Leadership Trap #2: Prematurely Framing the Problem
Executive Insight
The most expensive problem-solving mistakes often happen before solutions are evaluated: leaders define the problem too quickly from where they sit.
Expand the stakeholder boundary before narrowing the problem boundary. A better frame doesn’t just reveal different risks; it often reveals entirely different opportunities.
Nobody could tell me what “resilience” meant.
Years ago, I was asked to explore what resilience should mean for a rapidly growing city.
It was becoming a hot topic in municipal planning. The Rockefeller Foundation’s recently launched 100 Resilient Cities initiative was bringing greater attention to the physical, social, and economic challenges cities face.[1]
There was just one problem: Nobody seemed to agree on what resilience actually meant.
I could have started by defining it. Instead, I started asking questions.
I interviewed people across nearly every City department—including infrastructure functions as well as Finance, HR, Risk Management, and Emergency Management.
Everyone had part of the answer. And that was a problem.
When everyone owns a piece, nobody sees the whole.
Different perspectives changed the problem.
Emergency Management viewed resilience largely through the familiar cycle of prepare → respond → recover. That perspective led me to questions beyond emergency preparation: Do we have enough depth to sustain multiple response teams? Where are the single points of failure? How quickly could essential services recover?
Risk Management offered another lens: quantify exposure by considering the probability of an event, the probability that a particular vulnerability would be affected, and the financial consequences.
Suddenly, resilience wasn’t simply a desirable characteristic. We had a way to evaluate whether investments intended to improve it were worthwhile.
Neither perspective defined resilience by itself. Together with insights from other departments, they changed the shape of the problem.
After those interviews, I developed a working definition, summarized the City’s vulnerabilities, and mapped them across departments. Only then did I recommend where focused effort could have the greatest impact—from long-range planning and stormwater standards to scenario exercises around acute shocks and chronic stressors.
Discovery came before definition.
Resist framing the problem from where you sit.
Bolman and Deal’s Reframing Organizations has influenced my leadership thinking for years for precisely this reason. Their work demonstrates how leaders can become locked into one way of interpreting a situation and how deliberately changing frames can produce different diagnoses, options, and strategies.[2]
The practical implication for me is straightforward: Expand the stakeholder boundary before narrowing the problem boundary.
Your position gives you a perspective. It doesn’t give you the perspective.
That’s particularly important when a challenge crosses organizational boundaries. Resilience didn’t belong to Emergency Management, Public Utilities, Finance, Sustainability, or Risk Management. Each function could see something the others couldn’t.
The same is true of many difficult enterprise problems. Before defining them, ask more people to describe what they see: Tell me more.
A better frame reveals different risks—and different opportunities.
During one workshop, a small cross-functional group was examining extreme precipitation and wastewater operations.
Then, someone asked a question that changed the conversation: “What percentage of the river downstream of the treatment plant is our effluent?”
The question expanded the system boundary.
We had been considering whether the City’s wastewater infrastructure could withstand an extreme event. Now we had to consider what would happen downstream if it couldn’t.
That reframing exposed risks to smaller communities that weren’t visible when we considered the City’s infrastructure in isolation.
It also opened an entirely different solution space.
The conversation expanded from protecting the existing treatment process to reconsidering the process itself. Moving toward anaerobic digestion offered greater operational resilience while creating other potential benefits: cleaner effluent, renewable natural gas, usable fertilizer, and reduced need for thousands of acres devoted to land application.
A wider frame didn’t merely reveal more problems. It revealed more possibilities.
“Tell me more” is an executive discipline.
Reframing doesn’t mean postponing decisions indefinitely.
Discernment isn’t hesitation. Nor is it analysis paralysis.
It’s resisting the temptation to confuse your perspective with the problem itself.
When a challenge crosses organizational boundaries, I want to understand how it looks from several places inside—and sometimes outside—the system. What does Operations see? Finance? Engineering? Risk? The customer? The community downstream?
Each answer may expose another assumption. Each revelation may require translation before people actually share an understanding of what it means.
That’s why I increasingly think of discovery and translation as iterative. You discover something, translate it across perspectives, discover something else, and continue until the shape of the problem becomes clear enough to act.
Only then should you narrow the frame.
And the first question doesn’t need to be sophisticated. Often, it’s simply: “Tell me more.”
References
[1] The Rockefeller Foundation, “100 Resilient Cities.” https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/100-resilient-cities/
[2] Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Wiley.
