I want to tell you a little bit about what we're going to be doing today. We're going to be emphasizing framing, reframing, and systems thinking. And we have a couple suggestions for you as you engage with us in this course. And one of them is that you might want to consider keeping some notes about what strikes you about what we say, our stories, etc, as you go along. And if you're currently a member of a team or group, we suggest that you keep a journal or some notes about how what you're learning and gaining from being involved with our course is showing you or teaching you about the group or team you're in. As a way of starting today, Alan is going to lead off with a very remarkable story about framing and reframing. >> Thanks, Dana, this story is about the George Washington Bridge up until about 1975, the mid 1970s. For those of you who don't know, the George Washington Bridge is one of the major arteries of traffic into the city of New York, on the island of Manhattan, from the west. So it's always a bottleneck, even when traffic is flowing smoothly. But when there's problems with traffic, or accidents, the bottleneck becomes a complete standstill. And this is a serious issue for traffic, for life all around the city. So here's the story about the bridge, and this story is about barriers, in more ways than one. We'll talk about the barriers later. So imagine it's the middle of the 1970s, and usually, about once a month, there's a head-on collision on the bridge. A car or a truck, or cars and trucks cross the center line and collide head on. Obviously, this is a very serious accident, and there are serious injuries that result. The nearest hospital is Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. And the doctors, and nurses, and staff, all the medical professionals at the hospital and the medical center, work very hard to save the lives of these victims of these crashes. No matter what they do to improve the rapidity of their service and the accuracy of their diagnoses, the accidents still happen. They may save lives, but they're not preventing accidents from happening. Likewise, there's other groups involved with the bridge in these accidents. There are the police and law enforcement, and there is the Port Authority and the maintenance departments. And if you think for a moment, just like the medical center who is working hard to improve their ability to save lives, the law enforcement and maintenance department are working to improve their ability to prevent accidents as well. The police, it's certainly the law, you are not allowed to cross a double solid line. And yet, it happens, and the police can enforce that. They can put more police, 24 hours a day, around the clock, certainly, all holidays, the middle of the night. And all of these efforts to solve the problem do not prevent the accidents from happening. The maintenance department, it's responsible for maintaining that line and safety on the bridge, and it paints that line frequently. And it uses paints that glow in the dark so that in the dark, or rainy, stormy nights, the line is still visible. And still, these accidents happen. Everybody is doing their part and improving their part of the system, but the system isn't really changing. The accidents still occur, until everybody steps back from their part and their focus on their part of the problem, and thinks about the system as a whole. And when they do that, new innovative breakthroughs and solutions are possible. As you think about the whole problem, then it's possible to think about solutions that prevent all accidents from happening so that there are zero defects, there are no accidents at all. This is precisely what did happen in the mid 70s. The solution, in this particular case, happened to be barriers, concrete barriers. They're called Jersey barriers. They were designed in 1959 for use in construction zones to keep traffic out of the heavy equipment doing the work, or the people, the construction workers doing the work. And it channels the traffic into a single lane. By putting those barriers across the bridge, a solution was devised that dissolved the problem, not just solved it, but dissolved the problem. That means preventing the accidents from happening, zero defects, and this is an important breakthrough. Why did it take so long? Those barriers were invented in 59, and they weren't installed until 1975, some 15 years. Why does it take so long for people to find solutions? I need some help with that problem. Ramia, please help me. >> [LAUGH] Thank you so much for sharing this, indeed, remarkable story. So why does it takes too long? In this story, the stakeholders were approaching the problem from their own frames. And you gave a lot of examples, good examples of how they approached the problem from their mindsets. So for instance, the medical team was more focused on providing or enhancing patient services, rather than thinking about how to prevent these accidents from occurring in the first place. So each of them looked at their part of the problem, and not the whole problem. I do find that this happens a lot at work, as well. So let me give you an example. I was once a program manager for a large cross-functional team for designing a rewards program. Each of these team members had their own department heads. And because of how siloed these functions were, it was very difficult to get the teams together when needed. There were conflicts over priorities, there were conflicts over goals. The team members were not able to understand the other person's perspective or frames. Decisions got delayed, the project timelines were impacted. So I'm wondering, how then can these teams get unstuck? >> That's a great question, and one very hard to answer. I think, just to step back for a minute, before I try to answer that and talk for a minute about framing and reframing, one of the ways that I like to think about frames is to think of a camera, and the different lenses that you might put on a camera. If you put on a telephoto lens, you're going to see something quite different than if you put on a wide-angle lens. So I think that is one way to convey the frames that we use. >> Mm-hm. >> As you've said, Ramia, when people are in meetings, they usually come from a particular place or discipline. And they are caught in that way of looking at things, and I think it's very hard to move to thinking about how others see things. >> Mm-hm. >> I can give a brief example of this in a consulting I did quite a number of years ago. I arrived at the organization and met with the president. And I said to him, as I was taught to do, tell me about some of the problems you're having in your organization. And he said, wait a second, stop, we don't have problems here, we have only challenges. And I thought that was a wonderful example of reframing, because he moved it from a negative to ways to empower the organization to make changes or do some things that are different. So Amrita, can I ask you, I'm sort of passing the buck here a little, but what are some of your thoughts about how to get unstuck in these situations? >> Well, it's a fascinating question, isn't it, Dana, the phenomena of getting stuck. And looking at the story, it took them more than 15 years. That's almost a generation or more to come up with a solution that seemed to be right there. Now, if you were to expand on this and really take a pause to think, what is a frame? And do we know what our frames are? By default, we look at a situation and we try and make sense because the world is made up of so much information. And you can't just make a sense of it unless you apply a frame. Now, when you say use someone else's framework, or at least, the first time when I heard it in your class, I struggled to ask myself, how do I use someone else's frame? Because when I'm in a meeting, when, say, I was a part of this task force who had to create a solution, and I'm representing, say, the maintenance team. And my bosses said, I have $1 million, and you can paint the road yellow if you want and prevent the accidents. But really, I'm not impacting the real problem, which is prevention of the deaths, the cost of lives, because we are not able to solve the problem by looking at just the boundaries that our roads permit us, the frame of our roads, that we sort of don and we say we have to stay stuck with it. But what if I could figure out how to take a look at it from your angle, or from your angle, or to learn why is it that the way I am seeing a certain thing, somehow, makes a little different sense when I'm learning to see it from your lens? Now, that's an interesting question, because the idea is how do we generate usable knowledge from a format like the four of us sitting together and discussing a theme of continuous learning? Now, what happens when the solution that I think is so right becomes a problem? >> I have all kinds of bells and whistles going off in my head. >> [LAUGH] >> These problems we've caused for ourselves, and well-intentioned problems. >> Yes. >> Well-intentioned solutions and attempts, but cause us problems. One that occurs to me is that you can imagine a meeting where stakeholders do get together. And what typically happens in these meetings is not people rolling up their sleeves and trying to think about it from each other's perspective. Oftentimes, there's a lot of questions about who's responsible, who's to blame. And so one of the frames we must clearly replace is the blame frame, in our meetings and our solution solving attempts, to a learning frame, or what I would call a discovery frame. This is a big aspect to why teams don't find solutions, I believe. Yes, in this story, the barriers on the bridge are the solution. But the barriers in people's minds about how they're thinking about the problem prevents us from getting to this solution much sooner. And even the structures in our organizations become very physical barriers, because we take these complicated, complex problems that are difficult to get our hands on, and we break them up into pieces. Maintenance, law, medicine, we break them up into these silos, as Romia said before. And then it's easier to work in that limited area, but connecting these areas is the hard part. And that's where the problems lie, connecting the different areas of responsibility, which is why the reframing aspect, yes, thinking about the system, the whole system is important. But then thinking about using multiple lenses, multiple frames, not just one, to solving problems. That, I think, is a key part of what we need to do.
