Getting a Grip on Shifting Frames
mark November 13th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) This morning I was following up on some media. Two weeks ago, Frances submitted this great article to the Capital City Hues in Madison, WI. Since she was on the road, a few of us were shepherding the piece. In editing, we did a word count. What had begun as an almost 1,200 word essay had dropped to 700 words.
That was pretty amazing, but we had made some cuts, and if MSWord told us there were 700 words, there were 700 words. A few days later, we reflected on the drop, but didn’t question the count.
Today I went to the Capital City Hues website, but something seemed amiss. Seeing the text on one page, no way that was 700 words. Uh-oh, could we have sent the wrong file?
My heart and mind raced. I checked with my compatriot: Did we make a mistake? Had the paper seen an earlier file that didn’t get replaced?
No. It was—word for word—the exact same essay that Frances had finalized. The problem was we had done our count on a portion, not the entire text.
What a tiny matter, insignificant and easily corrected. Still this slight “slip” in my frame caused a very real panic. I was blind to what was right in front of me because I had hung my frame on the “facts.”
Frances invests a substantial amount of ink in Getting a Grip on just this point: How our beliefs are shaped by our frame, and how that frame often blinds us with “facts.”
Of course this is a minor example, but I had been thinking of more important frames earlier when this article in the Boston Globe set me off, reframing the cost of the war. Then this little post by Kevin Drum led me to this story on the Washington Post website.
How might changing our frame for the cost change the “facts” of the war itself? Moreover, if we genuinely internalize that it would cost less than the declared cost of the war (the Washington Post article cites a report that more than doubles that cost) to end poverty and malnutrition globally by 2015 and provide every child in the world with a primary education, what would we do? What must we do?
In what I considered a masterful frame shift, anticipating the Live 8 events before Gleneagles, a commercial asked: What if the tens of thousands who die every day of hunger disappeared from an American metropolitan area, one day from Des Moines, then from Baltimore, then Santa Fe? What if it were Rome or Stuttgart? This rising tide of death is invisible to most because it is hidden in the folds of the cloak of anonymous distance.
An item that has been much on Frances’ mind recently is the fragility of democracy worldwide. The imposition of martial law in Pakistan and the seemingly impending collapse in the former Soviet republic of Georgia—along with those signs that seem more immediate in the US—all seem to point to a common concern. How, then, does the legislative wrangling over “water-boarding” look from Tbilisi or Islamabad? How do we not see the scandal over telecom wiretapping immunity through that distant frame?
Clearly no single frame will unlock the multifaceted human experience. As Frances points out repeatedly, this infinite ability to re-imagine—even recreate—the world is our greatest strength and our Achilles’ heel. Perhaps it is the sine qua non of being human.
Perhaps, finally, it is not the specific frame that will grant success, but our ability to find—and utilize—challenging new frames that question our most sacrosanct ideas.
Maybe the genius of Getting a Grip is realizing that the numbers from the computer may—after all—be wrong.
Peace, Mark
