Are You Solving the Right Problems?
how good is your company at problem solving? Probably quite good, if your managers are like those at the companies I’ve studied.. What they struggle with, it turns out, is not solving problems but figuring out what the problems are. In surveys of 106 C-suite executives who represented 91 private and public-sector companies in 17 countries, I found that a full 85% strongly agreed or agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% strongly agreed or agreed that this flaw carried significant costs. Fewer than one in 10 said they were unaffected by the issue. The pattern is c
你的公司在解决问题方面有多擅长?如果你们的经理和我所研究过的公司的经理们一样的话，那可能相当不错。事实证明，他们所挣扎的不是解决问题，而是弄清问题是什么。在对代表17个国家91家私营和公共部门公司的106名高管进行的调查中，我发现，85%的人强烈同意或同意他们的组织在问题诊断方面做得很差，87%的人强烈同意或同意这一缺陷带来了巨大的成本。不到十分之一的人表示，他们没有受到这个问题的影响。模式是c
It has been 40 years since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels empirically demonstrated the central role of problem framing in creativity. Thinkers from Albert Einstein to Peter Drucker have emphasized the importance of properly diagnosing your problems. So why do organizations still struggle to get it right?
自Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi和Jacob Getzels经验证明问题框架在创造力中的核心作用已有40年。 从爱因斯坦到彼得德鲁克的思想家都强调了正确诊断问题的重要性。 那么为什么组织仍然难以做到正确呢？
Part of the reason is that we tend to overengineer the diagnostic process. Many existing frameworks—TRIZ, Six Sigma, Scrum, and others—are quite comprehensive. When properly applied, they can be tremendously powerful. But their very thoroughness also makes them too complex and time-consuming to fit into a regular workday. The setting in which people most need to be better at problem diagnosis is not the annual strategy seminar but the daily meeting—so we need tools that don’t require the entire organization to undergo weeks-long training programs.
部分原因是我们倾向于过度设计诊断过程。许多现有框架TRIZ、六西格玛、Scrum和其他框架都非常全面。如果应用得当，它们可以非常强大。但它们的彻底性也让它们过于复杂和耗时，无法适应一个正常的工作日。人们最需要更好地进行问题诊断的场合不是年度策略研讨会，而是日常会议，因此我们需要的工具不需要整个组织进行为期数周的培训计划。
But even when people apply simpler problem-diagnosis frameworks, such as root cause analysis and the related 5 Whys questioning technique, they often find themselves digging deeper into the problem they’ve already defined rather than arriving at another diagnosis. That can be helpful, certainly. But creative solutions nearly always come from an alternative definition of your problem.
但是，即使人们使用更简单的问题诊断框架，如根本原因分析和相关的“为什么”提问技巧，他们也常常发现自己在已经定义的问题中挖掘得更深，而不是得出另一个诊断。这当然是有帮助的。但创造性的解决方案几乎总是来自对问题的另一种定义。
Through my research on corporate innovation, much of it conducted with my colleague Paddy Miller, I have spent close to 10 years working with and studying reframing—first in the narrow context of organizational change and then more broadly. In the following pages I offer a new approach to problem diagnosis that can be applied quickly and, I’ve found, frequently leads to creative solutions by unearthing radically different framings of familiar and persistent problems. To put reframing in context, I’ll explain more precisely just what this approach is trying to achieve.
通过我对企业创新的研究，其中大部分是与我的同事帕蒂•米勒(Paddy Miller)一起进行的，我花了近10年的时间，首先在组织变革的狭窄背景下研究重构，然后在更广泛的背景下研究重构。在接下来的几页中，我提供了一种新的问题诊断方法，这种方法可以快速应用，而且我发现，通过挖掘出熟悉的和持久的问题的完全不同的框架，经常会带来创造性的解决方案。为了将重新构建放到上下文中，我将更精确地解释这种方法的目的。
The Slow Elevator Problem
电梯速度慢的问题
Imagine this: You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s old and slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem.
想象一下:你是一栋办公楼的业主，而你的房客却在抱怨电梯。这房子又旧又慢，而且他们要等很长时间。如果你不解决这个问题，有几个房客威胁要解除租约。
When asked, most people quickly identify some solutions: replace the lift, install a stronger motor, or perhaps upgrade the algorithm that runs the lift. These suggestions fall into what I call a solution space: a cluster of solutions that share assumptions about what the problem is—in this case, that the elevator is slow. This framing is illustrated below.
当被问到这个问题时，大多数人都会很快找到一些解决方案:更换电梯，安装一个更强的电机，或者升级运行电梯的算法。这些建议属于我所说的“解决方案空间”:一组解决方案，它们共享关于本例中问题所在的假设，即电梯很慢。这个框架如下图所示。
However, when the problem is presented to building managers, they suggest a much more elegant solution: Put up mirrors next to the elevator. This simple measure has proved wonderfully effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at—namely, themselves.
然而，当这个问题被提交给建筑管理人员时，他们提出了一个更优雅的解决方案:在电梯旁安装镜子。事实证明，这个简单的方法在减少抱怨方面非常有效，因为当人们看到一些非常吸引人的东西时，他们往往会忘记时间，那就是他们自己。
The mirror solution is particularly interesting because in fact it is not a solution to the stated problem: It doesn’t make the elevator faster. Instead it proposes a different understanding of the problem.
镜像解决方案特别有趣，因为实际上它并不是上述问题的解决方案:它不会使电梯更快。相反，它提出了对这个问题的不同理解。
Note that the initial framing of the problem is not necessarily wrong. Installing a new lift would probably work. The point of reframing is not to find the “real” problem but, rather, to see if there is a better one to solve. In fact, the very idea that a single root problem exists may be misleading; problems are typically multicausal and can be addressed in many ways. The elevator issue, for example, could be reframed as a peak demand problem—too many people need the lift at the same time—leading to a solution that focuses on spreading out the demand, such as by staggering people’s lunch breaks.
注意，问题的初始框架不一定是错误的。安装一个新的电梯可能会奏效。重构的目的不是找出真正的问题，而是看看是否有更好的问题需要解决。事实上，认为存在单一根源问题的想法本身可能具有误导性;问题通常是多句性的，可以通过多种方式解决。例如，电梯问题可以被重新定义为一个高峰需求问题，因为太多的人同时需要电梯，导致了一个解决方案，重点是分散需求，如通过错开人们的午餐brea
Identifying a different aspect of the problem can sometimes deliver radical improvements—and even spark solutions to problems that have seemed intractable for decades. I recently saw this in action when studying an often overlooked problem in the pet industry: the number of dogs in shelters.
确定问题的不同方面有时可以带来根本性的改善，甚至可以激发解决问题的灵感，而这些问题几十年来似乎一直难以解决。最近，我在研究宠物行业一个经常被忽视的问题时发现了这一点:收容所中狗的数量。
America s Dog-Adoption Problem
美国的狗收养问题
Dogs are very popular in America: Industry statistics suggest that more than 40% of U.S. households have one. But this fondness for dogs has a downside: According to estimates by the ASPCA, one of the largest animal-welfare groups in the United States, more than 3 million dogs enter a shelter each year and are put up for adoption.
狗在美国很受欢迎:行业统计数据显示，超过40%的美国家庭养狗。但这种对狗的喜爱也有不利的一面:根据美国最大的动物福利组织之一美国防止虐待动物协会(ASPCA)的估计，每年有300多万只狗进入收容所并被领养。
Shelters and other animal-welfare organizations work hard to raise awareness of this issue. A typical ad or poster will show a neglected, sad-looking dog, carefully chosen to evoke compassion, along with a line such as Save a life adopt a dog or perhaps a request to donate to the cause. Through this and other initiatives, this notoriously underfunded system manages to get about 1.4 million dogs adopted each year. But that leaves more than a million unadopted dogs and doesn t account for the many cats and other pets in the same situation. There is just a limited amount of compassion to go aro
动物收容所和其他动物福利组织努力提高人们对这一问题的认识。一个典型的广告或海报会展示一只被忽视的、看起来很悲伤的狗，精心挑选来唤起人们的同情，同时还会有诸如“拯救生命”、“收养一只狗”或“向慈善事业捐款”之类的语句。通过这一举措和其他举措，这个资金严重不足的系统每年成功收养了大约140万只狗。但是，还有100多万只狗没有被收养，这还没有算上处于同样境况的猫和其他宠物的数量。对阿罗的同情是有限的
Lori Weise, the founder of Downtown Dog Rescue in Los Angeles, has demonstrated that adoption is not the only way to frame the problem. Weise is one of the pioneers of an approach that is currently spreading within the industry—the shelter intervention program. Rather than seek to get more dogs adopted, Weise tries to keep them with their original families so that they never enter shelters in the first place. It turns out that about 30% of the dogs that enter a shelter are “owner surrenders,” deliberately relinquished by their owners. In a volunteer-driven community united by a deep love of animals, those people have often been heavily criticized for heartlessly discarding their pets as if they were just another consumer good. To prevent dogs from ending up with such “bad” owners, many shelters, despite their chronic overpopulation, require potential adopters to undergo laborious background checks.
Lori Weise是洛杉矶Downtown Dog Rescue的创始人，他已经证明采用并不是解决问题的唯一方法。 Weise是目前在行业内传播的方法的先驱之一 - 住房干预计划。 Weise不是试图让更多的狗被收养，而是试图让他们与原来的家庭保持联系，这样他们就不会首先进入避难所。 事实证明，大约30％进入庇护所的狗是“所有者投降”，故意由其主人放弃。 在一个充满热爱动物的志愿者驱动的社区中，这些人经常因为无情地丢弃他们的宠物而受到严厉的批评，好像他们只是另一种消费品。 为了防止狗与这些“坏”的主人结束，许多避难所尽管长期人口过剩，但仍需要潜在的采用者进行艰苦的背景调查。
Weise has a different take. “Owner surrenders are not a people problem,” she says. “By and large, they are a poverty problem. These families love their dogs as much as we do, but they are also exceptionally poor. We’re talking about people who in some cases aren’t entirely sure how they will feed their kids at the end of the month. So when a new landlord suddenly demands a deposit to house the dog, they simply have no way to get the money. In other cases, the dog needs a $10 rabies shot, but the family has no access to a vet, or may be afraid to approach any kind of authority. Handing over their pet to a shelter is often the last option they believe they have.”
韦斯有不同的看法。 “所有者投降不是人的问题，”她说。 “总的来说，他们是一个贫困问题。 这些家庭和我们一样爱他们的狗，但他们也非常贫穷。 我们谈论的是那些在某些情况下并不完全确定他们将在月底如何养活孩子的人。 因此，当一个新的房东突然要求存款来养狗时，他们根本无法获得这笔钱。 在其他情况下，狗需要10美元狂犬病射击，但家庭无法接触兽医，或者可能害怕接近任何类型的权威。 将宠物交给庇护所通常是他们认为的最后选择。“
Weise started her program in April 2013, collaborating with a shelter in South Los Angeles. The idea is simple: Whenever a family comes in to hand over a pet, a staff member asks without judgment if the family would prefer to keep the pet. If the answer is yes, the staff member tries to help resolve the problem, drawing on his or her network and knowledge of the system.
2013年4月，威斯与洛杉矶南部的一家收容所合作，开始了她的项目。这个想法很简单:每当一个家庭来移交宠物时，工作人员会不加判断地询问这个家庭是否愿意养宠物。如果答案是肯定的，工作人员就会利用他或她的网络和对系统的知识来帮助解决问题。
Within the first year it was clear that the program was a remarkable success. In prior years Weise’s organization had spent an average of $85 per pet it helped. The new program brought that cost down to about $60 while keeping shelter space free for other animals in need. And, Weise told me, that was just the immediate impact: “The wider effect on the community is the real point. The program helps families learn problem solving, lets them know their rights and responsibilities, and teaches the community that help is available. It also shifted the industry’s perception of the pet owners: We found that when offered assistance, a full 75% of them actually wanted to keep their pets.”
在第一年内，该计划显然取得了巨大成功。 在前几年，Weise的组织平均每只宠物花费85美元。 新计划将成本降至约60美元，同时为其他有需要的动物保留了避难空间。 而且，韦斯告诉我，这只是直接影响：“对社区的更广泛影响才是真正的重点。 该计划帮助家庭学习解决问题，让他们了解自己的权利和责任，并教导社区提供帮助。 它也改变了业界对宠物主人的看法：我们发现，当提供援助时，其中75％的人实际上想要养宠物。“
You won t know which problems can benefit from being reframed until you try.
除非你尝试，否则你不会知道哪些问题可以从重构中受益。
As of this writing, Weise s program has helped close to 5,000 pets and families and has gained the formal support of the ASPCA. Weise has released a book, First Home, Forever Home, that explains to other rescue groups how to run an intervention program. Thanks to her reframing of the problem, overcrowded shelters may someday be a thing of the past.
在撰写本文时，Weise的项目已经帮助了近5000只宠物和家庭，并获得了美国防止虐待动物协会的正式支持。威斯出版了一本名为《第一家园，永远的家园》的书，向其他救援组织解释了如何实施干预计划。多亏了她对这个问题的重新认识，过度拥挤的庇护所也许有一天会成为历史。
How might you find a similarly insightful reframing for your problem
您如何为您的问题找到类似的有洞察力的重构
Seven Practices for Effective Reframing
七个有效的重构实践
In my experience, reframing is best taught as a quick, iterative process. You might think of it as a cognitive counterpoint to rapid prototyping.
根据我的经验，重构最好是作为一个快速的迭代过程来教授。你可以把它看作是快速原型的认知对应物。
The practices I outline here can be used in one of two ways, depending on how much control you have over the situation. One way is to methodically apply all seven to the problem. That can be done in about 30 minutes, and it has the benefit of familiarizing everyone with the method.
我在这里概述的实践可以以两种方式之一使用，这取决于您对情况的控制程度。一种方法是有条不紊地将这七种方法应用到问题中。这可以在30分钟内完成，而且它的好处是让每个人都熟悉了这种方法。
The other way is suitable when you don t control the situation and have to scale the method according to how much time is available. Perhaps a team member ambushes you in the hallway and you have only five minutes to help him or her rethink a problem. If so, simply select the one or two practices that seem most appropriate.
另一种方法适用于不控制情况，并且必须根据可用的时间来扩展方法。也许一个团队成员在走廊里伏击了你，而你只有五分钟的时间来帮助他或她重新思考问题。如果是这样，只需选择一两个看起来最合适的实践。
Five minutes may sound like too little time to even describe a problem, much less reframe it. But surprisingly, I have found that such short interventions are often sufficient to kick-start new thinking—and once in a while they can trigger an aha moment and radically shift your view of a problem. Proximity to your own problems can make it easy to get lost in the weeds, endlessly ruminating about why a colleague, a spouse, or your children won’t listen. Sometimes all you need is someone to suggest, “Well, could the trouble be that you are bad at listening to them?”
五分钟可能听起来甚至没有时间来描述问题，更不用说重新构造它了。 但令人惊讶的是，我发现这种短暂的干预通常足以启动新的思维 - 偶尔它们可以引发一个时刻，并从根本上改变你对问题的看法。 靠近自己的问题可以很容易迷失在杂草中，无休止地反复思考为什么同事，配偶或你的孩子不会听。 有时你需要的只是有人建议，“嗯，难道你不好听你的话吗？”
Of course, not all problems are that simple. Often multiple rounds of reframing interspersed with observation, conversation, and prototyping are necessary. And in some cases reframing won t help at all. But you won t know which problems can benefit from being reframed until you try. Once you ve mastered the five-minute version, you can apply reframing to pretty much any problem you face.
当然，并不是所有的问题都那么简单。通常需要多轮的重新构建，其间穿插观察、对话和原型。在某些情况下，重新构建根本没有帮助。但是，除非你尝试，否则你不会知道哪些问题可以从重构中受益。一旦你掌握了5分钟的版本，你就可以把重构应用到你面临的任何问题上。
Here are the seven practices
以下是七个实践
1. Establish legitimacy.
It s difficult to use reframing if you are the only person in the room who understands the method. Other people, driven by a desire to find solutions, may feel that your insistence on discussing the problem is counterproductive. If the group has a power imbalance, such as when you re facing clients or more-senior colleagues, they may well shut you down before you even get started. And even powerful executives may find it hard to use the method when people are accustomed to getting answers rather than questions from their leaders.
1. 建立的合法性。
如果你是这个房间里唯一一个理解这种方法的人，你就很难使用重构。另一些人，在寻求解决方案的欲望驱使下，可能会觉得你坚持讨论问题会适得其反。如果团队存在权力不平衡，比如当你面对客户或更资深的同事时，他们很可能在你开始之前就把你关了。而且，当人们习惯于从他们的领导者那里得到答案而不是问题时，即使是有权有势的高管也可能发现很难使用这种方法。
Your first job, therefore, is to establish the method’s legitimacy within the group, creating the conversational space necessary to employ reframing. I suggest two ways to do this. The first is to share this article with the people you are meeting. Even if they don’t read it, simply seeing it may persuade them to listen to you. The second is to relate the slow elevator problem, which is my go-to example when I have less than 30 seconds to explain the concept. I have found it to be a powerful way to quickly explain reframing—how it differs from merely diagnosing a problem and how it can potentially create dramatically better results.
因此，您的第一项工作是在团队中建立方法的合法性，创建使用重构所必需的对话空间。 我建议两种方法来做到这一点。 首先是与您正在开会的人分享这篇文章。 即使他们不读它，只是看到它可能会说服他们听你的。 第二个是关联缓慢的电梯问题，这是我的第一个例子，当我有不到30秒的时间来解释这个概念。 我发现它是一种快速解释重构的有效方法 - 它与仅仅诊断一个问题有什么不同，以及它如何能够产生显着更好的结果。
2. Bring outsiders into the discussion.
This is the single most helpful reframing practice. I saw it in action eight years ago when the management team of a small European company was wrestling with a lack of innovation in its workforce. The managers had recently encountered a specific innovation training technique they all liked, so they started discussing how best to implement it within the organization.
2. 让外人参与讨论。
这是一个最有帮助的重构实践。八年前，当一家欧洲小公司的管理团队正努力解决员工缺乏创新的问题时，我亲眼目睹了这一点。经理们最近遇到了一种他们都喜欢的创新培训技术，所以他们开始讨论如何在组织内最好地实施它。
Sensing that the group lacked an outside voice, the general manager asked his personal assistant, Charlotte, to take part in their discussion. I ve been working here for 12 years, Charlotte told the group, and in that time I have seen three different management teams try to roll out some new innovation framework. None of them worked. I don t think people would react well to the introduction of another set of buzzwords.
总经理意识到这群人缺乏一种外界的声音，于是请他的私人助理夏洛特(Charlotte)参加他们的讨论。“我在这里工作了12年，”夏洛特告诉该组织，“在这期间，我看到了3个不同的管理团队试图推出一些新的创新框架。他们都没有成功。我不认为人们会对引入另一套流行语做出很好的反应。
Charlotte s observation prompted the managers to realize that they had fallen in love with a solution introducing an innovation framework before they fully understood the problem. They soon concluded that their initial diagnosis had been wrong: Many of their employees already knew how to innovate, but they didn t feel very engaged in the company, so they were unlikely to take initiative beyond what their job descriptions mandated. What the managers had first framed as a skill-set problem was better approached as a motivation problem.
夏洛特的观察促使经理们意识到，在他们完全理解问题之前，他们已经爱上了引入创新框架的解决方案。他们很快得出结论，他们最初的诊断是错误的:他们的许多员工已经知道如何创新，但他们觉得自己对公司不太投入，所以他们不太可能在工作职责之外采取主动。经理们最初将其框定为技能集问题的东西，最好作为激励问题来处理。
They abandoned all talk of innovation workshops and instead focused on improving employee engagement by (among other things) giving people more autonomy, introducing flexible working hours, and switching to a more participatory decision-making style. The remedy worked. Within 18 months workplace satisfaction scores had doubled and employee turnover had fallen dramatically. And as people started bringing their creative abilities to bear at work, financial results improved markedly. Four years later the company won an award for being the country s best place to work.
他们放弃了所有关于创新研讨会的讨论，转而专注于提高员工的参与度，方法包括(在其他方面)给予员工更多自主权、引入灵活的工作时间，以及转向更具参与性的决策风格。补救工作。在18个月内，工作满意度翻了一番，员工流动率大幅下降。随着人们开始在工作中发挥他们的创造性能力，财务业绩显著改善。四年后，该公司获得了全国最佳工作场所奖。
As this story shows, getting an outsider s perspective can be instrumental in rethinking a problem quickly and properly. To do so most effectively：
正如这个故事所显示的，从局外人的角度来看待问题，可以帮助你快速而正确地重新思考问题。最有效地做到这一点：
Look for boundary spanners. As research by Michael Tushman and many others has shown, the most useful input tends to come from people who understand but are not fully part of your world. Charlotte was close enough to the front lines of the company to know how the employees really felt, but she was also close enough to management to understand its priorities and speak its language, making her ideally suited for the task. In contrast, calling on an innovation expert might well have led the team s members further down the innovation path instead of inspiring them to rethink their problem.
寻找边界扳手。迈克尔•图什曼(Michael Tushman)等人的研究表明，最有用的信息往往来自那些理解你的人，但他们并不完全属于你的世界。夏洛特与公司的第一线关系密切，能够了解员工的真实感受，但她也与管理层关系密切，能够理解公司的优先事项，并能说公司的语言，这使她非常适合这项任务。相比之下，聘请创新专家很可能会让团队成员在创新道路上走得更远，而不是鼓励他们重新思考自己的问题。
Choose someone who will speak freely. By virtue of her long tenure and her closeness to the general manager, Charlotte felt free to challenge the management team while remaining committed to its objectives. This sense of psychological safety, as Harvard s Amy C. Edmondson calls it, has been proved to help groups perform better. You might consider turning to someone whose career advancement will not be determined by the group in question or who has a track record of (constructively) speaking truth to power.
选择一个畅所欲言的人。由于她的长期任期和她与总经理的亲密关系，夏洛特感到可以自由地挑战管理团队，同时继续致力于其目标。哈佛大学的艾米·c·埃德蒙森(Amy C. Edmondson)称这种心理安全感有助于团队表现得更好。你可能会考虑求助于这样的人，他的职业发展不会由他所在的团队决定，或者他有(建设性地)向权力说出真相的记录。
Expect input, not solutions. Crucially, Charlotte did not try to provide the group with a solution; rather, her observation made the managers themselves rethink their problem. This pattern is typical. By definition, outsiders are not experts on the situation and thus will rarely be able to solve the problem. That s not their function. They are there to stimulate the problem owners to think differently. So when you bring them in, ask them specifically to challenge the group s thinking, and prime the problem owners to listen and look for input rather than answers.
期待输入，而不是解决方案。至关重要的是，夏洛蒂并没有试图为这群人提供解决方案;相反，她的观察让经理们自己重新思考了他们的问题。这种模式很典型。从定义上讲，外部人士不是局势的专家，因此很少能够解决问题。这不是它们的函数。它们的存在是为了刺激问题所有者以不同的方式思考。所以，当你把他们带进来的时候，要特别要求他们挑战团队的思维，让问题的拥有者去倾听，去寻找输入，而不是答案。
3. Get people s definitions in writing.
It s not unusual for people to leave a meeting thinking they all agree on what the problem is after a loose oral description, only to discover weeks or months later that they had different views of the issue. Moreover, a successful reframing may well lurk in one of those views.
3.把人们的定义写下来。
人们在结束会议时认为他们在一个松散的口头描述之后对问题是什么达成了一致，但几周或几个月后才发现他们对这个问题有不同的看法，这并不罕见。此外，一个成功的重构很可能潜伏在这些观点之一。
For instance, a management team may agree that the company’s problem is a lack of innovation. But if you ask each member to describe what’s wrong in a sentence or two, you will quickly see how framings differ. Some people will claim, “Our employees aren’t motivated to innovate” or “They don’t understand the urgency of the situation.” Others will say, “People don’t have the right skill set,” “Our customers aren’t willing to pay for innovation,” or “We don’t reward people for innovation.” Pay close attention to the wording, because even seemingly inconsequential word choices can surface a new perspective on the problem.
例如，管理团队可能会同意公司的问题是缺乏创新。 但是如果你要求每个成员描述一两句话中的错误，你会很快看到框架的不同之处。 有些人会说，“我们的员工没有动力进行创新”或“他们不了解情况的紧迫性。”其他人会说，“人们没有合适的技能，”“我们的客户不是' 愿意为创新付钱，“或”我们不会奖励人们的创新。“密切注意措辞，因为即使看似无关紧要的单词选择也可以在问题上找到新的视角。
I saw a memorable demonstration of this when I was working with a group of managers in the construction industry, exploring what they could do as individual leaders to deliver better results. As we tried to identify the barriers each one faced, I asked them to write their problems on flip charts, after which we jointly analyzed the statements. The very first comment from the group had the greatest impact: “Almost none of the definitions include the word ‘I.’” With one exception, the problems were consistently worded in a way that diffused individual responsibility, such as “My team doesn’t…,” “The market doesn’t…,” and, in a few cases, “We don’t…” That one observation shifted the tenor of the meeting, pushing the participants to take more ownership of the challenges they faced.
当我与建筑行业的一组管理人员合作时，我看到了一个令人难忘的演示，探索他们作为个人领导者可以做些什么来提供更好的结果。 当我们试图找出每个人面临的障碍时，我让他们在活动挂图上写下他们的问题，之后我们共同分析了这些陈述。 该小组的第一个评论产生了最大的影响：“几乎没有一个定义包括'我'这个词。”除了一个例外，这些问题的措辞始终如一，散布个人责任，例如“我的团队没有” t ...，“”市场不......，“在少数情况下，”我们不......“这一观察改变了会议的主旨，推动参与者更多地了解他们所面临的挑战。
These individual definitions of the problem should ideally be gathered in advance of a discussion. If possible, ask people to send you a few lines in a confidential e-mail, and insist that they write in sentence form bullet points are simply too condensed. Then copy the definitions you ve collected on a flip chart so that everyone can see them and react to them in the meeting. Don t attribute them, because you want to ensure that people s judgment of a definition isn t affected by the definer s identity or status.
理想情况下，应该在讨论之前收集这些问题的单独定义。如果可能的话，让别人在一封保密的电子邮件中给你写几行话，并坚持让他们用句子形式来写要点，因为要点太过简洁。然后把你收集到的定义复制到活动挂图上，这样每个人都能看到它们，并在会议上做出反应。不要赋予他们属性，因为你想确保人们对定义的判断不受定义者的身份或地位的影响。
Receiving these multiple definitions will sensitize you to the perspectives of other stakeholders. We all appreciate in theory that others may experience a problem differently (or not see it at all). But as demonstrated in a recent study by Johannes Hattula, of Imperial College London, if managers try to imagine a customer s perspective themselves, they typically get it wrong. To understand what other stakeholders think, you need to hear it from them.
接收这些多个定义将使您对其他涉众的观点更加敏感。从理论上讲，我们都明白，其他人可能会有不同的经历(或者根本看不到)。但是，正如伦敦帝国理工学院的约翰内斯·哈图拉最近的一项研究所表明的，如果经理们试图想象顾客对自己的看法，他们通常会弄错。要了解其他涉众的想法，您需要听取他们的意见。
4. Ask what’s missing.
When faced with the description of a problem, people tend to delve into the details of what has been stated, paying less attention to what the description might be leaving out. To rectify this, make sure to ask explicitly what has not been captured or mentioned.
4. 询问缺少了什么。
当面对一个问题的描述时，人们倾向于钻研所陈述内容的细节，而较少注意描述中可能遗漏的内容。要纠正这一点，一定要明确询问哪些内容没有被捕获或提到。
Recently I worked with a team of senior executives in Brazil who had been asked to provide their CEO with ideas for improving the market’s perception of the company’s stock price. The team had expertly analyzed the components affecting a stock’s value—the P/E ratio forecast, the debt ratio, earnings per share, and so on. Of course, none of this was news to the CEO, nor were these factors particularly easy to affect, leading to mild despondency on the team.
最近，我与巴西的一个高级管理人员团队合作，他们被要求为他们的CEO提供改善市场对公司股价的看法的想法。 该团队专业分析了影响股票价值的因素 - 市盈率预测，负债率，每股收益等。 当然，这些都不是首席执行官的新闻，也不是这些因素特别容易影响，导致团队的轻微失望。
But when I prompted the executives to zoom out and consider what was missing from their definition of the problem, something new came up. It turned out that when external financial analysts asked to speak with executives from the company, the task of responding was typically delegated to slightly more junior leaders, none of whom had received training in how to talk to analysts. As soon as this point was raised, the group saw that it had found a potential recommendation for the CEO. (The observation came not from the team s finance expert but from a boundary-spanning HR executive.)
但当我提醒高管们缩小范围，考虑一下他们对问题的定义中缺失了什么时，一些新的东西出现了。事实证明，当外部财务分析师要求与该公司高管交谈时，通常会把回应的任务委派给资历稍浅的领导者，而这些人都没有接受过如何与分析师交谈的培训。这一点一提出来，该集团就发现，它已经为首席执行官找到了一个潜在的建议。(观察结果并非来自团队的财务专家，而是一位跨领域的人力资源高管。)
5. Consider multiple categories.
As Lori Weise s story demonstrates, powerful change can come from transforming people s perception of a problem. One way to trigger this kind of paradigm shift is to invite people to identify specifically what category of problem they think the group is facing. Is it an incentive problem? An expectations problem? An attitude problem? Then try to suggest other categories.
5. 考虑多个类别。
正如洛丽·韦斯的故事所证明的，强大的改变可以来自于改变人们对问题的看法。触发这种范式转变的一种方法是邀请人们明确地确定他们认为团队面临的问题类别。这是一个激励问题吗?一个预期的问题吗?一种态度问题?然后尝试推荐其他类别。
A manager I know named Jeremiah Zinn did this when he led the product development team of the popular children s entertainment channel Nickelodeon. The team was launching a promising new app, and lots of kids downloaded it. But actually activating the app was somewhat complicated, because it required logging in to the household s cable TV service. At that point in the sign-up process, almost every kid dropped out.
我认识的一位名叫耶利米·津恩(Jeremiah Zinn)的经理就是这么做的，当时他领导着广受欢迎的儿童娱乐频道尼克国际儿童频道(Nickelodeon)的产品开发团队。这个团队推出了一个很有前途的新应用，很多孩子都下载了它。但实际上，激活这款应用程序有点复杂，因为它需要登录用户的有线电视服务。在那个时候，几乎所有的孩子都退学了。
Seeing the problem as one of usability, the team put its expertise to work and ran hundreds of A/B tests on various sign-up flows, seeking to make the process less complex. Nothing helped.
将该问题视为可用性之一，该团队将其专业知识用于工作，并对各种注册流程进行了数百次A / B测试，旨在使该过程不那么复杂。 什么都没有帮助。
The shift came when Zinn realized that the team members had been thinking of the problem too narrowly. They had focused on the kids’ actions, carefully tracking every click and swipe—but they had not explored how the kids felt during the sign-up process. That turned out to be critical. As the team started looking for emotional reactions, it discovered that the request for the cable password made the kids fear getting in trouble: To a 10-year-old kid, a password request signals forbidden territory. Equipped with that insight, Zinn’s team simply added a short video explaining that it was OK to ask parents for the password—and saw a rapid 10-fold increase in the sign-up rate for the app.
当Zinn意识到团队成员过于狭隘地考虑问题时，这种转变就来了。 他们专注于孩子们的行动，仔细跟踪每次点击和刷卡 - 但他们没有探究孩子们在注册过程中的感受。 结果证明这很关键。 随着团队开始寻找情绪反应，它发现有线电话密码的请求让孩子们害怕遇到麻烦：对于一个10岁的孩子，密码请求发出禁止的领域信号。 Zinn的团队配备了这种洞察力，只是简单地添加了一个简短的视频，说明可以向父母询问密码，并且该应用程序的注册率提高了10倍。
By explicitly highlighting how the group thinks about a problem—what is sometimes called metacognition, or thinking about thinking—you can often help people reframe it, even if you don’t have other frames to suggest. And it’s a useful way of sorting through written definitions if you managed to gather them in advance.
通过明确突出小组如何思考问题 - 有时称为元认知或思考思考 - 即使您没有其他框架可供建议，您也可以经常帮助人们重新构思。 如果您设法提前收集它们，那么它是一种有用的方式来对书面定义进行排序。
Zinn’s story also exposes a typical pitfall in problem solving, first expressed by Abraham Kaplan in his famous law of the instrument: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. At Nickelodeon, because the team members were usability experts, they defaulted to thinking the problem was one of usability.
津恩的故事也暴露了一个典型的问题解决陷阱，亚伯拉罕·卡普兰(Abraham Kaplan)在他著名的《工具法则》(law of the instrument)中首次表达了这一观点:给一个小男孩一把锤子，他会发现他遇到的一切都需要敲打。在Nickelodeon，由于团队成员都是可用性专家，他们默认认为这个问题是可用性的问题之一。
6. Analyze positive exceptions.
To find additional problem framings, look to instances when the problem did not occur, asking, What was different about that situation? Exploring such positive exceptions, sometimes called bright spots, can often uncover hidden factors whose influence the group may not have considered.
6. 分析积极的例外。
要找到额外的问题框架，可以查看没有出现问题的实例，询问这种情况有什么不同?探索这些积极的例外情况，有时被称为亮点，往往可以发现一些隐藏的因素，而这些因素的影响可能是团队没有考虑到的。
A lawyer I spoke to, for instance, told me that the partners at his firm would occasionally meet to discuss initiatives that might grow their business in the longer term. But to his frustration, the instant one of those meetings ended, he and the other partners went back to focusing on landing the next short-term project. When prompted to think of positive exceptions, he remembered one longer-term initiative that had in fact gone forward.
例如，一位与我交谈过的律师告诉我，他所在律所的合伙人偶尔会会面，讨论从长远来看可能促进业务增长的举措。但令他沮丧的是，其中一次会议一结束，他和其他合伙人就重新专注于下一个短期项目。当被要求考虑积极的例外情况时，他想起了一项实际上已经取得进展的长期计划。
What was different about that one? I asked. It was that the meeting, unusually, had included not just partners but also an associate who was considered a rising star and it was she who had pursued the idea. That immediately suggested that talented associates be included in future meetings. The associates felt privileged and energized by being invited to the strategic discussions, and unlike the partners, they had a clear short-term incentive to move on long-term projects namely, to impress the partners and gain an edge in the competition against their peers.
那个有什么不同?我问。不同寻常的是，这次会议不仅包括合伙人，还包括一位被认为是后起之秀的合伙人，正是她提出了这个想法。这立即表明，未来的会议应该包括有才华的同事。被邀请参加战略讨论的员工感到特权和活力，与合伙人不同的是，他们有明确的短期动机去进行长期项目，即给合伙人留下深刻印象，并在与同行的竞争中获得优势。
A checklist for problem diagnosis tends to discourage actual thinking.
诊断问题的清单往往会阻碍实际的思考。
Looking at positive exceptions can also make the discussion less threatening. Especially in a large group or other public setting, dissecting a string of failures can quickly become confrontational and make people overly defensive. If, instead, you ask the group s members to analyze a positive outcome, it becomes easier for them to examine their own behavior.
看到积极的例外情况也可以使讨论不那么具有威胁性。尤其是在大型团体或其他公共场合，剖析一连串的失败很快就会变得具有对抗性，让人们变得过于防御性。相反，如果你让小组成员分析一个积极的结果，他们就更容易检查自己的行为。
7. Question the objective.
In the negotiation classic Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton share the early management thinker Mary Parker Follett s story about two people fighting over whether to keep a window open or closed. The underlying goals of the two turn out to differ: One person wants fresh air, while the other wants to avoid a draft. Only when these hidden objectives are brought to light through the questions of a third person is the problem resolved by opening a window in the next room.
7. 问题的目标。
在谈判经典之作《走向成功》(Getting to Yes)中，罗杰•费舍尔(Roger Fisher)、威廉•l•尤里(William L. Ury)和布鲁斯•巴顿(Bruce Patton)分享了早期管理思想家玛丽•帕克•福利特(Mary Parker Follett)的故事。这两个人的基本目标是不同的:一个人想呼吸新鲜空气，而另一个人想避免通风。只有当这些隐藏的目标通过第三人的问题被揭示出来时，才能通过打开隔壁房间的窗户来解决问题。
That story highlights another way to reframe a problem by paying explicit attention to the objectives of the parties involved, first clarifying and then challenging them. Weise s shelter intervention program, for instance, hinged on a shift in the objective, from increasing adoption to keeping more pets with their original owners. The story of Charlotte, too, included a shift in the stated goals of the management team, from teaching innovation skills to boosting employee engagement.
这个故事强调了另一种重新构建问题的方法，即明确关注相关各方的目标，首先澄清目标，然后提出挑战。例如，威斯的收容所干预计划，就取决于目标的转变，从增加领养到与原来的主人一起饲养更多的宠物。夏洛特的故事也包括管理团队既定目标的转变，从传授创新技能到提高员工参与度。
As described in Fred Kaplan’s book The Insurgents, a famous contemporary example is the change in U.S. military doctrine pioneered by General David Petraeus, among others. In traditional warfare, the aim of a battle is to defeat the enemy forces. But Petraeus and his allies argued that when dealing with insurgencies, the army had to pursue a different, broader objective to prevent new enemies from cropping up—namely, get the populace on its side, thereby removing the source of recruits and other forms of local support the insurgency needed to operate in the area. That approach was eventually adopted by the military—because a small group of rogue thinkers took it upon themselves to question the predefined and long-standing objectives of their organization.
正如弗雷德·卡普兰（Fred Kaplan）的着作“叛乱分子”（The Insurgents）所描述的那样，当代着名的例子是大卫彼得雷乌斯将军开创的美国军事学说的变化。 在传统战争中，战斗的目的是打败敌军。 但彼得雷乌斯和他的盟友认为，在处理叛乱时，军队必须追求一个不同的，更广泛的目标，以防止新的敌人出现 - 即让民众站在一边，从而消除新兵和其他形式的当地人 支持在该地区开展活动所需的叛乱活动。 这种方法最终被军方采用 - 因为一小群流氓思想家自己质疑他们组织的预定义和长期目标。
CONCLUSION
Powerful as reframing can be, it takes time and practice to get good at it. One senior executive from the defense industry told me, I was shocked by how difficult it is to reframe problems, but also how effective it is. As you start to work more with the method, urge your team to trust the process, and be prepared for it to feel messy and confusing at times.
结论:尽管重构功能强大，但要想精通它需要时间和实践。一位来自国防工业的高级管理人员告诉我，我震惊于重新定义问题是多么困难，但它是多么有效。当您开始更多地使用这个方法时，请敦促您的团队信任这个过程，并准备好让它有时感到混乱和困惑。
In leading more and more reframing discussions, you may also be tempted to create a diagnostic checklist. I strongly caution you against that or at least against making the checklist evident to the group you re engaging with. A checklist for problem diagnosis tends to discourage actual thinking, which of course defeats the very purpose of engaging in reframing. As Neil Gaiman reminds us in The Sandman, tools can be the subtlest of traps.
在引导越来越多的重新构建讨论时，您可能还想创建一个诊断清单。我强烈警告你不要这样做，或者至少不要让你的团队明显地看到你的清单。用于问题诊断的检查表往往会阻碍实际的思考，这当然违背了重新构建的目的。正如尼尔•盖曼(Neil Gaiman)在《睡魔》(The Sandman)中提醒我们的那样，工具可能是陷阱中最微妙的。
Finally, combine reframing with real-world testing. The method is ultimately limited by the knowledge and perspectives of the people in the room and as Steve Blank, of Stanford, and others have repeatedly shown, it is fatal to think you can figure it all out within the comfy confines of your own office. The next time you face a problem, start by reframing it but don t wait too long before getting out of the building to observe your customers and prototype your ideas. It is neither thinking nor testing alone, but a marriage of the two, that holds the key to radically better results.
最后，将重构与实际测试结合起来。这种方法最终会受到房间里人们的知识和观点的限制，正如斯坦福大学的史蒂夫•布兰克(Steve Blank)和其他人反复证明的那样，认为自己可以在自己舒适的办公室里把所有问题都解决，这是致命的。下次你遇到问题的时候，从重新设计开始，但不要等太久才走出大楼去观察你的客户，并把你的想法变成原型。要想取得更好的结果，关键不在于思考，也不在于测试，而在于两者的结合。
