Early in my management consulting business, I learned the power of business metaphors. And of reframing problems and solutions with different metaphors to gain support for achieving certain organizational objectives and personal goals. Framing is one way of seizing leadership opportunities. It’s all about how you manage meaning with words, the central task of leadership. Talk is actually the resource you use to get things done. So, anyone who wants to change thinking and get things done pays close attention to metaphors, the very best descriptive lens
Louis Pondy, one of the more effective management scholars, emphasized that leaders’ effectiveness lies in their “ability to make activity meaningful” for others. Effective leaders “give others a sense of understanding what they are doing.” Managers, in contrast, pay attention to how things get done, while leaders pay attention to what events and decisions mean.
The fundamental tool of making or creating meaning is the ability to frame. Framing not only makes sense of an activity or process, but it also sets forth the character and significance of a subject.
Framing and business
In complex and chaotic business environments, there is usually a lot of maneuverability around “the facts.” But if there is any uncertainty or ambiguity around facts, the game is about constructing reality, through framing, leading others to action.
The early desktops like the Apple II sometimes required the end-user to physically cut some wires and solder others together to make configuration changes. Changes were intended to be largely permanent for the life of the hardware, making skills like soldering necessary. But as the computer became more accessible for people, they became difficult for computer users lacking skill with soldering irons. Rather than cutting and soldering connections, jumpers or DIP switches replaced wire soldering. Eventually, that become too complex, so computer configuration became automatic. Some wise business people referred to the connections with the metaphor of “plug and play.” Plug and play remains in the center of technology language because it both addresses the process and the significance of the technology. Now, marketers and salespeople use “plug and play” as one means that specifies simplicity, making them more useful for amateurs. Plug and play have been applied throughout the tech industry, and beyond, making the metaphor (frame) iconic: a widely recognized and established frame of reference.
Framing and photography
One way of understanding framing better is to notice how gifted photographers show us their view of the world through photographs. They capture a viewpoint framing their subjects to capture the world through photographs. Nick Ut, an AP photographer of the Vietnam War believed the right photo could end the war. His famous picture of children and a naked child running and crying from an explosion was perhaps the most famous photo of that war—and had a lot of power for the ending of that war.
Dorothea Lange’s photo of the migrant mother with two children and her hand to her chin, perhaps history's most famous photograph, was a unique and powerful frame. Lange, who believed that one could understand others through close study, tightly framed the children and the mother, whose eyes, worn from worry and resignation, look past the camera. It remains the iconic frame of the depression. Lange could have framed the depression through pictures of empty factories, abandoned farms, or large throngs of unemployed people lined up at soup kitchens. Instead she framed the depression in terms of the people who were suffering. The photo, like the Vietnamese photo, has become iconic.
Framing and literature
Framing may be neutral, serious or even amusing—as long as it is descriptive and manages meaning to achieve the creator’ objectives. In the latest New Yorker (May 11, 2020), the science writer, David Quammen interviews Ali Khan, formerly of the CDC and now of the US Public Health Service. Khan is a physician and epidemiologist, who has a way with language, both serious and amusing.
Early in the article, Khan dismissed Ebola, but “for my money,” “SARS infected a little more than eight thousand people, “of whom about ten percent died, and then the outbreak ended.” “Money” as a metaphor is usually applied to issues of wealth or high importance. It’s unusual to apply it to a disease or infection. It becomes attention-getting in this use.
Quammen follows up the money metaphor with another which emphasizes its contagiousness. “SARS was the bullet that went whistling past humanity’s ear.” A near miss?
In a long paragraph well into the article, both Khan and Quammen play with ear-catching metaphors. The paragraph considers the tardy, inadequate and confusing response of the federal government. In the government’s failures to appreciate and respond to the virus warnings. Khan refers to the failure as “lack of imagination.” Quammen refers to the failure as the absence of the “smoke alarm.” And then after John Bolton took over, he dissolved the pandemic organization. And Quammen, continuing the metaphor, wrote that “a smoke alarm doesn’t work when the battery has been removed.”
Referring to the collapse of investments in organizational preparation for pandemics, a research virologist referred to the collapse as an “attention-deficit disorder on a global scale.”
The most powerful tool of influence is language. And each day is filled with dozens of opportunities to influence perceptions, manage meaning, rally support and spur action. Whether in photography, business or literature, framing is one of the most powerful tools available to any craftsman in today’s world.
“War” is the metaphor of choice for the pandemic. Why? That metaphor has unusual resonance for Americans. I suspect it’s not the metaphor of choice in much of the world.
**See especially: Fairhurst and Sarr, The Art of Framing.
**A currrent exhibition of Lange's photos, including the "Migrant Mother," is currently on exhibition at MOMA: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/304