If you want to change things, don’t just work harder, change your thinking.
It’s amazing what new solutions can emerge when we flip your thinking and consider the problem from a different perspective.
Unfortunately, most of us are so set in our way of thinking that we struggle to shift perspective and to explore things from alternatives lenses.
I was talking to someone today about a change at work. They were frustrated and anxious. All they could see was the downside of the change and could not for even one second think that there was an upside. Or that the upside could work in their favour.
This reminded me of the Post-It Note story.
In the 1960s, a scientist at 3M named Spencer Silver was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive but failed miserably. What he created instead was a glue so weak it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. The adhesive stuck lightly to surfaces but didn’t bond tightly to them and could be peeled apart without leaving a mark.
By conventional thinking, this was a failed experiment. Silver himself wasn’t sure what to do with it, but he kept sharing it internally, convinced it had some use he hadn’t found yet. The company didn’t see a clear use for it, leading to a period where it was nearly abandoned.
Years later, Art Fry, another 3M scientist, was frustrated by something mundane. Every Wednesday night while practicing with his church choir, he would use little scraps of paper as bookmarks but by Sunday, he’d find that the bookmarks had all fallen out of the hymnal. He needed a bookmark that would stick to the paper without damaging the pages. He realized Silver’s adhesive could create a bookmark that would stay in place but not damage the book. He asked himself, what if the Silver’s product flaw was the solution?
The result was the Post-it Note. One of the most successful office products in history. A product born entirely from reframing a “failure” as a possibility. The adhesive didn’t change. The thinking did.
This is exactly how reframing works in real life. The situation doesn’t change. What changes is the angle from which you choose to look at the situation.
A great way to start practising reframing is to ask yourself whether how you see a problem, challenge or obstacle is the ONLY way to see it. What other perspectives could exist? How would someone else look at the situation, and what would they think of it?
The moment you admit that there might be another way of looking at the challenge is the moment you begin to shift. Change your thinking and the rest will follow.