Weeknote: The ‘art’ of framing
‘It’s difficult to see the picture when you’re inside the frame’ Eugene Kleiner
Some of our most critical systems are no longer a good fit for the emerging societal needs. In many cases, they are perpetuating inequality (think healthcare, finance and housing) and worsening climate change (energy, food security).
UNDP’s Deep Demonstration program is an investment in developing capabilities to better understand systemic issues and how to engage with them, whilst keeping a strong dose of humility. The practice that is slowly emerging for us consists of:*
· Sense: understand underlying drivers (as opposed to symptoms) of policy issues, relationships and power dynamics that are beneath the surface
· Reframe: change the vantage point from which to ‘see’ and intervene in the system
· Position: translate new entry points into a portfolio of interventions
· Transform: deploy the portfolio for nudging the system to a different state
One of the more striking insights in our 9 months of this journey has been around reframing. Enrique Martinez defines framing as filtering (identifying what has value), discovering (finding opportunities in uncertainty and ambiguity), solving (connecting what was disconnected before) and defining boundaries (deciding what to keep and what to discard). Oxfam leveraged framing theory to help rethink UK’s approach to address poverty (spoiler: it found that mass mobilization of population around the poverty based on celebrity engagement and charity concerts only reinforced consumerism mindset which is not only short term but reinforced the values that contribute negatively to global poverty in the first place).
Framing SDGs as a compliance instrument, risk management strategy or a greatest business opportunity implies different policy options for a Government. A healthcare system designed to promote wellbeing looks very different to the one designed to treat and cure diseases. Helping families provide support to young mothers (baby friendly families) leads to far more options to deal with acute malnutrition than simply treating it as access to nutritious food for children. Re-conceiving the antibiotic resistance from a biological (how is a molecule structured and how it functions) to an informational problem (does it kill bacteria) expanded a set of possibilities for Regina Barzilay that ultimately led her to discover a superbug that kills superbugs. Some countries framed COVID as a flu, leading to the ‘mitigation’ strategies (eg. UK), while some others likened it to SARS (New Zeland) adopting the ‘elimination’ approach — same data, different frames, opposite conclusion.
In our Deep Demonstrations, reframing has been about considering a range of vantage points from which to ‘see’ the system and reflect it back to itself to unlock new possibilities. In this sense, frames are not solutions but means of expanding the palette of options that the system has available to itself for its renewal. They can help decision makers at all levels recalibrate their understanding and ability to act on complex issues. Playing with different ways of seeing the system seems to open new possibilities and choices, ultimately leading to more agency of our partners to act on wicked issues:
· In pivoting from a focus on dynamics that emerge from a dyad relationship (state-citizen) to a triad (citizen-state-communities), one of our teams expanded a range of possibilities to work on societal trust that now includes neighborhood level interventions for social cohesion, climate change adaptation as a driver of personal accountability to the community, and trust in the digital space
· Policy system designed to increase birth rates to combat depopulation looks very differently to the one premised on improving conditions for the well-being for the entire population — for building more livable cities for 50+ and attracting digital nomads, to reimagining a relationship with Diaspora based on common interests.
· Tackling economic growth by expanding access to finance and skill development among youth and indigenous groups does little if a system is rigged against making most of those investments. Reframing the focus toward decentralized governance (eg. land sharing rights) unlocks new directions aimed at building individual agency. Without access to and ownership of fixed resources, indigenous population may not be able to generate sustainable value irrespective of skills they may acquire.
· Moving from a tweak the existing paradigm (how do we increase tourist arrivals) to considering a new vantage point (how do we incentivize more visitors — those who have an interest to keep coming back and contribute to the well-being of our community) unlocks interventions around labor laws, rights of women and people with disabilities that were previously seen as disconnected from stimulating tourism.
· If we consider future of work to be equally about the internet of things as about decommissioning mental models that are no longer a useful way of addressing societal needs today (stigma around HIVAIDS and disability that firewalls societal groups from the labor market or extractive agricultural practices that expose communities to various risks) then the initial policy toolkit expands beyond digitization into governance and environment.
New frames are deliberate ways of leveraging mental models that act against the blindfolds that siloed, linear interventions impose. They tend to unearth new understanding of relationships (links between skills and land ownership) and generate more options for acting, at times allowing us to intuit something about issues for which data may not exist (will visitors really generate more value for communities or would trust built in a digital space spill over into the physical world?).
Frames can help us learn from individual experiences and come up with abstractions and rules that apply to other situations that may not have happened yet. But in doing so, frames are also deceiving — they can build a false sense of safety because the premium isn’t on having that one perfect frame, but on the ability of continually developing new mental models about a world that’s fast changing, questioning whether we’re using the right one for the context we’re in, and adapting.
*The 4-step logic is adapted from the sense-position-transform framework developed by the UNDP Istanbul Innovation Team and inspired by the work of UNDP’s Regional Innovation Center on waste
