How to teach framing?

Most areas of business, economics, finance, science and engineering are continually addressing problems where the goal is to do something better.

I am going to approach the process of teaching how to frame problems from the perspective of business students who face an endless array of business cases that are familiar to a broad audience, but the ideas can be applied to any setting.

The framing process always starts by addressing the three framing questions we cover here:

1. What are the performance metrics?
2. What types of decisions are being made (which might include discussing who makes the decisions)?
3. What are the uncertainties that affect performance?

We are going to consider two teaching situations:

a) You have an existing lecture to solve a business problem in virtually any context.

b) You have a guest speaker from industry speaking about a specific problem setting.

Adding it to the beginning of a lecture

Imagine you have a lecture prepared to address a specific business problem, which might be inventory planning, locating facilities, scheduling projects, pricing products, or personnel management. Your lecture may be designed to illustrate a specific tool or solution approach, which means you have already chosen what decision is being made, and the performance metric.

1. Metrics: Take a few minutes to step back to a larger problem setting where you want to minimize costs, maximize profits, or increase productivity. As you increase the scope of the problem, you typically are going to encounter multiple metrics. Organize these into a pyramid as we do here.

2. Decisions: Next switch to a discussion of what steps might be taken to improve one or more of your metrics. These may be discrete actions (change the product design, revise the manufacturing process) or continuous parameters. List anything that may have an impact on any of your metrics. Remember that there are different types of decisions (illustrated here). There are even many different words for “decision” as illustrated here.

3. Uncertainties: Finally, summarize the uncertainties that might change the impact of each decision on the performance metrics. Again, there are many types of uncertainty (as illustrated here), but you want to identify the uncertainties that have the greatest impact on your performance metrics.

It is possible to manage this discussion so that you summarize the core elements in as little as 5 minutes, or as much as 30 minutes, depending on the level of student involvement. What is important is the constant repetition of thinking about metrics, decisions and uncertainties. Be sure to always summarize these in distinct lists. I then recommend creating an interaction matrix such as those given in the framing interaction matrix.

The goal is to repeat this exercise as often as possible, in a wide range of settings, so that thinking about metrics, decisions, and uncertainties becomes second nature.

Guest speaker from industry

Now imagine that you have invited someone from industry to talk about a problem. This speaker will not know anything about our framing process, and will discuss a problem setting in a general way using the vocabulary of their community.

Give each student a sheet with three headings (metrics, decisions, uncertainties) such as the sheet provided here.

As the speaker progresses through their presentation, the students have to identify different metrics that seem relevant for evaluating performance, what decisions have an impact on these metrics, and the uncertainties that affect performance.

It is possible that the speaker may overlook something, such as decisions. Students should realize that the talk is incomplete, and ask the speaker to fill in missing elements. They have to learn how to do this in a way that is understandable to the speaker. For example, asking “What decisions do you make” may not be obvious to someone not trained in this vocabulary.