A632.3.4.RB_HallMike

Making decisions is such a challenging thing in life for a variety of reasons.  First, they often are leading you down at least two very different paths in life where the Lord only knows where you will end up.  Additionally, you often have insufficient or untested data for you to assist in making your decisions.  Another problem with decision making is the “frame” through which you are viewing your decision.  In general, many people have issues with the different framing problems, and I am no different.

The first framing problem is frame blindness.  In this situation, you are not only having a hard time with a frame but you are also potentially looking out the completely wrong one.  In other words, you are seeing a problem in the incorrect light and are completely missing potentialities of the situation.  In my case, I often make decisions with my wife looking through a literal frame – I say and do things at face value with little ideas of ulterior motives.  My wife on the other hand is always looking for hidden meanings.  Rather than me continue to make poor decisions in my wife’s eyes, I had to start stepping back and think about how my decisions might be viewed from her frame of reference.  As a result, I make a lot less careless decisions with respect to my wife.

The second framing problem is illusion of completeness.  In this situation, you think you have all of the necessary facts when in reality you are missing a large portion of them.  I had a recent problem with this when we purchased a new car.  It was at the end of the year and the dealership was incredibly busy.  As a result, the salesman was very hurried in going through our paperwork – he insisted that everything was as it should be and that the paperwork was complete.  This hurried mindset and illusion of completeness with the paperwork pushed me to believe that everything was good to go.  Although he was about 90% right, there were some major problems with our paperwork: he shorted us over $200 in title fees and he registered our car to the wrong house.  Had I not trusted him and insisted on thoroughly going through the paperwork, I am positive I would have caught these errors.  Instead, he assured me everything was ok and directed me to look through a frame that was not near as complete as I desired.

The third framing problem is overconfidence.  In this situation, one thinks that their frame of reference is superior to others and discards it.  For this scenario, I have to go back a bit to find a situation that fits as I try very hard to take other peoples’ viewpoint into consideration, but an event in swimming does come to mind.  One of the other swimmers I trained with had a particular way of doing one of his strokes.  I thought it was rather goofy and pretty much wrote him off as having a strange stroke.  As time wore on, his stroke started to catch on (several others had similar versions) and I was left swimming an outdated breast stroke.  If I had decided to try his method earlier, I might have taken to it much quicker than I did since it was many thousands of yards of training later before I finally did pick it up.

In conclusion, framing a problem is an everyday situation that many people face unsuccessfully.  With that in mind, knowing that it is a very challenging problem and that you are weak at it allows you focus your thoughts in order to overcome your shortcomings.  While I continue to struggle at times with frames, I would say that I have improved over the past 10 years in trying to not fall into the framing traps that are out there – I still have a ways to go, but I will continue to work on it.