THE ART OF FRAMING
BY MICHAEL WESTLAND-ROSE
Organisational leaders have a tough job these days communicating messages in a way that that will strongly effect peoples actions and decisions.
Why?
Simply because information has become so readily available. The downside to todays rapid communication structures is that less of the information actually sticks.
Think about how many emails you receive in one day, how many meetings you attend in one week, how many reports or documents you need to read in a month, how many presentations you attend in any given quarter. If you were to keep a record of how much information you are required to take in during just one month of your working life you would probably be staggered. The people you communicate with are also suffering the same overload of data.
Information of course is great for helping make decisions. The better the information, the better quality decision making - that’s the theory anyway. In practice people become much more selective. There’s a tendency to pull out what we want, maybe to hear what we want to hear, to select that which fits and quickly discard the rest.
In a way, we are having to be more selective because there’s often just far too much data to take in and not enough time to fully digest everything.
Slicing Through The Data
Leaders who are attempting to influence actions and decisions need to develop the art of ‘framing’ as a way of making messages literally slice through the rest of the data.
So what is framing? Rather like the word suggests, it puts an outline around the rest of the picture as an enhancement. For example, a painting may have a variety of colours. Placing that painting within a blue frame will inevitably help bring out the blue colours within the painting. A red frame would equally help highlight the red colours and so on. To take the analogy further, the amount of any one colour will make a difference to how the overall painting is received, and of course the size and positioning of certain items within that picture will attract the eye.
Any good photographer will tell you that the positioning and focusing of people or objects within a photograph makes a huge difference to the overall look and feel of the photograph and will clearly influence what the viewer sees in that photo.
How you frame an issue influences how others see it and focuses their attention on particular aspects of it. In communication terms, framing should create the result where the recipient receives exactly the right message. They don’t have to ask ‘what does this mean to me’, and the message is a persuasive one that sticks in the forefront of their mind.
26 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE MARCH 2015
FOR INLFUENCING DECISIONS