«You all had important and significant relationships with my predecessor. She had her own personal style, and you all learned—both consciously and deliberately, and by habit—how to present information to her. I'm different. I don't even know how I'm different, specifically, but for the next few weeks or a month, I want you to be particularly sensitive—and I will also—to the fact that there are some occasions on which I'll need very specific, very detailed, high quality information. At other times I'm going to simply ask you for a 'go/no–go' opinion.»
That way of framing the transition is both a reframe and a future–pace. It specifies the outcome: developing an adequate level of information flow. It alerts the staff that there will be some adjustments, because there are going to be differences. The new manager is not God and doesn't know what the differences will be specifically, since she was never exposed to the quality control measures that the previous manager used. That allows the staff to take a deep sigh of relief and say «OK. She's saying that she recognizes there are going to be adjustments made, and she wants my cooperation in achieving the outcome: finding an appropriate level of specificity in reporting information.»
Man: So a generalization that you could make from that example is that you need to be careful to frame any change in such a way that the people affected by it will respond in a positive way.
Yes, exactly. And that may mean framing changes differently for different levels or departments within an organization. Every maneuver in a business organization has to be done in such a way that it makes sense within the perceptual frame of the people who are affected. A five–year plan, if it were transmitted in its entirety to an assembly–line worker, would make no sense at all. For the assembly–line worker, the five–year plan has to be presented in terms of what happens to him and his job. To talk about the financial background and so forth would simply be confusing to him. It's literally information that he doesn't need to know. The description of a five–year plan at the executive level is not part of the perceptual reality of the assembly–line worker. It has to be relativized to his perceptual frame.
For example, I had a friend who was hired as the chief executive officer of a large firm. He is one of the few really high–quality business communicators that I know of. He has a really fine sensitivity to nonverbal behavior, and so on. One class of employees at the main headquarters of this firm was being operated by a time clock. The workers punched in every morning, punched out at noon, punched back in after lunch, and punched out in the evening. My friend has a philosophy that machines should never supervise or run people. One of the first changes he made after he'd spent a month or so taking over the reins as chief executive officer, was to remove the time clock. He explained to his primary staff his principle about not wanting machines to run people in his organization. He presented a frame to them which was adequate for their understanding, and then ordered all the time clocks removed on a Friday evening.
Now, consider the situation for the employees on Monday morning. They had been punching the time clock for years. No matter what happened on the way to work, or the night before, punching the clock was what hypnotists call a «reinduction signal» for them; it was an anchor that triggered access to all the skills and states of consciousness which were appropriate for effective performance at work. The time clock provided a signal in all representational systems. You see the clock, you push the card in kinesthetically, and you hear that funny sound as it punches the card.
My friend had inadvertently removed the exact anchor that they needed to perform successfully. The efficiency of the organization dropped by half in the first week or so after he had done this. I happened to arrive about a week later, and everyone was really upset. The solution that I came up with turned things around quite nicely. I proposed that he issue a short little statement to the first–line supervisors to pass on to the employees on Friday afternoon. This statement explained his belief that it was inappropriate for people to be run by machines. In his organization he wanted people to run people. Consistent with that, he had removed the time clock which had been there. And when they came to work on Monday morning, they would be interested to notice their supervisor standing in the position where the time clock used to be, and they could feel quite good about the fact that they could see a smile on the face of the supervisor—something they had never seen on the face of the time clock. The supervisors were told to say «good morning» and shake the hand of each employee as he came in. This provided a direct bridging, replacing the time clock by the supervisor in all representational systems. I'm sure that for the majority of employees, when they saw the face of the supervisor, they actually saw a superimposed image of the time clock! That gave them immediate access to the skills and states of consciousness that were required for efficient work.
That reframed the change, and preserved the signal function of the time clock. As a matter of fact, there was a productivity overrun. The employees bounced past previous efficiency levels for the next week. Then things settled down to slightly above previous levels. Business people know that if they let routines develop efficiently, then any change will probably disrupt them. However, if they very explicitly bridge or future–pace the changes to specify the way that they want them to operate, they can reduce the risk of disrupting the organization when they make changes.
Man: So is that reframing, or is it a future–pace?
It's both. You see, if you make a change without establishing an explicit frame around it, that leaves the employees to make up their own frames. So some of them might think «They've taken away my time clock, and that's just a way for them to disrupt my routine so that I don't perform my job well, because they're going to try to get rid of me.» It doesn't matter exactly what the workers hallucinate. The point is that the frames they select may be ones in which the change is considered inappropriate or disruptive. The maneuver I described recontextualized the change so that the workers could make a positive response at the appropriate time and place.
Man: For several years I worked as a lab chemist. I took off my white lab coat every Friday afternoon, and I'd have complete amnesia for anything connected with the lab until I put on my coat again the next Monday morning. As I put it on I'd ask myself «Now what was I doing Friday afternoon?»
That's a nice example. Imagine what would have happened if someone had taken away all the lab coats!
All behavior takes place in some context, and that context is the anchor for a certain set of responses. Framing is another word for contextualization, and reframing is recontextualization. Sometimes you do that by changing the actual external context. More often you change the internal context—the way a person internally frames and understands events—so as to get a different response. Whenever you do this in a system, you have to take into account how the entire system operates to be sure that the changes you make are ecological.
Reframing Dissociated States: Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, etc.
There are certain conditions that have to exist in order for six–step reframing to be effective. If you have someone who is severely dissociated, you can't expect reframing to work. Alcoholics, drug addicts, manic–depressives, and multiple personalities are all severely dissociated. Often people who overeat or smoke also fall into the same category. I'm going to talk primarily about alcoholics as an example. But I want you to understand that what I'm saying also applies to all the other examples of extreme dissociation.