We Keep Seeing the Same Picture Because We Keep Using the Same Frame

We see a similar picture every time we look from the same frame.

Problems, solutions, opportunities, challenges. After a while, they all look the same. The problem feels familiar. The solution feels familiar. Even the opportunity, when it arrives, looks like something we have seen before.

The frame decides the picture

We are often told to think outside the box. To be creative. To find an unusual way.

The advice is not wrong, but it skips a step. We cannot think outside the box while we are still looking through it. The box is not only where we think. It is how we see.

That box is our frame. It is made of our training, our industry, our past successes, the people we work with and the language we use every day. It is useful. It lets us move quickly through familiar situations. But it also decides, quietly, what we notice and what we ignore.

So creativity does not start with a new idea. It starts with a new frame.

We must change the frame through which we see the world.

It is easier said than done. But it is worth it.

Three ways to change the frame

The difficulty is that we cannot easily see our own frame. We are standing inside it. So the change usually needs something from outside.

Talk to someone from a different domain. Someone with different experience, who is unaware of our world. They do not know what is normal for us, so they ask the questions we stopped asking long ago. What looks obvious to us looks strange to them, and that strangeness is useful.

Talk to someone who has helped others like us. Someone who has already helped people in our situation see things from a different perspective. They know our world well enough to understand it, but they are not bound by it. They have seen the same pattern elsewhere, and they know where it tends to lead.

Come out of our shell. Sometimes we do not need another person at all. We just need to come out of our shell, expose ourselves to the real world, and be fully aware of how the world unfolds around us. Read outside our field. Visit places where the work is done differently. Watch how other people solve problems that look nothing like ours, until we notice that they are not so different after all.

A familiar example

Consider a council finance team whose month-end close takes ten working days.

Every review produces the same answers. More staff. A better spreadsheet. Earlier cut-off dates. Each answer is reasonable, and each one comes from the same frame. Month-end is when reconciliations happen, so the only question anyone asks is how to do month-end faster.

Then someone joins from a retail business, where stock and cash are reconciled every day. They ask a simple question. Why wait until the end of the month at all?

Nobody in the room had asked it. The question was not clever. It was simply asked from a different frame.

What it actually takes

None of this requires special talent.

All we need is an open mind and curious intent. With those two things, there is plenty of opportunity to wear numerous frames and observe the fascinating world around us.

A new frame does not have to replace the old one. It adds to it. The more frames we are willing to wear, the more of the picture we can see.

Without an open mind and curious intent, we keep looking at new problems and seeing old pictures. And then we wonder why our solutions keep looking the same.

The questions that remain

Here are some questions to ponder.

When did you last look at a problem through someone else’s frame, rather than asking them to look through yours?

Who in your circle comes from a world entirely unlike yours, and how often do you ask them what they see?

And if every problem, solution and opportunity has started to look the same, is it the world that has stopped changing, or your frame?