As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished reading The Undoing Project. (Seriously, go read it if you haven’t already.) One of the great lessons in the book is that people change their response to a question based on the way it is framed.
Consider the following two statements:
We are deploying a new phone technology that has a 90% success rate.
We are deploying a new phone technology that has a 10% failure rate.
They convey exactly the same information but one is framed around the positive successes and the other around the negative failures. Now imagine you are presenting your program to a senior leader with the hopes of getting their approval to move forward. Which are you going to use?
It should be obvious that you position it using the positive framing option. I’m sure everyone is nodding their head in agreement right now. But stop and consider how often you read every word you write to consider the framing implications (not everything is as easy to determine as the example here).
Framing is not a good or bad activity, it’s something that we all must do in every communication. Choosing the words to use to convey a recommendation is important. If your words do not match the direction of the decision you are asking for, the decision-makers will feel a disconnection.
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