learning a wide variety of frames is crucial for progress
To get better, we must learn to see problems through multiple frameworks. A single classical lens may trap you. Being able to switch lenses raises the opportunity of finding better answers.
How individuals can train the ability to choose a framework
How organizations can make multi-framework thinking actually work instead of collapsing into sameness.
Joel Podolny
A top academic person (Harvard/Stanford/Yale) who changed the ordinary curriculum at Yale to a cross-disciplinary courses with many different models rather than one right template.
Steve Jobs wanted “Thinking Different” to become a transferable mental “identity”. Podolny built Apple University to institutionalize cognitive flexibility and hold core concepts yet drop them when better viewpoints emerge. That produces conflicts, but the benefits cover the costs.
Tim Cook after Jobs: Kept the emphasis on diversity as a performance advantage.
An 8×8 checkerboard has two opposite-corner white squares removed. Can you cover the remaining 62 squares with 31 dominoes (each domino covers two adjacent squares)?
Typical (failing) approach: Trial-and-error arrangements of multiple attempts. The “placement frame”.
Each domino always covers one black and one white square.
Removing two white squares leaves unequal counts of white and black squares, so that kind of perfect coverage is impossible.
The solution comes from reframing the representation, not from more persistence.
Problems like this one are all around us. In these moments, we can’t sequentially reason our way through them. The very tools that improve ourability to apply a frame—that is, frequent practice of counterfactual thinking—provide little help for choosing a frame. That presents a huge challenge. If we can’t do better at choosing a frame despite our advances in applying them, our framing will remain stunted. We will be stuck with an incomplete tool, the head of a hammer without a handle. We need a different strategy.
It may be tempting to think that mental diversity means exposing oneself to a great number of ideas, opinions, and views. But that misses the point. The advantage does not lie in volume but variation.
Adding new frames to one’s mental inventory in this way is useful but it has limitations. As the number of cases that are considered in business school settings is relatively small, the method provides only a limited number of frames to students. This could be misinterpreted to suggest to students that these frames are sufficient to solve most real-world problems, thereby failing to prepare them for more radical reframing. That concern is not new—it was understood by the Harvard Business School dean who launched the case study method, Wallace Donham. During the Great Depression, he worried that the casestudy method was too narrow, producing business leaders who failed “to see things in wide relations,” as he put it in a Harvard Business Review article in 1933. Of course, this isn’t a fatal flaw: it is better to be familiar with some of the most useful frames than none at all.
The first and easiest strategy for adding mental models that are quite different from the ones we already know is to look at how others frame a problem. If we come in contact with new mental models we can add them to our armory. Another strategy for increasing mental diversity is to whet our appetite for new ideas. Call it “cognitive foraging”: the pursuit of new ways of thinking and seeing the world without the specific aim to acquire frames.