Problem Framing
For a pragmatic approach to managing and leading, problem framing is of central importance. Elsewhere, I’ve written in detail about problem framing and re-framing, or see the brief overview in the box to the right. But for this post, the first in a series, the purpose is different. If you routinely employ problem framing, you’ll probably have experienced a few occasions where the re-framing of a problem results in–to use an already over-used phrase–a truly ‘game changing’ level of performance improvement. These re-framings belong here, in The Hall of Frame (sorry). For this series, I draw from my own experience, from published or historical examples, and invite you to share yours as well.
Mail Order Pharmacy
This first entry is from my own experience, circa 1995. This was the first and clearest realization I had, of just how impactful it can sometimes be, to simply look at a situation differently. At the time, I didn’t know there was a name/label for what I now know as problem framing. Here’s the story.
My first job after business school was at a large, mail-order pharmacy in the Southwestern US. Prescriptions (or “Rx’s”) were sent in by patients or their physicians, to be filled by our registered pharmacists, and then mailed out to the patients. While the average retail pharmacy might fill a couple hundred Rx’s per day, our mail-order facility filled several thousand. Thus, one of the operational challenges was keeping track of thousands of paper prescriptions per day, each of which was a legal document. According to state law at the time, each original Rx had to be stored, maintained, and also quickly retrievable, at the request of patients, physicians or state inspectors.
“Out of Order”
Prescription numbers were assigned sequentially. But during processing, that order would get jumbled up–some were delayed, others cancelled, etc. Before storage, and to ensure that each original document was quickly retrievable, the prescriptions had to be put back into numerical order. This re-ordering required the efforts of roughly two FTEs, or about 14-16 hours in total, every day. This was tedious work, as you might imagine.
As is always the case, the way you frame a problem, largely determines the actions you take to resolve it. At the pharmacy, we saw our problem as the prescriptions being ‘out of order’–this is how we’d always framed it. Although, at the time, we didn’t talk about ‘framing’ or ‘re-framing.’ We just saw it as ‘out of order.’ Looking at the large, rather unkempt stacks of prescriptions at the end of each day, which we collected in a large plastic tubs, it’s easy to see why saw it that way. And because we’d decided that the problem was the Rx’s being ‘out of order,’ solving the problem involved putting them ‘back in order,’ which in turn necessitated 14-16 hours of work.
But there was also another, different ‘order,’ according to which the prescriptions were already perfectly ‘in order.’ Before reading on, pause here and think for a moment. Can you see it?
Re-Frame
The alternative order was: the order in which the prescriptions were filled or processed. The very first Rx filled that morning, lay on the bottom of the stack, in the first plastic tub. And the last Rx filled that day, lay on the top of the stack, in the last plastic tub. It’s true that the prescriptions were out of numerical order. But it was also true that the very same set of prescriptions were already in processing order–this simple realization was the breakthrough. Now the problem became: we were not capturing the order in which the prescriptions had been processed.
Solving this new re-framed problem turned out to be fairly simple: we simply ran the prescriptions though a high-speed optical scanner, which read a bar code that contained the Rx number, and produced a file with a processing number added to the end of it. If prescription #704 was the first prescription filled that day, that became #704-1. If #1027 was the second prescription filled, it was also the second prescription scanned, and was recorded as #1027-2, and so on.
Using this method, arrived at by re-framing the problem, the time required to handle each day’s prescriptions, went from 14-16 hours, to about 20 minutes. That level of improvement belongs here, as the original inductee into The Hall of Frame.
With this new method, prescriptions were stored and retrieved according to the processing order. Prescriptions could also be quickly scanned and stored throughout the day, in easy to handle batches. Wrestling with the multiple stacks of an entire day’s prescriptions, was eliminated.
‘The problem’ is whatever you choose to treat as problematic
Managerial problems are seldom fully ‘given,’ with no room for interpretation or discretion. In most cases problems are the result of our choice as to what we will treat as problematic. Problem framing is not passive, it’s proactive, and allows you to take at least some degree of additional control. Although we didn’t see it initially, we didn’t need to be bound by the ‘out of order’ framing. By avoiding that framing, we also avoided the work of re-ordering which this framing necessitated. Notice also how the re-framing led us in an entirely different, and ultimately useful direction: taking advantage of the processing order that had always been there, waiting to be captured.
Once you’ve decided what you’re looking for, that’s all you’ll find
As is often the case, it’s difficult to predict when or from whom the initial spark or idea for a beneficial re-framing will emerge. In this example, our daily volume had been growing, and after a particularly busy day, someone complained about the monotony of re-ordering. Then someone else responded that the Rx’s were already in some kind of an order–the order of processing. This was the spark. Then someone else wondered aloud if maybe we could use the bar code that was already printed on the label? Then someone else recalled that we had a high-speed optical scanner that was not being used. We ran a successful pilot, and within a couple of weeks, the process that had been in place for years was replaced, and performance was dramatically improved. Even the grouchy COO was impressed.
Of course not every attempt at re-framing is a success. Sometimes you make things worse. But every once in a while, you hit upon one that leads to order-of-magnitude improvement, as with this example. This was my first experience with a method that I now refer to as problem framing, a method I have applied routinely ever since, as an important part of a pragmatic approach to managing and leading. I have more inductees worthy of The Hall of Frame, including some at a much larger scale and impact, and I suspect you do as well. If so, please tell me about them. If not, please take a closer look at ‘how things are’ in your workplace, and give some thought to ‘how things could be.’