I like my job the most when leadership comes to me with a business challenge where communication will play an important role, and I’m asked to create a comms strategy to help them reach their goals. The opportunity to be creative while providing substantial value to your company or client is what it is all about.
In that situation I immediately, in my mind, start to reframe the problem to gain a fresh perspective. “Mastering the ability to reframe problems is an important tool for increasing your imagination,” points out Tina Seelig of Stanford University, “because it unlocks a vast array of solutions. With experience it becomes quite natural.”
For me, the key to reframing is asking three questions. Sometimes I ask them outright, sometimes I embed them into the conversation, but I always get the answers to these three things:
- Where do you want to go? What is your business objective? How will you know you are successful? Where do you want to end up when this project is over?
- Where are you now? What is the current situation, and how far away from your goals are you? What resources do we have at our disposal?
- What stands in the way? What are the impediments to success? Internal lethargy, outside pressures, budget constraints, pockets of leadership resistance?
More detailed questions will come later. But if I walk away from the initial conversation with the answers to those three, I’ll know what I’m doing and what I’m up against. I can begin playing with perspective, changing my point of view on the situation so that I know the game I’m playing, and can begin creating a strategy to address it.
The game I’m playing?
Yes, game. Card games and sports are, for me, very effective in reframing a situation.
Now, I do global marketing and communications for a major international business services firm that employs approximately 250,000 people in over 150 countries, with English not the first language for many of them. So for business communications I use clear and simple vocabulary, avoid idioms, and refer to months rather than seasons since it’s all different in the southern hemisphere. And, especially, I don’t use sports analogies.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t carry those sports analogies in my head. Having been an athlete when I was young, and a coach when I got older, and even a sports writer at a national publication for a little while, sports provide a natural way to change perspective.
But one size does not fit all, and one sport won’t provide all the analogies. You need to assess what is going on, and understand what game you are playing. Here are some simplistic imaginary examples:
- Sometimes you have one chance to try something, and when you pull the trigger on it you know you’ll set off a chain reaction that will be mostly out of your control. Its baseball, and you’re at bat.
- Sometimes the only way the project is going to be a success is if everyone has highly defined, even compartmentalized roles, and executes a tight and rigid plan. You’re playing American football.
- Sometimes you are essentially on your own and the only thing standing between you and success is one enemy – a problematic colleague, or a competitor, or a circumstance. You’re playing singles tennis.
- And sometimes you’re in a race. It might be a sprint or a marathon, on foot or on wheels, but it’s a race pure and simple, and can’t be mistaken for anything else.
You have to recognize the game for what it is. If you walk into a situation and have the graceful, self-contained strategy of golf in your head but the challenge in front of you is more like the barely controlled, push and pull chaos of soccer, you’re going to be ill-prepared for what needs to be done.
Know the sport you’re using
And you have to genuinely understand the sport if you use this approach. That’s why I never use rugby or cricket as analogies, as I still find parts of those sports incomprehensible. Because misunderstanding your analogy is worse than having no analogy at all!
To take this sports idea a step further: to see the consequences of misunderstanding the game, just look at what happens to teams led by mediocre coaches. When my son was playing AAU basketball all around the northeast US, I had the chance to watch a lot of youth coaches in action. And it astounded me how often these guys didn’t really understand the game they were supposed to be coaching, and they led consistently underperforming teams because of that.
Ask yourself this core question: “How do you win at basketball?” You might answer, “Whoever scores the most points.” But that is really just a different way of describing the final score; finishing with the most points is your objective. (As in the first question above: ‘What is your business objective?’) But how do you get there?
The crucial thing about basketball is that on any one possession your team can only score one to (rarely) four points. Or none, since the opponent is trying to defend their goal and either deny you points, or to force you to lose possession. (Another question: ‘What are the impediments to success?’) Then the opponent tries to get their one to four points. So it goes, back and forth.
Broken down this way, it should be obvious that basketball isn’t really about scoring points; this isn’t baseball where a team can have a huge number of runs in a single inning that can turn a game around. It’s about being more efficient in converting possessions into points; about how many successful possessions you have, compared to your opponent’s. (That’s the game you’re playing!)
It sounds like a small distinction, but it actually is a huge difference. This is why defense is so critical in basketball. If you have shooters galore who can put up great offensive numbers but you don’t do anything to disrupt the opponent’s offense, you’re going to lose. (That third question: ‘What resources do we have at our disposal?’) I’ve seen coaches, late in a game, ten points behind, take good defenders and rebounders off the court and replace them with outside shooters who neither defend nor rebound. They seemed to think points would magically appear while the game clock slowed and the opponents spontaneously collapsed.
But of course that never happened. Those shooters could only get a couple of points at best each possession, and meanwhile the other team answered, maintaining the lead. It was a basketball version of selling goods for less than what you paid for them, but imagining that you’ll make up the difference in volume.
It works that way in marketing and communications, too
I’ve met marketers like that, well-intentioned people who either didn’t recognize the game they were playing, or didn’t take the time to think it through…
- They spend time and money distributing press releases in support of things that have almost no interest for traditional media, because distributing press releases is what they always do.
- They get excited about the reach and engagement of their social campaign, but there is no business objective shaping it, so it sits isolated in a vacuum.
- They boast about how many visitors came to the company’s page online, but their goal was actually to capture registrations and the web page didn’t drive that.
- They don’t narrow down their target audience, and therefore put most of their advertising in front of the wrong demographics.
Communicators in this situation need to reframe their thinking. As McDonalds’s CEO Steve Easterbrook puts it, “Whether it’s in communications or marketing or strategy, you need people to come in with a fresh perspective.” And if you can jump-start that thinking by using a sport, or a scenario from Greek mythology, or a chapter from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or whatever else serves your purpose, then have at it.
Because the most important thing is to get that different point of view to unlock new paths and alternative solutions.
Originally published on LinkedIn on 11 June 2017.