The Art of Opportunity Framing: Getting Unstuck and Restarting Progress

Maartje van Krieken: Hey, thanks for tuning in today. I'm glad you're here. We have one of my favorite topics to talk about today. I want to talk about a tool that is very useful when you are hitting a crisis, when your project is stranded, or when your organization feels stuck, and is it making progress or delivering as intended? The tool in my world is called opportunity framing, but you might have seen or heard some of its principles under different words or elements. To me, the tool is very different from goal setting, although I've seen it mixed up with this. To me, opportunity framing is more about the definition of success and alignment around that, rather than the intricate and consigned, concise and smart process around goal setting. Specifically, I think if you do opportunity framing, you might also want to do some goal setting within, but that's not the overarching principle that I want to talk about here today. So let's get into this. I talk a lot about creating clarity and focus or needing to know where you're going. The difference between being in bad chaos, aka overload, treading water, inefficiency, stress and good chaos, which is innovating, thriving, riding the waves and making progress and booking successes. The difference between those two, to me, is very largely dependent on having a clear filter and having clarity on where you're going or what success looks like. Works as a filter. It helps you make decisions. It helps you prioritize. It creates clarity for those in your team, what are the levers, what they can do to contribute to where things are headed, and hence it's a major tool to get out of dodge, really, and that it's relevant is clear, because over 40% of employees say that they have have stress because they don't know where they're going or where their business is going. They don't actually know what their work is supposed to contribute to. And people don't like that. People want to help reach the destination. Also, almost 40% well over a third of all projects fail because the definition of success is not clear, so the outcome of what the project is supposed to deliver or do is under defined. What's much more staggering and more important, I believe, to many of you, is that 91% of managers do not actually rely in peers on peers in interdependent organizations, because there is lack of trust that where their priorities are and where they're heading is aligned well enough with where you are heading, and hence that they are delivering their piece of The puzzle in the optimal way for you, leading to a lot of duplication of effort and work. The fact that that's 91% of managers suggest that all of us experience this at time in medium to large organizations, and so even a small reduction in those numbers would have a huge positive impact on your business. So opportunity framing, I call it a structured approach to identifying, defining and aligning on what success looks like amidst uncertainty. Yeah, so and that uncertainty can be created by different things. That uncertainty can be created by an immediate crisis, a major event that happened, that uncertainty can be created by a project or an organization slowly having derailed from its course. That uncertainty can also just simply be a fact of life due to the nature of the business you're in, right? If you're in a highly innovative industry, or a new tech development, or you're working disease control during a pandemic, for instance, then uncertainty is created and caused by the world that leads your business to exist in the first place, and so simply a fact of life. So where does opportunity framing come in? Opportunity framing, to me, is a very scalable tool. So it can, you can do a little bit of a back of an envelope exercise by yourself. I'm talking here more about the more purposeful deploy. And both the processes and the tools in that underneath that umbrella in a team or larger organization setting. So the symptoms I see when I would recommend doing this is the fact that stress levels are high, that feedback from the organization is that they don't really know where they're going, or they don't see how their work is contributing to the bigger picture, organizations where there's a lot of duplication of efforts organizations, or where projects and or initiatives are recycling and or Yeah, organizations where teams within the organization don't seem to collaborate or connect as well as they they should. So you see pain points and irritation at the interfaces. You probably hear comments like, Yeah, but they and, well, if only that department would do more. Well, we're trying really hard, but also we're missing this from here, and we need more from there. Yeah, so complaining, irritation, etc, at the interdependencies between groups of people, or even internal and external, and where this also comes into play is when there is a sudden situation. So the example I want to work through today is a Toyota example. In 2010 they had a malfunction of the accelerator pedal in a wide range of models and cars that were sold globally. So of course, a major safety issue, and yeah, as soon as you find out as a brand that's known for safety and reliability, of course, major disaster for the business. So what do you do? So then, taking into account what opportunity framing is intending to do in a situation like that is saying, Okay, this is where we're at. We need to come up with a solution out of this, right? And the first question to ask then is, what does that solution need to do? Whatever the plan that were, the concept, the idea that we're coming up with and that we're going to implement, what does it need to do? Rather than, how do we quantify it? No, what does it need to do? So in case of Toyota, of course, all these this mechanical issue needs fixing. Yeah, they need to replace all these parts to make working cars again. But at the same time, they also really realized that they needed to restore their image, because if they're the brand that's reliable and safe, then the only way to show to the world that they truly are that is to operate with that motto in this situation. And so what they did is that they issued a huge recall, but that went hand in hand with Swift and immediate action to make it very easy for people to come back with their car to find a place to go and have the relevant issue fixed. They also stopped production immediately and communicated that so they showed the world that they were taking accountability and that they really were operating from safety as a first priority. So talking about, what is it that the solution needs to do, the solution or the plan that's being implemented, the destination that you're working towards, what does it look like in terms of what does it need to do? And what it needs to do is for Toyota restore its image and fix all those cars in the process, and also fix the process internally to prevent it from happening again in projects. It's kind of the same, because I want you to see if your project is stalled, I would ask you to go back to the drawing board and sit down with your team and the relevant stakeholders and talk about, what is it that this project needs to do once we deliver it at the end, right? It needs to render a new, fully automated payment system implemented seamlessly that delivers the benefits we promise compared to the old system.

That is what it needs to do at the end, and then that helps you go to the next question, which is, okay, let's diagnose, where is that stuck? Where is that stuck? So is it because we over promised in terms of what that new system would do? And we're we, we are stuck on figuring out how we actually make this system deliver all the promises that were originally set out, or is it much simpler, and we're. There are some other priorities brought into the same team, and so there's not the same amount of resources who can work on this. There may be an original plan wasn't accounted for year end payments or annual planning cycles, and so the project got stalled a bit because it needs to work around that. And now what the late there could be several things. It's typically not one thing, right? Because if it's one very obvious thing, you probably would have tackled it. So I'm suspecting that your project is stalled because there is a bunch of little things. But asking yourself, if this is what I want this project to do at the end, where am I currently? Then getting stuck? Getting it there, it definitely tends to help you diagnose the challenge at hand. Yeah, that's the looking back question. There is also a looking forward question, because I look at opportunity framing as a bit of a reboot. You've decided that whatever you've been trying to do in your organization or on your project is not working, and hence you need to go back to the drawing board and redefine what success looks like, or you find yourself in a crisis and answerable. So there is a clear call to action and pressure to actually deliver something. So in this situation, once you've defined where it is you're going and what, what the solution needs to do, then the next question is, what are the biggest levers you have to achieve that? And in the case of Toyota, it was clearly stopping production immediately, and not putting out more cars, but also very much making the public facing part of this process to return the cars, to have them fixed, and hence show the world firsthand that they were dealing with The problem was a major lever to rebuild trust. Then there was another major lever towards building trust that they deployed that maybe wasn't so visible to the members of the public and to their consumers, but that kind of closed the back door, which was fixing their processes internally and up their reliability and quality control significantly, because they also realized that this was a once and never again type event. If their solution was going to rebuild trust, then that solution was also successful. That solution was also dependent on this never happening again. And so there was a significant investment internally in Toyota that probably most of the audience never saw. And if it works well, we'll never see because there will not be another such downfall in the process, right? And so a big part of opportunity framing is spending the time and effort to identify which are the biggest levers that will get you there, and that requires stakeholders, all stakeholders, being involved in some way, shape or form. The majority who have active working parts and or decision makers should be involved directly. Those more on the periphery can be involved in a more informed way, but this is the time and place in the process to bring everybody in and say, Okay, if this is where we need to go, and this is where we're at now, and these are some of the barriers we've identified, and these are some of the opportunities, the levers we've identified, what is it that each and everyone in your own space can do to enable those to either take away some of the blockers to create, you know, for your finance system project, to free up more resources, or is there a way to alter the deadline, or is there a way to if we realize that this the system is not going to achieve all it should, or all that was promised, and hence there was an over promise, then you need to reevaluate what benefits the system can and will bring, and if that is enough to keep the project going, or maybe stop it there and then, or if with A little bit additional investment of some sort of resources. Those things are achievable, and whether it's worth it doing that supplemental investment, those are the types of conversations that all stakeholders need to be part of, and so they need to be in the room at some point in time together again. Here, it's important that people hear the same messages and are sitting at the same table, and these conversations are not had one by one, because going back to what creates part of the challenge here is that people don't don't trust what happens in other groups that they're not part of, right? So we build trust and alignment by having people in the same room as part. Of the same conversations so we can fix the things around the interdependencies, where usually a lot of the breakdown happens. Then ai, ai does play a role in opportunity framing for me, of various parts in the process, when I work in small groups on defining what the solution needs to do. Yeah, so what does it need to do and look like? And defining that destination as broad as I can, including some of the boundaries and including what it's not. I tend to use AI to frame and reframe to Word and reword, to use different vocabulary to put in my definition and then ask it to play it back to me in a different style, to see how it translates and where I maybe still have clarity in that. Ai, of course, also can process large volumes as data. So if you are trying to figure out where you're getting stuck, or if you need some big order of magnitude answers so that you can make some decisions, then AI can tell you what the impact may be of certain levers can process your data and can help the discussion alone, because you should be able to at least get some rough answers out of it that can, yeah, as I said, give you order of magnitude indications on whether left or right makes any real difference, or whether they're somewhat in the same ballpark, which can help a discussion along quickly, and hence can make this process quicker than it used to be. There is lots to lots of smaller tools and processes and facilitation skills that come into opportunity framing and a good facilitator will tailor a session to the challenge at hand and the individuals involved and the size of the turnaround, or whether this is from scratch or refinement challenge, they will tailor that to the situation. The one thing that's pretty universal, and we touched on it already a little bit, is stakeholders, and not so much in the crisis situations. Because typically, if there's a crisis situations, we're all very good at bringing everybody up to speed and keeping people in the loop, even if they don't get a seat at the table, or even time, doesn't allow them to have a seat at the table, because of the nature of the situation when projects derail or when organizations start to get stranded, there is typically a group of stakeholders That has not been kept up to speed as well as others. And the challenge then is, if you go and do a reframing of some sorts to try and create clarity and get to a better place, that's a very positive experience for you and the team. But if you do all that work and then, hence change course, and then start to celebrate successes on the basis of an altered or new definition, then you can imagine that you run into challenges with stakeholders that were not brought on board with this. So if you are taking the post, actually do this, and you know that there are stakeholders that haven't really are maybe not as aware how dire things are or how things are not as they were at the start of the project or the initiative or the start of the planning cycle, or the last time you talk to them with regards to business performance, This is your time to go back. In my experience, this is actually an excellent opportunity to go back to these stakeholders and say, Hey, we've been for a while trying to fix this or trying to right this ship, or try to alter a course on this finance system project implementation, and it isn't going where it should be going.

And so here is what we're going to do about this. We are actually going to take the time. It shouldn't cost you a lot of time, but we're going to take the pause to do a framing or a reframing. We're going to create clarity in direction. We're going to then communicate it and describe all that in much more clarity than we have before. And again, AI can come into Word and reword all your messaging and then use that to restart or through start the project the process. And once we've gone through the process, we can also show you why we know that it's going to work this time, and how we're going to do this, and this is how we think we should or could involve you in the process. So use the opportunity to bring back everybody back in the loop. Just make sure you don't lose them again in the next iteration, alive. And those stakeholders behind where you're going is such a powerful tool when it comes to empowerment, and we've talked about this often, if people know where you're going, if they truly understand the picture of what you envisage, where you're headed towards, and what that looks like, yeah, what does that then do? What does it look like? How does it feel? How do you how do you know that you've achieved it? What color does it have? What does it smell like if you have that well defined and other people can see that picture too. They can tap into their own capacity and capability much easier and proactively take from there what they have to contribute to your cause. People want to help. People want to do that. So the power of reframing is creating that clarity, and hence creating that filter that will allow you to work through the overload, pull out the stuff that makes a difference. Prioritize, make faster decisions, bring your team back on board, reduce the frustration, reduce the stress, and reduce the duplication of efforts in your organization. So in summary, if you have a project that's stalled, if you have a business process or a part of your business that feels like it's treading water and it's not progressing, if you end up in a crisis and emergency, then reframe, frame or reframe, take the time. If you have skilled facilitators in house, they can do this for you, if not bring in an external person. For this, there is a whole tool suite behind it in a couple of days, you can reset things for large scale projects or processes. It doesn't take weeks or months. It's worth your effort and worth the money, because if you can reduce that 91% of people managers who don't trust the output from their peers in work that's interdependent from each other. Or if you can stay away from that 37% of projects that fail, or if you can keep your people largely out of that 40% of employees or frustrated because they don't actually know where their organization is going, then you know you'll be more successful. If you want to know more about this subject, reach out if you could use some help facilitating. Let me know you know where to find me. Thank you for tuning in today, and good luck creating more clarity in direction. Hope to see you here next week. Thank you.