Framers summary

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to apply communist ideals to farming practices. To do that, they adopted Lysenkoism, a theory of plant genetics based on Marxist-Leninist thought. Lysenkoism promoted a number of bogus claims, like the idea that crops could be planted very close together. Supposedly, the crops wouldn’t compete for resources, just like members of the same social class in a communist society would not compete with one another. 

This policy, as you might imagine, was a total disaster. It’s also a perfect example of framing gone awry. The Soviet Union increased the area of cultivated land a hundredfold, yet yields rotted or died, leading to mass famine and death. The nation had taken a frame from economics –⁠ communism –⁠ and applied it to farming, with brutal ramifications. 

Ben Bernanke is an economist who’s known for helping prevent total disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. Things were looking dire for banks, but policymakers were operating under the frame that bailing out individual firms would create perverse incentives for others. 

Bernanke thought differently. He’d studied the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression – and so he understood the causal links between the central bank’s response and the damage it had done to the economy. Bernanke directed the Federal Reserve to buy up assets from banks, thus supplying them with new cash they could lend and infuse the economy with. 

It was the final game of the 2018 World Cup, and French striker Antoine Griezmann was gearing up to take a free kick. As his shot hurtled toward the goal, it skimmed the top of Croatian defender Mario Mandžukić, shifting the ball just out of the goalie’s reach and into the back of the net.

The referee for the game recorded the point as an “own goal” for Croatia. To make that call, the ref imagined an alternate reality –⁠ a counterfactual –⁠ in which Mandžukić hadn’t touched the ball. And he concluded that, in this imaginary version of the game, the goalie would’ve easily caught it –⁠ making Mandžukić, rather than Griezmann, the true goal scorer.

The architect Frank Gehry famously claimed that his most difficult assignment was one in which he was told to build a house with no constraints whatsoever. The assignment paralyzed him; with so many options, he didn’t know which way to turn. 

Conversely, when the children’s writer Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, was challenged to write a book with just 50 different words of one syllable each, he came up with the immensely popular Green Eggs and Ham.

Have you heard the expression, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? All too often, this is the relationship we have with frames. We tend to stick to the frames we know well and have applied in the past. That’s not necessarily bad; in fact, it can frequently help us make quick decisions that lead to good outcomes. The catch is that leaning on the same frames all the time reduces our ability to switch perspectives and reframe a situation when necessary.

Make no mistake: reframing is anything but easy. However, resisting known frames and generating new ones is sometimes the only way to solve a problem.

In 1959, there were three times as many tech companies based around Boston’s Route 128 as there were in Silicon Valley. By 1990, that statistic was exactly the reverse. What happened? 

Well, East Coast tech companies were focused on stability over novel thinking. Its organizations were deeply formal and hierarchical, and employees were rewarded for sticking to what corporate higher-ups thought was best. Over on the West Coast, though, the business environment was flush with small, decentralized companies that prized innovation and novelty. Employees from different firms were encouraged to meet with one other to share ideas.