Examine a challenge through several different lenses.
<p>A structured perspective-taking exercise where participants examine a real challenge or opportunity through several different lenses to surface thinking they wouldn't reach through normal analysis.</p>
Shifting the Frame draws on two well-established traditions in innovation and design thinking.
The first is Edward de Bono's work on lateral thinking: the idea that our minds naturally settle into habitual patterns of thought, and that generating fresh ideas requires deliberately disrupting those patterns. De Bono argued that the most useful form of creativity in organisations is finding new angles on familiar problems, which requires structured provocation to achieve consistently. Open-ended brainstorming rarely produces this, because most people revert to the frames they already have. A set of structured lenses works precisely because it prevents that reversion.
The second is the design thinking tradition, developed at IDEO and the Stanford d.school, which places enormous emphasis on perspective-taking as the foundation of fresh thinking. The customer lens draws on Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done theory: the idea that customers are trying to accomplish something in their lives, and that understanding what that something actually is opens up entirely new ways of thinking about a product, service, or market. The outsider lens draws on Steven Johnson's concept of the adjacent possible: the idea that the most useful innovations often come from importing approaches that already work somewhere else. The constraint lens connects to research on constraint-driven creativity, which consistently shows that limitations, handled well, focus and sharpen thinking. The future lens draws on backcasting: a technique from scenario planning that asks what a desired future would look like and works backwards from there, surfacing assumptions and obstacles that conventional planning would not uncover.
Participants experience what it feels like to approach a familiar problem from an unfamiliar angle, and leave with at least one genuinely new perspective on a challenge they brought into the room.
The quality of this exercise depends on people choosing a real, specific challenge, so push back gently if someone's is too broad. Asking what aspect of it they are most stuck on right now is a useful way to sharpen the focus before they start.
Each person picks a real, specific challenge or opportunity to work on. Push back gently if the challenge is too broad.
People examine the challenge through several structured lenses, such as customer, outsider, constraint, and future, to surface thinking they would not reach through normal analysis.
Use Shifting the Frame when a team is stuck on a familiar problem and conventional analysis has run out of road. Working a real challenge through several structured lenses, customer, outsider, constraint and future, surfaces thinking normal analysis would never reach.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
