Frames [of Reference]

Later today I’m leading a workshop for a team on asking good questions, and we’ll be talking a lot about the frame of reference you uniquely use to critically understand something better.

A point that I make in the workshop is that each of us carries a unique frame (of reference) – or lens – in which we take on new information and process it. It’s hard to give a workshop on how to ask questions without first recognizing that everyone  may need to ask slightly different questions, in a slightly different way.

Some of us may carry a technical frame of reference – we look at problems from the mindset of: “What are the technical guts of this thing? How does it work, who might we need to make sure it keeps working, and what are the short- and long-term things that need to get built? And how does this impact the potential for future innovation?”

But some of us might carry a financial frame of reference – we look at problems from the economic impact: “How much does this thing cost and what is the business opportunity at hand? What would happen if we increase or decrease the cost structure? How does this thing that we have relate to the broader economic trends of market demands and competitors?”

In general I believe we all have a baseline reference frame – the things we use to start out learning new things. And it’s really important to understand what your unique lens is to learn something new, because adopting someone else’s frame will only work if your brain is wired the exact same way as theirs.

One reference frame that I’ve noticed I carry around a lot is a people-first frame. I’ve held this frame for a long time but you can only really notice it if you look backward and see how you’ve generally learned new things in your life.

For me, this practice started in my very first job out of school, when I worked at a boutique consulting firm in Philadelphia that helped Fortune 500 companies create software solutions for change management initiatives.

When a very large telecom company split into two smaller (but still quite large) entities, it was our team who created and rolled out the tool that deployed offer letters to each employee at the organization, along with a customized portal that let them “claim” their converted employee stock options in the new entity.

My job was to write all of the copy in the app itself, as well as all of the employee-facing communications about the stock option split program. I wrote briefs for executives, for HR leaders, and for managers, which were sent around internally on a biweekly basis – and translated into a half-dozen languages.

As a trained journalist, I remember having a hard time wrapping my head around this assignment initially – not only from the obvious complexity at hand, but also because I felt like I didn’t know who I was writing to. I didn’t know what it felt like to be an executive, let alone an HR manager or a team lead at a multi-billion dollar, international operation. I didn’t know what the vibe was like when people were receiving these messages. I didn’t know the language that would resonate best to get people on the receiving end to really hear what I was trying to convey.

On my very first business trip to the corporate campus, I remember sitting in a van on a tour with some of the HR executives who had hired us as they pointed out some of the office research buildings, lab spaces, and innovation hubs.

I asked innocently: “Can I go meet some people who are working on these products and talk to them a bit?”

I was met with blank stares.

“Why would you want to do that?” someone finally asked.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I guess I sort of want to understand what they are thinking about this whole separation that’s happening, and whether it can inform any of our work.”

“That’s cute,” someone said. Or maybe I imagined it. The point is – the conversion moved on. We did the project. I never did end up meeting any of the “every-person” employees who worked at the company. But it’s interesting to observe that, even then, the way I was trying to learn new information was by interacting with the people who are doing the thing.

When I worked at Stack Overflow, and I wanted to get better at speaking about our technical infrastructure, I spent hours with software developers on our team to understand their decision-making frameworks. When I worked in VC and wanted to understand how to best support the companies across our portfolio, the first thing I wanted to do was get out the door and in front of as many people at as many companies as possible.

But what I’ve learned is, for better or worse, my frame of reference, the lens in which I see the world, is through deep experiential immersion in someone else’s shoes. I’m sure there are other ways to learn new things, but I personally find it impossible without “trying on” a new life in their shoes for a little while.

It’s important to understand your own frame of reference because if you don’t, you’ll try to adopt someone else’s and wonder for a long time why you don’t “get it.”

This, by the way, is why there’s no such thing as a bad question – the questions we each need to ask in order to understand a new topic are uniquely specialized to our reference frames. The trick of course is knowing how (and when) to switch frames.