, what do you think about those people? Well, what goes through your mind when you think about the people who hand over their own pets? Probably that they're bad people. Like it is hard to imagine. Like somebody is like handing over a kid. Like how can you be so heartless, so irresponsible to take your dog and just hand it over to a shelter? Now, when you look at this, you see a dynamic in the industry. Namely, that assumptions about a problem can sometimes counter what we're trying to achieve. Because if you're framing of this problem as the intake problem, if you're framing us, the issue is that people are bad. What do you do? Well, you do what shelters all over the world do. You screen people. You create barriers to adoption. What you're looking at below here anonymized is a real world form for how to save a dog from death. Literally, it is before we will allow you to take this pet out of our shelter. We need you to fill out all of these questions, including employee referrals, information about your home, vet referrals. And people would check and reach out. It is actually a difficult process in many places to get to save a dog from death. Now, with that framing, that's understandable. But what was interesting about Lori was she thought there was something wrong with that. And not with the screening, I mean, but with the assumption that most of those 30% of people are actually bad actors or bad people. So she went in and did a very simple experiment. She went in and she worked with one shelter in Los Angeles. She had a staff member placed at the entrance. And the staff member, whenever somebody came in to hand over their dog, the staff member would ask, if you could, would you like to keep your pet or your dog? First observation, like that they could actually often help them do that. Like they could go in and they realize, okay, here's the issue. And they could help the family keep their dog out of the shelter in the first place. This was typically more cost-effective than helping the dog once it was inside the shelter. But most significantly, it flatly contradicted the assumption that most of the people in the industry are making because more than three in four families said yes. The handing over their dog was the last thing they wanted to do. And what Lori realized through this was that this wasn't a people problem, the issue of owner surrenders. This was an income problem, a financial problem. When you looked at the people who came in and handed over their dog, they loved that dog as much as you and I do. But they also had very limited means. And so what might happen is that they had had to move into a new building. The landlord demanded $150 deposit to house the dog and that was just not an amount of money they could get. And so what Lori found out was that a more effective way of using the funds that they had was actually instead of paying to the shelter to keep the dog there longer or to help it with whatever was going on, literally to go in and pursue a different goal, namely to help the dog stay with their first family. And I think the reason this story impacted me when I heard it from Lori was that again, this is not a technological solution. We've had this problem for 20, 40 years, but it wasn't until relatively recently, this is a story that happened about five years ago that somebody went in and fundamentally challenged the perception we had of the people involved. And that's the point here as well, that when you're looking at again the question of strategies, it is so easy when we see bad behavior or we see some kind of thing we don't want to make assumptions about the other person or the other people involved. Our spouse is selfish when something is going on. Our customers are stupid or super risk averse, hopelessly so, or people voting for the other side, they're just monsters who want to see the world burn. It is so easy to jump into that. And one of the things we can do to alleviate that is to ask again, even if our first guess about people's motivations feels right, and it often does, asking, is there something else going on? In Lori's case, of course, was this just because there are bad irresponsible people or was there something else going on preventing them from keeping their dogs that we could address in this case in a more cost-effective manner than what we are usually doing? That's the cases I wanted to share. We are now heading towards the discussion and I'm gonna prime this a little bit before we go into it. First of all, what I'd ask you to do if you haven't been doing it already, feel free to ask questions, observation and comments in the chat field, and we will have LK help out again with kind of sharing these and delving into some of the questions here for the remaining 20 minutes of this call. And one more thing, don't necessarily feel you have to ask a question. It is okay to just share an observation or make a remark or share an experience you've had around or whatever it is. So you don't have to force it into the form of a question. I welcome questions, but also other things are more than welcome to. And as you are typing in your questions and so on, I will round off a little bit here with some next steps you can consider instead of saving this for the end of the call. I'll just cover this now. And that's of course, first and foremost, if you are interested in delving deeper into this, what's your problem? It's basically a guide I wrote for how to do this. So this is a practical guide for how to get better at solving the right problems. And a little bit about your buying options because there are options around where you wanna waste your money. You can of course get it on Amazon, Bounty Nobles and those usual platforms. That's probably where you will find it for the least money. They tend to have slightly better discounts than anywhere else. If you want to, you can also grab it from HarvardHBR.org in their store and they support multiple different e-reader formats. So if you're a Kindle, Amazon is fine. If you want the audio book, that's where to go. But if you want, for instance, for the mobile or if you wanna as a PDF for that matter, Harvard supports that. And I've asked Harvard because of the price difference, I've actually asked Harvard to provide a discount code only for you which will be active the next two days. So if you get it through Harvard, you just put in right line as a code and then you get 30% off both the fiscal and the e-book. I would almost recommend that you, the e-book will get there faster. Would recommend that you make it the physical version as you'll see in the book. I might show it a little bit later. It's very visually driven. There's lots of illustrations along the way that are slightly better experienced in a physical copy. The e-books are great to look. In terms of, sorry, I'm jumping ahead here, you might as well also go out and support some of your local book dealers. I'm sure they need a little bit of encouragement and distance here at the moment. So if I find your normal book dealer or use Bookshop or IndieBound, I think those are both US sites where you can locate independent booksellers and support them if you like. A little bit otherwise, you can jump in and look at the book's website there, howtoreeframe.com. There's more info, there's the research I spoke about with the deep dive into that. There's some free downloads like checklists and the cameras for this and so on that you can look at. And finally, if you're interested in either having me speak to your people or coming in and looking at, you know, following me on Twitter or LinkedIn, whatever, well, you can either go in on my website and contact me there, or you can just follow me with the ad Thomas Waddell, which is my handle on all social media. With that, we're gonna turn over to the questions and I'm gonna end here with a quote. Again, one of the people I mentioned earlier, Peter Drucker, who's a big and important thinker on this topic, what Peter Drucker said famously was basically that the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions. There are in this Q and A, we're now getting into, there are no wrong questions. So there's the free fall here and I'm looking very much forward to hearing from you. I'm now gonna jump out of the slides so you can get me in a little bit more of a close-up format here, whether you enjoy that or not. And that should bring us to the webcam. So I hope you are now seeing me in full screen. So that's it. Elke, we have 15 minutes and I'm looking forward to hearing and discussing some of the reactions and questions you might have. Perfect, thanks. We are now going to begin answering the questions that were submitted during today's presentation and as a reminder, you can still submit your questions or thoughts through the chat pane visible on your control panel now. So we have had some really great questions come in. Our first question asks, what would be your suggestion if you are way deep into the strategy execution and realize that the problem framing used at the beginning to design the strategy was wrong? You may have limited options, I'm sorry to say. There are cases where you can still pivot and then there are cases where you're locked in. And I have seen a few instances of people late in the process managing to change direction, but that typically goes up on the decision level and it typically also becomes expensive. So I'm afraid I don't have a lot of miracle cures for when you're in a lock-in type situation. You have been spending most of the seed journey rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and maybe realizing that the lifeboats might be a better thing to focus on, if you will. I'm sorry that I don't have a more encouraging answer. It is exactly because of this dilemma that I thought it was so important to get the book out so we can get better at preventing that. I don't think we can ever prevent it fully. My dream is that we can make people just 10, 15% better and not making that mistake. Another aspect might of course be to get better at adopting lean startup practices. So you at least test things if you can before you roll out the full solution. That's another aspect or way of approaching that dilemma. Great question, what else Alison? Okay. So our next question asks, how do we know we are asking out of the frame questions just to be sure we are out of the frame? First of all, you don't necessarily have to be out of the frame. Sometimes you can find useful reframings just by delving in. Having said that, what I typically look for, there's no iron rule, but I look for a couple of different things. I look for surprise. So typically when you're finding an out of the frame perspective, that will be surprising to the person or to yourself because it breaks with their mental model. So it's almost a physical sensation you'll sometimes see people have when they go, oh, I hadn't thought about that. I'm looking for simplicity. Solutions can be complex, but problems are typically, as we covered earlier, they're actually fairly simple. Once you see them, the problems now you are before seeing them, you don't necessarily realize the simplicity, but I tend to look for not overly complex perspectives and weird theories about why things are going on. More looking for things that are like, ah, if that's true, that's actually basic and that's something we can fix. Finally, I encourage sometimes looking deeper into things that seem counterintuitive. You might sometimes have an adverse reaction to a specific framing, like a stronger than normal emotional reaction to it. That's typically again, because it breaks a mental model only you're not ready for. So sometimes it can make a lot of sense to look at not what seems right to you, but to ask the question, if this was true, would that make a huge difference to us? So those are very simple rules, like look for surprises, look for simple solutions and look for solutions or framings that are significant if they are true. Thank you. What else? More questions. All right, our next question. Hello, in your perspective, why do people tend to avoid simple solutions? Sometimes simple solutions seems like wrong choices. There's a lot of factors here and I'm not sure reframing can always solve that for you because one of the things that you inevitably see going on, especially in more complex systems, is of course that people are incentivized not to see the simple solutions. One of the stories I write about in the book is both positive and tragic in the sense that there's a group around a concept called positive deviance that realized that there's a much, much better way in looking at Argentinian schools of keeping kids in school. They looked at a district that had high dropout rates and they realized that there's a simple way of vastly decreasing that dropout rate. Problem, even though this method worked in that district they looked at, it was not endorsed by then the Argentine Ministry of Education. And if you read the book of the authors called The Power of Positive Deviance, they share their perspective on why that is, namely that there are people inside the ministry that got rich by taking funds from the big million dollar projects that were currently going on. And if they came in with a solution that was cost around $20,000 so orders of magnitude less then those commissions would disappear. So you unfortunately sometimes see incentive problems that are stopping good ideas from surfacing. Thank you. What else? More insights, more observations. Any thoughts on how to convince clients to slow down and engage in reframing? So I have a full chapter on this because one of the core problems once you get reframing and once you're yourself as good and of course the fundamental barrier you'll face is the resistance or recalcitrance of the other person. There's a lot of different ways to handle this. A couple of strategies you can show up with a framework. Like if you look at, for instance, design agencies they typically have a process chart for what they do. And one of the reasons for that is when you show up with something formal looking people tend to take it seriously more often. I have in the book, I share basically a canvas that you can see here, this is online as well which is one tool you can use for this. You can share the slow elevator story. That helps sometimes shift people's attention. You can share examples from other companies where they have done it so the client makes the connection to why this is happening. Or you can work on stealth. So you can say, okay, we'll look at that problem but then you go in and say, we would love to interview a couple of your employees in order to understand this problem better or a couple of your clients or whatever. And then you come back to the client and say, well, we thought this was the problem but look at the input we got here from the employees or your customers or whatever it is maybe there's something else going on. So that's a couple of different strategies that you can use. There are lots more and I'm sure you actually have some bright spots in your own organizations when you consider how you have sometimes managed to shift clients away from that first problem framing and overcome resistance. Not always possible, but there are strategies that can help. What else? Thank you. When should we stop searching for the root cause of a problem? Because if we keep looking, we will back to the man of the case. Yes. One of the big misperceptions around problem solving or problem diagnosis is that it has to happen upfront and take a significant amount of time. You know that quote, it's often attributed to Albert Einstein, it's not actually his about, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes solving. That's a horrible idea. And that's a bad quote, put it out of your mind because what that's really saying is, get stuck in paralysis by analysis most of the time, then panic, implement something, and then this small failure. The way to use this, and the reason I emphasize this, the speed of this, five or 10 minutes might be a little bit longer if your problem is this bigger of course, is that this is repeated. So you go in, you run reframing maybe Monday morning, then you jump into action, you use prototyping, you talk to people, you examine if there are other stakeholders. And then at the end of the week, you might come back again and say, folks, given what we did this week, do we need to revisit the problem again? Like, did we learn something during when we were moving forward that helped like made us realize we need to rethink what's going on here? You saw the story with Lori as well. She didn't think all of this. She had a different framing of the problem. And then she set up an experiment to learn about it. And that's where she realized, okay, we're also something here. So it's really in terms of the question of when to stop reframing, two answers. One is by doing real world stuff. Like you go in, you try something and that will start telling you whether you're on the right track. Second thing, I would actually argue never quite fully stop reframing because what happens is you find a solution that works and then the world changes and then the problem slightly starts to become different. And if you are by that time stuck in your solution, which is the right solution, then you might miss that the problem or people's needs or the situation is gradually changing as well. So this is not so much a process as it is almost a mindset. It is a way of looking at the world that you have in the back of your head all along the way and that you sometimes delve into in going in and trying to do. Excellent question, very relevant point. Do we have time for one more? Do we wrap up, Elka? Sorry. I think we have time for one more. Are there any tools to improve reframing problems or is it just a matter of changing mindset? There are lots of tools. Again, this is a topic we have looked into both from practitioners and academic sites for over 50 years. So you can go online or whatever and you can find the tools for reframing. I think what you wanna keep an eye out for here when you look at what tools to use is simplicity. Because I think one of the reasons I... Why aren't we better at this? If we've known about this for 50 years if the research is in place how come people are still bad at it? When I surveyed organizations, 85% of them said that we are still bad at this. We waste significant time, money, energy on solving the wrong problems. And I think one of the issues here is complexity. If you look at the problem solving space there are some really strong tools from Six Sigma, Lean A3, like lots of different frameworks you can use for this and they are very, very powerful in some contexts. For instance, a manufacturing floor where you have to sort out why are the cars coming out on the other end and not working. The problem with a lot of them is that they're so comprehensive they become impossible to use in daily life. Like nobody in an average Wednesday afternoon unless you work in a very specialized field has the time to pull out a 40 point checklist and go through like a big framework. What I've emphasized here and what I'm really trying to do with my book is to democratize reframing. To get this out as widely as at all possible. Because I think it's insane we're still bad at this. And what I've developed and road tested through my work is basically a method that you can learn relatively rapidly that you can start applying to problems big and small and that doesn't take a lot of time or special tools or so on in order to do this. When you get good at this it becomes a habit of mind for you, for your team. And that's the point where I think we have a real shot at solving more of the right problems. Thank you. Great. So I think we're just about out of time here. If you have any closing comments we'd love to hear them. Otherwise I can wrap us up. I think I will just leave you with the notion that this is a very important tool. It's important. I hope I've given you a sense for innovation. It's important for general problem solving. It's important to deal with the many, many problems we're facing at the moment, not least the new ones generated by the current crisis. This is a thing that you can learn relatively fast. When you read the book you can start applying it to problems you have right now. And that is the path forward to starting to get good at this. So I recommend to you look into it, try it out, share it with your team so you start getting other people on board so they can help you. If we get that right then I think we have a fighting chance for dealing not just with the current crisis but with all of the problems that I'm sure all of us are facing. So I'd just like to say thank you for tuning in. For listening, I hope you have found it useful and please reach out with anything with questions, with remarks, tell me what I'm wrong about. I love to get input from people. That's how I write my books. I learn from practitioners that have managed sometimes to do amazing things with the problem we face. So I'll end it here and say thanks a lot for inviting me and thank you to Brightline as well for setting this up. Great, thank you so much, Thomas. We are getting a lot of kudos to you. Excellent presentation. Thank you very much. So we'd like to thank you, Thomas, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge. Just as a reminder, the presentation is being recorded and we will be sharing it on the Brightline YouTube channel. Please do share your feedback and we will be sending you a form after the webinar. On behalf of our presenter, thank you so much for joining us today and have a great rest of your day.