Framing From the Extremes
It’s in our nature to say or write things with an assumed audience of the individuals who we expect will believe us. I’ve realized that…
It’s in our nature to say or write things with an assumed audience of the individuals who we expect will believe us. I’ve realized that flipping this is a great exercise–how would you cast your proposal, initiative, or new idea if you first had to pitch it to your staunchest critic? Walking through this exercise helps me to find the extremes that are necessary, and generally, I learn through the process that both framings are wrong and can be improved using insight from the opposite pole.
When we launched one of the earliest versions of Speaker Technologies, the concept included a heavy lobbying element. To our supporters, we were saying–at least in our heads–that lobbying was necessary to get politicians to take the actions that our users were demanding. One day not long after, I had the chance to meet one of the key political decision-makers on our first issue face to face, and immediately I knew I couldn’t explain our work from a framing of “telling politicians what to do.” That would immediately put the person we needed as an ally on the defensive, regardless of his/her view. Further, I discovered that this individual already supported the agenda we thought we needed to push along. Quickly I realized that a better framing was something closer to “we’re here to catalyze faster action on issues where policymakers and the pubic are already aligned.” This angle not only landed positively with the decision-maker, but it also helped us to expand our view of what we were doing. Instead of viewing policy as a thing with polar views and clear promoters and blockers, we learned that the right question to ask was closer to “if everyone agrees, why is progress still slow?” We never would have arrived at this crucial layer of understanding if we had remained in only one frame.
Standing back, if we had thought to consider the toughest reviewer of the idea first while we were framing our ideas, we would have started from that position and benefitted from a more powerful focus from the get go. Now when I pitch a new concept, I try to first pretend I’m sharing it separately with people representing both extremes, and then I refine the final version.
// Originally posted March 8, 2018 on prior blog //