4 ways to reframe focus

What can you do when you sense that you’re not working on the right question, or how to navigate the tension between your mandate and emerging convictions?

23 years ago, I took my first three job interviews to enter a consulting firm. The second one was a case study to test my ability to reframe a problem formulated by a client. Little did I know then, that it was such a critical skill and would become a corner stone of my practice.

Just this morning, I heard a peer sharing her frustration in a meeting: “We did what they asked but we know it won’t work. And if we tell them, they’ll think we didn’t do our job and we won’t get more work”.

As a consultant, you often wish your clients had asked you a different question; a better question! Being external to your client’s context allows you to see things from a different perspective and often develop a different take on the problem or the opportunity at hand. Unfortunately, you are often bound by the mandate you have received — often defined without you — to answer a specific question or solve a specific problem in a specific way.

To illustrate with a real life example, I was approached by a retailer requesting for a 1-day workshop to brainstorm new disruptive business models. The question wasn’t uninteresting but it soon became very clear that the greatest challenge wasn’t to generate ideas but rather to create a context where they could be genuinely tested and implemented. That conversation was not accessible at first.

So how do you deal with that gap between your mandate and your intuition for what the right question should be?

Depending on your sense of ethics, this tension between your mandate and your convictions may be more or less painful.

One way of course, is to just keep doing what the client wants and close your eyes on how useful it really is. We call those “cleaning jobs” and they have the merits to pay the bills.

If this is not good enough for you, experience shows that you need to follow three steps to reconcile — and help your client do so — the initial intent and mandate with your emerging understanding of the problem and the opportunity:

1. Create awareness that what you see exists and matters.
2. Create a `permission space` to gain the legitimacy to do something about it.
3. Propose mechanism to address what you’re proposing to address.

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order, on how to approach these steps. Consider them holistically rather than sequentially as they all feed into one another.

Reframing the value

The objective of a project and the objectives of a strategy are two different things. The project is not a purpose in itself, it’s an enabler of the strategy (or it should be). While your mandate may be defined by the scope and objectives of a specific project, nothing prevents you from broadening the conversation to unlock greater business value. A good, humble and non-threatening way to do this is to practice the art of questioning:

• What greater purpose or strategy is this project contributing to?
• How does it relate to other projects or initiatives contributing to the same purpose / strategy?
• In addition to the known business case for the project, where else could we create value by doing things differently?
• Can we solve other problems with this project or initiative by looking at it differently?
• Who else could benefit from it if they could influence how we do things?
• Etc.

By shifting the focus of the conversation from achieving the objectives of the project to contributing to the objectives of the organisation, you can often reframe the perception of what the real opportunity is.

Hold your facilitator / advisor posture

Once you are convinced, it is very tempting to push your view onto your clients. Create slides, make a presentation, explain, convince, etc. Unfortunately, consultants come and go so unless you’re willing get a job in your client’s organisation and take ownership of the agenda, your role is to enhance and accelerate your clients’ agenda to the best of their current and emerging abilities. Be mindful to not push your own agenda. Rather, create a pathway for awareness, understanding, and ultimately ownership of your ideas, which requires a lot more effort than just explaining your views or conclusions.

• What experience can I create to help them see what I see?
• Where is there curiosity and appetite for exploration of new ideas?
• How much ambition do they really have? How bold are they?
• Who is showing a form of leadership and how can I leverage them, regardless of where they stand in the system?
• Etc.

Like for any other innovation, the potential value of your intuition is less conditioned by how good it is, but more so the readiness of the system to embrace it. Focus on the readiness and be ready to let go, slow down or evolve your thinking to meet your clients where they are at.

Create a space for dialogue by design

It takes time and a specific mindset to explore complex ideas, even more so when they require a mental reframing. To allow for it, you need to create a space for dialogue and exploration ranging across vantage points. A healthy articulation between strategic navigation and operational navigation requires a two-way dialogue where executives feed decisions and intuitions into the system, and managers or consultants feedback into the boardroom their insights and evidences from the field. The quality of that dialogue varies greatly depending on who is involved and on how, when and where it takes place. Be mindful of creating that space by design so that everything about the context of that dialogue is in service of the type of conversation you need to have.

• Who should be part of what conversations?
• How does the presence of each individual in a conversation influence the way the others will engage?
• What headspace and emotional state do the participants need to be to have the right level of conversation?
• Should we leverage existing forums (steering committees, team meetings, etc.) or create bespoke new ones?
• What does the nature and complexity of the question tell you about the desired format of the conversation?
• Etc.

There is no tension or ambiguities that can’t be resolved once you have established the right patterns for dialogue between the right people in the system.

Make people dream without scaring them

Bold endeavors often come with a great level of risks. While broadening the perspective to think systemically is a sure fire way to develop more impactful and more sustainable responses to your questions/problems, it is also increasing the perceived risk of failures. Systems can be influenced but not controlled, and the lack of control is often perceived as the greater risk. The challenge is therefor to make the key stakeholders dreams about the potential that a different path would unlock, while addressing the fear that the uncertainty inherent to your proposals may trigger.

• What makes the perspective of a reframing desirable?
• What stories can you tell to illustrate the potential or the risk of not doing?
• What can the key stakeholders legitimately be scared of?
• What is the cost for them of sticking to the plan? What is the perceived risk, rational or not, of doing?
• How confident or empowered do they feel to hold the space for a reframe?
• Etc.

Understanding and addressing the emotional reactions to your proposals is as important as the robustness of your reasoning and the validity of your insights. Be deliberate about the experience and the thought process of the key stakeholders as you expose them to your ideas; create a pathway towards shared ownership.

In reflection, the key is to be mindful of your posture, empathetic with your face-offs, and to create a context where people and new perspectives can connect.

Change Platform model — Openfield

These insights, building on our practice of transformation at Openfield, all relate to the conveyor belt component of our change platform model. I’m very keen to hear about your thoughts and experiences navigating that tension between mandate and emerging convictions.

Notes

1. The question addressed here from the perspective of transformation is addressed in a similar way from the perspective of workshops in my book Collaboration by Design. The gap between mandate and intuitions is often similar and so are the patterns of behaviors to close the gap.
2. Cédric Defay has developed a two-day training course on the Art of Questioning to explore how to use questions for re-framing.