10: Frame Shifting
By "frame shifting," the author is referring to changing your mental perspective. We have a habitual way of thinking about things, a default mode in which our mind works, that is adopted because it is successful and efficient. But limiting yourself to a single frame also brings with it filters that cause you to overlook information.
The author tells an anecdote about looking for his car keys - walking thorough his home from room to room and looking down at every surface on which he might have set them. He didn't find them until he knelt on the floor and saw they had fallen behind a piece of furniture: from a physical perspective of standing, he never would have seen them, but when he changed his perspective, he spotted them almost immediately.
The problem with mental conception is similar to that of physical perception: we are limited by our customary way of "seeing" things. By frame shifting, a change of mental perspective can make things evident that were invisible or ignored.
The author lists some of the constraints that limit human thinking ability (EN: this list is likely far from comprehensive).
- Limited Perception - We are not omniscient, and cannot know or perceive everything, so we must act on incomplete information at all times.
- Limited Attention - We cannot process everything we perceive, nor every thought that crosses our mind. When we attempt to focus on one thing, we ignore everything else, and often fail to accurately assess what is relevant.
- Limited Processing - Thinking is limited to the capacity of working memory, and it's suggested we can only juggle about seven pieces of information at a time.
- Limited Retrieval - While there is some argument as to how much information we store in long-term memory, there is little argument that we are unable to access everything that is in our memory.
He mentions the psychological process of "chunking," which creates hierarchies and taxonomies of information in the human mind. If you ask a person to name every food they can think of, their mind freezes. If you ask them to name every fruit, they will fare a little better. If you ask them to name every red fruit, they will far better still. If you ask them to name every red fruit that is a berry, they will provide a nearly comprehensive list.
Then, there's some talk of strategic narratives, which are common in Chinese and Japanese literature. A sequence of simple phrases, which are abstract metaphors, calls to mind a possible approach to a problem so that the decision-maker can consider multiple approaches. The same exists in western culture, though they are often not as terse or poetically phrased. For example, the "Trojan horse" stratagem implies a complicated procedure of deception and surprise, which might be more difficult to consider if you were to dwell on the incidental details.
Strategic narratives and problem-solving techniques often involve disruption thought and causing a person to change their frame of mind to perceive the problem in a different manner, and to consider more than just the most obvious solution.
This is a particular problem with thinking: we gravitate toward our first plausible idea and stop thinking about other approaches. But the more strategic objectives you are able to consider, the greater your chances of finding one that will be successful, rather than working one that is flawed on a fundamental level.
Disruption of traditional patterns of thought are particularly important in a competitive situation. If ten companies are attempting to solve the same problem, they will generally go about it in the same way, and victory goes to the company that executes most efficiently on a common strategy. But a better way to compete is to try an entirely different approach to the problem, and work an entirely different solution - it is the superiority of the strategy, rather than the efficiency of execution, that leads to victory. And it is much easier to win with a different approach than to win by working harder at doing the same things.
Anecdote: Urban Outfitters
The author mentions an interview with the CEO of Urban Outfitters, a fast-frowning and profitable clothing retailer, who contributed his success to the fact that "we knew nothing about the business when we started."
Operationally, a lack of industry knowledge is considered to be a liability because a person doesn't know common best practices. But strategically, it can be an asset because their thinking is not limited to what is already assumed by other firms.
Some of the unusual tactics the firm tried were:
- To sell exclusively to college students, considered a low-income and unprofitable segment by most clothing retailers
- To hire managers with degrees in fine art and liberal arts rather than business to ensure original thinking rather than traditional
- To decentralize operations to give store managers latitude to customize their store to the local market rather than forcing the uniformity of a franchise
- To sell used clothing alongside new merchandise in a store
- To remove the "district" layer of management so that there was less monitoring, oversight, and central control of stores
- To separate design from merchandising, so that the designers didn't have an automatic market but had to compete for acceptance with stores
(EN: The details are scant and the reader is left to himself to figure out how each of these tactics was superior to other retailers. It seems one can reason it out, though it is based on assumptions and stereotypes of retail operations.)
Anecdote: Lessons from Dogfighting
The author relates the points of a strategy that was created by the US Air Force's top pilot for training other pilots to outmaneuver enemies, and has a simple four-step process
- Collect or consider all the data at your disposal, not just that which you assume is relevant
- Derive multiple models of the problem from the data, rather than starting with a single model and choosing data that fits
- Analyze the various options and determine which is the best fit for the problem
- Take action on your decisions
What interests the author is that the first three steps are about strategy, and only the last one is about execution. He senses that this is a problem in the business world, and does a little more research to back it: searching Amazon, he found over 6,000 books about execution, but less than 1,000 about strategy.
It seems that, culturally, we are more inclined to seek out a plan on which we can take action, and less inclined to invest time in developing a good plan.