Amit Out of the Office

On the Phenomenology of Problem Reframing

Over the last dozen years, I’ve participated in 3 phases of venturing building, first with Prehype, then Arabella, and now, Akili. Through those experiences, like any entrepreneur (with maybe a few extra repetitions), I’ve been a student of problem solving.

Like some other people, at Prehype we viewed entrepreneurship as an art. And like other arts, entrepreneurship has developed its own set of evolving tools, processes, and ways of thinking. Without being explicitly stated, it was a general belief that there is no right way to build a startup. Some practiced lean methodologies, while others were making deep upfront commitments on the basis of first principles. In order to focus on a particular problem, some amount of flexibility was imperative.

If there is one tool or process that was closest to religion for us at Prehype, which I’ve carried throughout my career, it was Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg’s framework for problem reframing. I used to give workshops using this framework, teaching it to others, and ultimately, refining my own version of it. I want to tell you about problem reframing. What it is, how it works, and most importantly, why it works. Reframing isn’t natural or intuitive to most people. In knowing the why, I hope that you will not only have a powerful tool to use, but understand the context in which to use it. For me, that context has grown to encompass much of life.

What is problem reframing?

When we have a problem in front of us, humans are very good at coming up with solutions. Given a particular problem, especially when throwing out feasibility, cost, liability, or morality, it is easy to come up with solutions. We can illustrate this with a few examples in a minute.

The issue with this is that we are tempted to jump to solutions before really understanding the problem. Given the ease of finding solutions, it is very easy to create the wrong solution, by which I mean a solution that is overly costly, ambitious, risky, or otherwise poorly thought through. Jumping to solutions because that is easier and more intuitive, we also avoid the harder work of questioning our ingrained assumptions and understanding of the problem, which may be wrong.

Problem statements tend to be fairly shallow, they don’t on their own provide enough context to know what is at stake. You might have heard the maxim that entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time understanding their problem domain. Maybe they fall in love with solutions. They may end up with solutions chasing problems. Problem reframing is a methodology for examining problem domains.

How does it work?

Say you are the owner of a nightclub. Your nightclub happens to be in a residential part of town, and so, you have many neighbors close by who expect to go to sleep at reasonable hours. Lately, your customers have been loitering outside the club after you close, making a lot of noise, and waking up the neighbors, who have complained to you. To prevent them from organizing and trying to evict you, you’re keen to try to find an amicable resolution.

Before we proceed, go ahead and take 30 seconds to think of some solutions. They don’t have to be realistic or even legal.

Done? What did you come up with?

Here are a few common ones I've heard (from realistic to insane):

It’s generally easy to come up with solutions. We seem hardwired to jump to conclusions (it’s called the jumping conclusion bias), and there is a compulsion to move from limited information to a satisfying resolution. In our workshops, participants would just rattle these off effortlessly. But let’s stick with the problem here and try to reframe it.

What IS the actual problem?

It’s a bit hard to pin down, isn’t it? In fact, these are all problem statements, and they are all legitimate, but they are all clearly circling the same situation, which is what we’d like to resolve. Taken individually, each seems to isolate some part of the situation that is problematic, whether legal, ethical, social, economic, or perhaps liturgical.

Notice that if you think about a resolution to each of these problem statements, they may be entirely different. The resolutions may transform the problematic situation such that the issue is resolved but the resultant situations look very different. If we were to evaluate them, we may not like the consequences of some, and yet we often don’t consider those consequences, we just look for a solution to the problem.

The philosophy of solving problems

Sam Harris, a great popularizer of the value of meditation, says that its greatest insight to those who practice it, is the breakdown of the self and the realization that there is experience prior to reflection. Essentially, the idea of non duality. This idea has a long philosophical history, which is relevant to problem reframing.

When we experience the world, we don’t experience “problems,” we experience situations.[1] Situations are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional when we analyze them, but when we experience them, they are qualitative, felt. When we experience situations that become problematic, we step back from experience into reflection or inquiry that attempts to discriminate and classify amongst the multi dimensional space of the situation.[2] We start drawing distinctions, making assessments, framing the situation, breaking it up into components. At this point, we can examine the situation and try to understand what problems there are. Just as language discriminates between subjects and objects, framing situations in terms of their problems is also an exercise of discrimination (in the positive sense). By reframing the original problem, what we’re actually doing is adding dimensionality to our inquiry.

The key here is that what we’re actually interested in is transforming or improving the situation, the experience. A “problem” is simply one dimension of the situation that we discriminate out of it. But if the problem space of a situation is multi dimensional, then there are many “problems” within that space, which translate into many possible avenues for resolving or improving a situation. Some resolutions will handle multiple dimensions, sometimes favorably, sometimes not, and all will have downstream consequences. Based on this understanding, the biggest mistake is to take a shallow problem statement as given and immediately search for a solution that will resolve it.

Recently, a friend of mine was looking for a new job. He’s a generalist around product management, user experience design, and user research, and has mostly worked at startups. At one interview, they gave him an assignment related to their actual product. It was a scenario that they wanted him to respond to with potential solutions. He shared it with me to get my feedback on his response, and what stood out to me immediately was the relevance of problem reframing. In the process of describing the assignment, the company had already provided a framing, which narrowed the possible spectrum of solutions. But it also forced an acceptance of some assumptions that were clearly questionable. The first thing to do was to question those assumptions and reframe the understanding of the situation and its problems. Doing this not only expanded the space for thinking about the problem and solutions, it also showed the company a clear process of first thoughtfully understanding the problem and having a procedure for suggesting the solutions.

The consequences of a problem are hard to see in one characterization. Since situations have breadth, they offer different perspectives that provide alternative dimensions, potential consequences, and prospective solution spaces.

This is the phenomenology of problem reframing.

Why does this work?

The example I gave above was a situation that was faced by many nightclubs, particularly in London in the late 90s. What was “the” solution?

Hard candy.

You see in this case, the noise was made mostly by people chatting with each other. What made the noise? People’s mouths. How do you occupy people’s mouths so they can’t make noise with them? Give them hard candy as they’re walking out of the club. (Hard candy also seems to be more effective than gum at forcing consistent trap shutting).

Problem reframing works because it helps us explore the multi dimensional space around an experienced situation, and, in turn, discover the “problem” that we are most interested in addressing, that we believe will be most expedient in resolving the situation towards a desired outcome, and that transforms the situation into a desired state with fewer negative downstream consequences. Whether the best solution or not, from the examples above you can at least say that hard candy is an elegant solution, it’s efficient, inexpensive, and has few downstream consequences.

If situations are multi dimensional, if the problem space is large, then our opportunity for resolving or ameliorating the situation, for bringing it into a more harmonious or effective or improved condition, becomes limited when we don’t examine all possible avenues for resolution, when we jump to solutions without exploring the problem space.

Another example

I built a business years ago called Chompers Club (now known as Bark Bright).

The premise of the business was that a staggering majority of dogs get periodontal disease. That can often lead to other health problems, but also to painful and expensive tooth extraction. According to vets, the problem can be solved by dog parents (yes, it’s dog parents!) brushing their dog’s teeth every day. But pretty much nobody does this.

The question is why?

When we first thought of the problem, we knew we could come up with a variety of solutions, but we insisted on sticking with the problem and reframing it to understand its different dimensions.

Why don’t dog parents brush their dog’s teeth consistently?

You can see where this is going. Different dimensions of the problem indicate different perspectives on the situation, and different areas to focus on. They also indicate different potential solutions. If your dog hates getting brushed, that may be because you’re using a human toothbrush. Dog teeth are shaped differently than human teeth! A solution could be to design a brush that a dog might like. That would not solve the universal issue of human laziness, but the dog might enjoy it. Of course, this solution requires a certain level of investment and particular skills, something we may not have or be interested in.

In short, reframing allows us to ask, which of these areas are interesting to us? Which do we even think we could solve for? Which can we control? Which do we have the skills for? Reframing actually moves beyond the solution and considers the means needed to arrive at it, and their consequences. Some may be impossible, some may be immoral, but none are wholly disconnected from the ends which we look for them to achieve.

The crucial habit in the phenomenology of problem reframing is to spend time exploring the problem space, beyond your initial thought on what the problem is.

One particular advantage of this habit, is the discovery of the desired outcome. Just as when launching a new business or project, intelligent practice suggests to be generally open minded and incorporate feedback from users into your understanding of both problem and solution. Thoughtful inquiry of any kind works similarly. To understand why this is the case let’s take a detour into the relationship between means and ends.

Means and Ends

There is a simplistic view of the world which is captured by the maxim, “the ends justify the means.” When you ask a person to explain a particular action, say why they decided to take the back roads instead of the highway to get to the office that day, they will usually invoke a justifying end, say, getting to work on time. Getting to work on time justifies taking the back roads even if there was a detour and the back roads ended up taking longer. The decision to take the back roads is considered with the end of getting to work on time as a fixed goal, the assumption being that as far as the end is concerned, it doesn’t really matter what the means of getting to it are. But of course this is not true. If the only way to get to work on time is to go twice the speed limit and risk endangering yourself, pedestrians, and other drivers, or to spend all of your savings to charter a helicopter to take off from your front lawn because the roads are all closed and there is no other way, neither of those seem like reasonable means and you should probably adjust your end.

The upshot here is that the meaning of an end is interdependent on the means necessary to achieve it. If we ask what means are needed to achieve a given end, one thing we may discover is that the consequences of employing those means are incompatible with other ends that we value. A founder’s company may be saved at the cost of his friendship with his cofounder. Loyalty to an organization or institution may come at the cost of intellectual integrity or even moral complicity. “The ends justifies the means” is actually more like “this end justifies the sacrifice of all other ends”. This is fanaticism. Yet this is precisely the type of thinking that people engage in daily, in business, in politics, in moral decisions.

The belief that we experience the world primarily through accepting clear, fixed, and given “ends” and searching for “means” to arrive at them is called “straight line instrumentalism”, a term coined by Langdon Winner. Straight line instrumentalism is the view that perceived problems come more or less given with ready-made objects of desire that function as inflexible ends. The resolution of the perceived problem, then, is only a matter of choosing the appropriate instruments, putting them to use, and judging success in terms of the degree to which there has been a satisfactory arrival at the ends originally projected.

But as we’ve seen from problem reframing in the two previous examples, we didn’t know what the end was at the outset. What we do know is that we’re in a situation that is problematic, and we’d like to resolve it. But we don’t know yet which problem dimension we’re solving for, what the solution is (the means), and what satisfactory resolution to the problem we’ll arrive at (the end). Straight line instrumentalism should sound less and less like real life at this point. In real life, we usually arrive at points that somewhat resemble ends, we’ve made progress but perhaps we didn’t fully resolve the situation, or there have been consequences we didn’t anticipate, or feedback we need to iterate on, and now we have to examine the whole situation again and repeat. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Life gives us no clear ends, and the means to reach them.

We don’t reach for ends when we encounter problems in a situation, we search for a way forward, something that provides a positive signal for us to take an intelligent step down a path that is projected towards some loose goal. Knowing whether the goal or “end” is good or right or appropriate or immoral is something we discover in the process of moving towards it, taking in new data, constructing new tools to analyze our situation more deftly, and re-evaluating. Here problem reframing is a useful tool.

The results of problem reframing, of examining the consequences of employing distinct means, of employing experimentation in practice, is the successful evaluation and adjustment of ends and values.

One of the main differences between successful and unsuccessful inquiry is that methods that tend to be unsuccessful avoid or dismiss experimentally based challenges to their received doctrines. Facts are selected because of their support for conclusions accepted in advance and often without qualification; new data are denied or ignored and improved hypotheses cannot arise. In broad terms, this is one of the crucial differences between science and ideology.

Reframing for entrepreneurship, investment, and life

Problem reframing is a useful tool not only in entrepreneurship, but in life more broadly, anywhere we examine problems and solutions. I used to teach this method in workshops to corporate employees, to help them identify and reframe problems in their businesses, which could be passed on to entrepreneurs to build from. At first I thought it useful only in that setting. But over time, I started using it in my product process, refining different tactics, and started using it with every new startup or product I worked on. Now i use it extensively in my investing practice when doing diligence on companies, or talking through ideas with founders. Through many iterations I've learned how it works for me.

Inquiry is a broader and more basic category than and encompasses science, art, even ethical decision making. As humans, it is a generic technique that we apply in these cases, even if they are different and have different purposes. Since reframing is a useful technique of inquiry, it can be valuable to much of life. As i’ve gotten older it’s become easier to apply it in more areas of my life.

How We Think

When I first learned about problem reframing, and started teaching it in innovation workshops, I became fascinated with why it worked, and I could sense that something deeper and more philosophical was going on. I’ve described some of the underlying insights that the phenomenology of problem reframing uncovers for us. But we can go another level further. What reframing reveals about how we experience the world, applies to the process of thought itself. The reason problem reframing is so fascinating to me is that it reflects the very essence of how we think. We experience the world as integrated, qualitative situations, and we operate largely through habit. When we pause to reflect, when we run into obstacles, when anything pushes us slightly out of our rhythm and equilibrium, we think. And in order to understand the meaning of a situation, thinking starts framing, discriminating, and parsing the situation into distinct objects, subjects, and relations. For humans, we don’t start with a reality filled with objects and properties and find ways to connect them (one of the great errors of epistemology historically). Rather we start with an integrated experienced unity, and discriminate our reality out of it. And the way we notice patterns, discriminate objects, and frame situations is a result of our acquired habits of perception, thought, and action.

How adept someone is at navigating reframing and the fluidity of means/ends thinking is a sign of moral sophistication. Framing is a matter of judgement. If I’m sitting in a room and knock over a lamp because I was startled by someone opening the door, what “caused” the lamp to fall? Was it my elbow? Was it the sound? Was it the person entering the room? The framing is a judgement, and one that is often selected based on the context rather than declaring a single cause of the event. If there is no judgement, then there is no moral responsibility, or moral reasoning at all. Without reframing, we may be tempted to use straight line instrumentalist thinking, and perhaps would sacrifice all ends in the service of one particular end.

How to act intelligently

Philosophy suggests that there are better and worse ways of thinking about the world, if your intention is to act intelligently. You can of course appeal to authority, political or religious fundamentalism, ideological purity, or magic, but you give up the need for anyone to accept your thinking as rational or intelligent.

Demonstrating intelligence through successful inquiry into a situation means not selecting facts on the basis of conclusions drawn in advance. If you ever feel like this is what’s happening, whether it’s done by you or someone else, reframing can help. If you want to act intelligently, problem reframing is a tool that passes the sniff test.

In all three examples that I described, we are doing philosophy. Figuring out how something works, or if it can work, is the realm of science or engineering. But figuring out if we should act, and the implications of acting, is the realm of philosophy. The reason I love problem reframing is that it clearly gets at and uncovers philosophical thinking by exposing the depth of experience as it is experienced, and giving you more surface area for consideration and experimentation, all so you can make more intelligent decisions.

In other words, problem reframing works because it reveals something deep about the world. That the world is experienced in a unified form, and problems are biased dimensions that we choose to pull out. To not succumb to that bias, reframe to explore as much of the problem space as you can. In doing so, you’ll be using a philosophical insight to your advantage, to think and act intelligently in the world. Guess philosophy is not useless after all.

Thanks for reading.

[1] What does this mean? That the basic unit of experience is an integrated situation that dynamically evolves through the interaction of an organism and environment (both of which are already integrated rather than clearly distinct from each other). Problems, like many other distinctions, are pulled out of these experienced situations by us, and the pull takes equally from the organism and the environment. Crucially, what we choose to pull out are patterns that relate to our interests, purposes, and activities. To more deeply analyze these, reframing helps parse them out beyond the immediate pull of our biases.

[2] When we experience situations that are not problematic, we’re often driven by habits. We’re not automata, but habits of thought and action can take us very far.