Reframing to See More

Leaders are often encouraged to build strong relationships across the organization, usually with an implicit definition: trust, openness, mutual support, and genuine personal connection. Those relationships matter enormously. They are also only one kind leaders need.

Some relationships create value because they are functional. Others matter because they are necessary. Still others become workable only when the boundaries are clearly defined. Leaders who recognize only trusting and friendly relationships can leave themselves without the access, information, influence, or cooperation required to get consequential work done.

I saw how narrow that definition had become during a recent leadership session. I shared a story from early in my career about a senior colleague who publicly singled me out for a deadline our team had collectively mishandled. I confronted him privately and made clear that I understood what he had done and would not accept it. The next morning, he corrected the record with everyone who had heard the accusation.

We did not become friends, and I did not trust him, but we had a relationship after that moment. The terms were clear, his behavior changed, and he never treated me that way again. What surprised me was how many leaders in the room later cited that story as one of their most important learnings of the day. The idea that a consequential relationship did not have to be trusting, warm, or even particularly positive felt novel to them—and that should concern us.

The goal is not to make every important relationship trusting or close. It is to build the relationship the work requires.

The Relationships the Work Requires

I just returned from a week of travel and a symposium in Iceland. I expected to see extraordinary things, but what I did not expect was to come home thinking differently about the act of seeing itself.

In one of our sessions with public officials in Reykjavik, a leader commented that Icelanders think of themselves as being at the center of the world. I initially dismissed it as a bit of national pride. But the idea stayed with me. Later, standing at Thingvellir National Park, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart and the rift is visible across the landscape, I found myself thinking about the frame that belief creates. How differently might we understand our place in the world if we believed we were standing at its center rather than somewhere on the edge?

The question followed me through the week. A fellow traveler who is an avid gardener described a gardener’s year not as four seasons, but as 72 micro-seasons, each marked by what is emerging, blooming, fading, and making way for what comes next. I immediately thought about how differently she must experience change. We could stand in the same garden and look at the same thing, yet she would have more to see.

These observations made me more aware of how profoundly what we bring to an experience shapes what we are capable of seeing. I knew immediately that I could not unlearn what I had just learned. What surprised me was that this finer degree of distinction revealed something I had not even realized I was missing.

The risk is that we begin to confuse the boundaries of the frame with the boundaries of what is possible.

When the frame becomes reality

A frame is more than a point of view. It is a filter that helps us make sense of what is in front of us, and it creates a realm for our thinking. Inside that realm are the people who seem relevant, the ideas that feel reasonable, the choices that appear available, and the outcomes we can imagine. Outside it may be possibilities we never seriously consider, not because we examined and rejected them, but because the frame filtered them out before we ever recognized them as options.

We need frames. None of us can absorb every signal, entertain every possibility, or reconsider every assumption as we go through each day. Frames make complexity manageable. They allow us to recognize patterns, draw on experience, and act. But their usefulness can mask the constraints they create. The risk is that we begin to confuse the boundaries of the frame with the boundaries of what is possible.

That matters right now. Leaders are flooded with information, reliable and unreliable, useful and distracting, all competing for attention. At the same time, they are rewarded for decisiveness, agility, productivity, and simplification. Those are valuable capabilities, but under enough pressure they can reinforce a frame before we have considered whether it is the right one.

We dismiss an unexpected line of inquiry as a “squirrel,” and the label itself gives us permission to move on. We favor the idea that resonates because agreement feels like traction. We trust instinct because experience has made instinct useful, and we simplify until the problem feels manageable. In doing so, we can overvalue resonance and undervalue the discord that might force us to see something differently.

Sometimes what feels like clarity is simply an answer that fits within the frame we already know. Moving quickly is often necessary. The harder question is whether the efficiencies that make that possible are also constraining what leaders are able to see.

A different frame can change behavior

While in Iceland, author Andri Snær Magnason shared a remarkable illustration that brought framing to life for me. He described Iceland’s Romantic poets writing about birds that, during periods of real hardship and hunger, had also been viewed as sources of food. Their poetry gave those birds a different kind of meaning, drawing attention to their beauty, their songs, their behaviors, and their place in the natural world.

Magnason connected that writing to an extraordinary shift: half of Iceland’s bird species have not been hunted or eaten since the mid-nineteenth century. The birds themselves had not changed. What people were able to see in them had. Eventually, behavior followed.

That is the power and the constraint of a frame. It does not simply influence how we describe what is in front of us. It shapes what we allow ourselves to think, value, envision, and ultimately move toward. A different frame cannot make facts disappear or turn a real constraint into an imaginary one. But it can expose the difference between a true constraint and an assumption we have simply stopped questioning.

For leaders, that distinction matters. The org structure is the org structure. Certain people belong in the room. There are processes to follow. Careers progress in a given way. This is what customers will accept. Markets behave in predictable ways. We have practices that guide us to answers quite efficiently. But which of those are actually truths, and which are frames we have stopped noticing?

When leaders mistake one for the other, they narrow the range of what the organization is able to consider.

Reframing our thinking changes what we see. And what a leader can see determines what an organization can do.

Seeing more takes work

I came home thinking that seeing more is not primarily about gathering more information. Most leaders already have more information than they can absorb. Seeing more is about becoming able to notice more distinctions, consider more perspectives, and recognize more possibilities.

Seeing differently rarely happens by accident. It often begins when something interrupts the familiar frame: a perspective that does not immediately resonate, a boundary that suddenly looks less fixed, or complexity that resists our instinct to simplify. Experience remains valuable, but it can also make us quicker to recognize what we have seen before than to notice what might look different through another frame.

At Pathbuilders, this is part of what sits beneath our work around a leader’s capacity to SEE. As responsibility grows, the way leaders SEE must evolve: from recognizing differences, to appreciating different approaches, embracing different perspectives, and ultimately seeking the talent the enterprise needs to win. The point is not to teach leaders to look harder at the same picture. It is to help them become capable of seeing more in it.

The gardener’s 72 micro-seasons keep coming back to me. What might leaders notice if they stopped seeing a market, a strategy, or even a year as one broad season and learned to recognize the smaller transitions within it? Would we spot the signals of change sooner, recognize when one phase needs to give way to another, or see something differently enough to change what we do next?

Leaders make decisions every day that shape an organization’s trajectory. Those decisions can only draw on what leaders have been able to bring into view.

Reframing our thinking changes what we see. And what a leader can see determines what an organization can do.

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