What are frames? Frames are mental models that we use to simplify our understanding of the complex world around us. They help us to make sense of it all. They consist of our assumptions about how things work.
So what does this have to do with project management? Alot actually. How we frame a problem often shapes the solution.
Prospect theory, created by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979 is a concept in behavioural economics that aims to describe how we make decisions when faced with risk, probability and uncertainty. All the ingredients we have on projects.
Daniel Kahneman also wrote the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I cannot recommend enough! – (Amazon affiliate link)
Prospect theory suggests that framing a situation in a certain way can greatly impact the way we act and that framing situations in terms of a loss causes us to take more risks. This extended into management is where it caught my interest. Framing things as threats or opportunities can change the way we react to messages and situations.
There is a fascinating case study of the newspaper industry and how it responded to the threat of the Internet in the early 90’s. The full article can be found here: https://nieman.harvard.edu/articles/newspapers-and-the-internet/
To summarise, organisations act very rigidly when responding to a threat (the introduction of internet) and act more flexibly and adaptively when responding to opportunities. The newspaper companies that viewed the introduction of the Internet as a threat responded by throwing more money at the problem but resulted in a replication of their hard copy version of the newspaper except online. Whereas the newspaper companies that viewed the introduction of the internet as an opportunity didn’t necessarily allocate enough resources to tackle the problem.
I think the key takeaway here is to frame and tailor your problem or situation on projects to your audience. You know your stakeholders best, and as a steward of your project it is up to you to get the right outcome for the business.
Happy project managing!🙂
ThePMPath 