Framing the picture

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris Oh, Scott, I'm kind of excited. I don't know why. Must be something in the water.

Scott I love a little excitement.

Chris It's not like the weather's exciting here. I mean, it's in London. It's just constantly gray this time of year.

Scott Not constantly. You have like gray weather and you're in like full lockdown. You guys are in like severe lockdown.

Chris You know, I guess, you know, I'm sure you talk about data that doesn't exist, but you know is real. I mean, if it existed, the data on mental health in this country right now would probably be pretty grim. Because you're right, it's been full lockdown in, you know, where I am since December. And, you know, if you can see my hair, like, it's been a while.

Scott Mine is pretty long, too. Mine is pretty long, too. I have clippers, so I'm going to just clip my own hair.

Chris And you know, interestingly, the data says that the worst times of year from a mental health perspective are actually kind of like in May and in September. Because May is when sort of people come out of that kind of hibernation mode and you get... Really kind of harsh on yourself, a kind of where am I at as everybody starts to get busy and active and you can see more people living their busy lives and you kind of feel bad about yourself. And then September as kind of that sort of ebb in the summer is your demand to kind of turn into the active season of September for a lot of people. So these are the two critical moments Traditionally, from a mental health perspective and a public health perspective, and of course, this last year, I'm sure that truism has been thrown out of the water because there's this bigger reality of COVID.

But I've definitely felt it. A few months to be unable to surprise yourself with much. It definitely has a toll. Fortunately, other people don't have the benefit of talking to you each week and seeing your sunny disposition. Exactly, exactly.

Scott I am nothing but sun. I am nothing but sun. Plus, if you really need to get away from it all, just come to the United States, like Texas or Mississippi. We got states that are just fully open for business, man. I mean, if things here are just like, how can you do it, man? It's a wild west out here, buddy.

Chris It would be such a great time to be, you know, just studying the differences of people. It's the same thing, but boy, has it been different everywhere.

Scott How do you frame the differences? So leading into our topic for the month, which we're going to be talking about a topic about having to do with frames and what frames let you see and what they hide and what they reveal. I have a story for you. Okay, well then start with your story. I'm going to start with a story. It's a story. And then I have a joke for you. This is kind of a joke and a story. It's sort of a little, you know, it's a little vignette, as they say. So there are these two monks in a monastery, and one of the monks sees the other monk smoking while he's praying. And the monk is flabbergasted and kind of irritated and says, I asked the abbot if I could smoke when I pray. And he looked at me and said, no, how can you do it? He said, ah, I asked the abbot if I could pray when I smoke.

The prejudicial way of framing the question, right? That's brilliant. Yeah, right. But it's interesting. I love that story. A professor of mine told that story one time in class, and I thought, and it was all about the prejudicial way. That things get framed. And that's a little bit what we're going to be talking about for the month, and that'll be the focus of the Basecamp discussion.

Chris See, and also, I mean, that's a story where the frame is clear when you kind of get to see both sides. And then the joke I was going to tell you is sort of when the frame is not. You must have heard this old joke about two fish swimming past each other in a stream, and one fish says to the other, oh, gee, you know, the water's nice today, isn't it? And the other fish replies, wait, what's water? So frames are so powerful, and the hardest part is seeing them in the first place. And so, yeah, I did feel like the time has finally come to just sort of try to talk squarely about one of the fundamental... aspects of of what we try to do you know you and me by like two different minds talking together and and all the convening work we've been trying to do over the past couple of years which is um you know you know fundamentally we're trying to get diverse minds together so we can free our own minds and see new possibilities but you know if you want to free your mind you first got to kind of notice your own frames It's like noticing your own glasses and then you can kind of take them off and contemplate the effect of your frame on what you are seeing.

And I love how we kind of came to this topic with sort of, you know, working from the other way as we thought, you know, someday in the future, and we're going to do it, we want to get a bunch of, you know, the people that I know in China on a conversation with a bunch of the people that we know around the rest of the world. Because it seems like, you know, for someone like me who's lived in China for a number of years, How I understand China is just very different from people who never been there, but I sure hear a lot about it. It's kind of framed for me. Who China is and who people in China are. And so we thought it would just be fascinating to leverage this medium. It's so easy for people to virtually get together nowadays and just sort of have that conversation.

And then we said, you know, the thing is when you frame it that way as kind of East meets West, you've already kind of dictated what the conversation is going to be about. And that would be exactly not the point. And so we ourselves, you know, talking about it, realized, dude, we're making the mistake that we're trying to solve.

Scott I think that's especially true in a North American context, because it is, I mean, China is just covered all the time now. I mean, with the kind of decline of Russian power in the world, relative decline of Russian power in the world, right? And I mean, that's... And we're kind of still, you know, in the United States, we're kind of post 9-11, where China gets so much ink and takes up so much of the global imagination in the news. Like when people are framing, and you know, I mean, news almost always frames things adversarially, right? So you've got to find an adversary, right? So China's a great adversary in the news for... You know, in an American context, right? Which is just, again, as you're saying, it's just incredibly prejudicial.

Chris Yeah, well, it's an example of, you know, when all you know about something or someone, and kind of the general point is, when all you know about something or someone is sort of, you know, what comes through media versus personal experience, then all you're really going to know is... The stories of consequence or that have been decided to be consequential. So if you're an American, as you are, and you're hearing about China, it's mainly like state-to-state stuff. Look at what China is doing in cyber warfare, or look at what they're doing in Xinjiang province, or look at what they're doing in Hong Kong, or look at what they're doing to our domestic industry. And it's really talking about That country's government and its policies. It's really hard then when you meet someone there to meet them as an individual. There's so much fascinating conversation to be had about the experience of social media and data privacy. With individuals in China who live under a different data regime, but have a lot of the same concerns and interests as you and I do with our data privacy. And so the question is, can you have that conversation?

And the answer is sure, but we first have to kind of get past that obvious frame that we feel like, well, no, but we need to be talking about. These, these other issues, you know, the way that, the way that, sorry, I'm not explaining this very well. Maybe you can explain it better. You know, it's like, well, what we were gonna do, let's put, let's put, you know, US and China in a room together and talk, and they're all gonna talk about what makes me Chinese and what makes you American. Which is not the most interesting conversation to have. So then we realized though, the conversation we need to have is, so what does the frame make you see? And can we get past, can we, maybe not get past it, that's not it, but can we be aware of it so that then we can play with it?

Scott Yeah, because I think you can, right, or you can reframe things, right? You can, I mean, this is one of the things, generally, right, without a frame, art, like if we're thinking of paintings, paintings stay rolled up and not on display, right? So you need a frame to look at them. But then you could say, I don't know, maybe this frame isn't the most helpful frame to display the picture. Maybe we need this kind of frame, or this material, or maybe we need something that's more gold and ornate, like a museum frame, or something more plain to actually display what we want to look at. And so that's the thing, I think, that inevitably, to see the art, we've got to have a frame. But we can be conscious of it. And I think that's what's hard, though, because how often... When you go to a museum and look at paintings, do you think about the frame? Only if you're a curator, right?

Chris Right, exactly. And you don't even realize how it's shaping your perception of it, these choices that have been made.

Scott Or if you walk into a friend's flat or apartment or house for dinner party or something, and they have... You know, prints up on the wall or something. You look at the art, but you don't think about the framing choice, really, very often. Because, I mean, that's part of the nature of frames, right? They are elusive, right? They're demure in some ways. The way they present themselves is not in a, hey, look at me, hey, look at me. So you have to take, it just takes a lot of attention. To detail, it takes a lot of awareness and deliberate observation to look and think about a frame.

Chris I've got two stories for you about this. I want to share them both. The first one is just whimsical and really funny. The other is kind of trying to impress you with a good example of challenging frames. But the first one, you mentioned art galleries. So I remember here in London, I went to the Tate Modern, so a modern art gallery. So the fun thing about a modern art gallery is sometimes you don't know, like, is that art? And so I played a cruel joke. This is a few years ago now. And so there was a door. And it was literally just a door. But I stood back from it and kind of took a contemplative pose. Looking at the door, and I think there was a sign in front of it that said like entrance or something. So there was like a vague, if you're really, really creative, you could imagine it being somehow an artistic statement. So I posed in front of this door, just pretending to appreciate it as art. And then there was a kind of a seating area to look at the art. And so I sat there and I just watched the other people who had seen me doing that walk up to the same door and appreciate it as art.

Because here we are in a modern art gallery, right? That's the frame. And so like, oh, I guess this is art. But no, I was just playing with their expectations. So that's my funny story. The more serious one, when you talk about the power of changing frame, and I know you like biblical stories. So maybe it's weeks ago now, somebody was telling me a version of David and Goliath that I had never heard before. And it had to do with how originally this was framed as a contest between champions on the battlefield. And the genius of David was to see that frame and change it. So he dropped the sword, which is what he would have met Goliath with as a champion, and pulled out his sling because... He knew that he couldn't beat Goliath soldier to soldier, but a shepherd defending his flock from a wolf, that was something he knew how to do. And so he changed the frame to one that was more favorable to him. And I had never heard the story presented that way before, but it made total sense to me. And it kind of, for me, became this just wonderful example of how, if you can notice the frame of kind of how you're presenting reality to yourself, then you have a whole menu of... A wonderful, playful, powerful choices. I can change it. I can warp it. I can smash it. I can twist it. I can expand it. We've expanded the frame in the past.

You're quite a Democrat, but you've got some Republican friends. And we put them together in a global conversation about something that is, what has the coronavirus revealed to me? All of the other people around the world They instantly can tell that, okay, those are the Americans. And you find yourselves on the same side of a conversation in a way that you wouldn't when it's just Republicans and Democrats in a room. So we enlarge the frame. And suddenly the distinctions that are so critical to your identity, they recede into the background of a larger commonality. And that's fun. But all of these things only become possible when you kind of start to play with, you know, not what I perceive, but how I'm perceiving.

Scott And sometimes when it just doesn't work, like, I mean, I love that David story because, you know, right before the... When he decides that he's going to go face Goliath, he says, I'll face Goliath. King Saul tries to put his battle armor on David.

Chris See, I knew you'd have more details of this story.

Scott And David's just like, David goes, I can't move in this. He's like, I just can't do that. He was the youngest of his brothers. It's interesting, too, because the prophet Samuel is sent out to find Israel's new king in David's household, and he looks at all the big strapping guys. David's dad is like, here's all my... Jesse's dad is like, here's all my sons. And Samuel's confused. He's not here. And he's like, oh, well, I have one other son. He's tending the... Cheap, it's the youngest. He's kind of the run of the litter. Sam was like, that's the one. He's the one. So David's whole story is constantly reframing. But some of it is the people realizing the frames don't work, realizing the armor doesn't work, realizing at one time does the armor just not fit you, right? The frame doesn't fit you, and it's really blocking your ability to see. But those are moments, I think, and part of this is like, I think what the virtue of communities like Basecamp are, because... Right. Creating those moments for one another.

Chris Yeah, because it's hard to know what you're not seeing. Oh, well, it's the two fish passing each other in the river, right? Yeah. What's water? Right. Exactly. But you could imagine, you know, maybe an extension of the story. For the bird flying over the water... Or for the bear on the bank of the stream, it's obvious that there's this medium called water that the fish are swimming in. And yeah, to your point, like when we get together as people who, you know, we... We all look through our own frames that aren't the same as yours. It is, I think, more likely, it's easier to notice, like, hey, did you know you're wearing glasses? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right, right. And, you know, I guess there's a lot of this conversation going on, you know, particularly in, well, yeah, all over the world. Thank you so much.

There are things about you that bias my perception of you. You're a white male and that tells me things. So we're becoming conscious of our unconscious perceptions, but this is so much more than that in the sense that there is a lot of, maybe cognitive bias is now always going to be used for that, but there's like cognitive assumptions. That society presents for me.

Scott Right, and that's the key, right? The frame is that your cognitive biases can't be explained just in terms of your own cognition, right? They're formed by a wider frame and story and arc. And so we can do, you know, experimental psychological kind of work and get at biases, but we're still not getting at What frames the biases yet? We're seeing the frame work operatively in individual interactions, but we're still not seeing the frame yet.

Chris So here's not to terrify you, but I think it's probably so deep that it's like every time we use a noun, we're using a frame. That maybe works for us, but at some point maybe doesn't work for us anymore. Because naming things is both really helpful and also a kind of a way of determining what it is and what it isn't. So practical example, whenever I work with business executives, So every business executive of every major organization pretty much in the world now knows about cognitive bias and how do we bring an appreciation of our personal biases into how we work together on teams and the workforce and stuff like that. But when I talk to, let's say it's a pharmaceutical company, And I asked the executive, you know, so I've looked in your latest investor presentation, you describe yourself as a pharmaceutical company. Are you? That's a frame, right? And what does that help you to see? And what does it make it harder for you to see in the world? Because I can tell you, if you're a pharmaceutical company, you are looking for...

You are looking for disease that you can fix with a pill. And that's a kind of paradigm that you have about health, around how do we improve health? We identify and eliminate diseases. There are a lot of other people who work in the domain of health who would see it completely differently. And as we go forward into a world of all of these molecular sciences and technologies, is pharmaceutical company, The best platform, the most open-ended way of describing who you are as a collective of people with this pretty rare capacity to interact with the world at a molecular level. Is that the best frame for you? And then suddenly, you can kind of see the minds blowing, like, oh my God, I don't know. But if it's not that, what are we? So there's this kind of... You know, I think when you really start to notice some of your frames, you have this sense of vertigo around, whoa, whoa, like, well, you know, what else could it be? But if we can hang in that vertigo a bit.

Scott Yeah, I think it's great. You and I have talked about this, I think, a little bit. I'm trying to remember if, I don't think we've talked about it on the podcast, but I think we just talked about it on the phone or something. about dissonance and cognitive dissonance, and how basically, evolutionarily, we are really, dissonance is really hard for the human mind to take, right? This is why we like frames that tie up dissonance, because it doesn't, you have to, by nature, we cap off and kind of tie up dissonance. That's what we do evolutionarily, because, you know, I guess as hunter-gatherer societies, dissonance isn't great, right? You gotta function. And what it takes, I think, to suspend a frame that you're using all the time is to engage in dissonance. And part of, I think, why we need communities to do that is because it's a really hard exercise to sit in dissonance. Because our snap judgment reaction is to solve the dissonance, right? And to reframe things quickly, or go back to the old frame, or reframe in a tidy way.

And I think the value of a kind of community coming together around a question about frames, it's almost like you could do, it's like doing calisthenics together. You're less likely to quit when you're with the bootcamp team, right?

Chris Yeah, it's like yoga for the brain. There's a lot easier in a group. Listening to you, like, yeah, that... Bringing dissonance into how we grow our own knowledge. You know, there's that kind of classic typology of, like, there's three types of knowledge. There's what you know, there's what you don't know, and there's what you don't know that you don't know. You've heard that one, right? So the dissonance would be to say, okay, well, let's take these one by one. There's what you know. More precisely, it's what you think you know. Maybe you don't. And then there's what you don't know. Well, actually, it's what you think you don't know. Maybe you do. And then within that typology, the assumption is what you're trying to do is sort of ultimately colonize that whole circle with knowledge so that you know it all. When probably the more you think you know, the harder it gets to shrink that I don't even know that I don't know it because it gets harder and harder to see any way other than you do. So it's impossible, actually. There's some stuff in that I don't even know that I don't know it that you cannot possibly come to know yourself. It requires other people to break your frame because the smarter you think you are, The less you're going to explore other ways of looking at the world. So just to say like that frame, that classic typology we've heard so many times, there's what you know, there's what you don't know, there's what you don't know that you don't know.

It all kind of invites you to what you call consonants. You can kind of put it all together somehow. But to take each of those pieces of the pie and challenge them, how do you know that you know that? It's just a completely different way of growing knowledge that requires other people.

Scott I had one of the best days of my life last November. I spent it in the Phoenix Zoo with a lovely couple, and they're just great. They're older than I am, and both just really bright people. And we were looking at a rhinoceros, this beautiful rhinoceros, and the guy starts telling me a story about how unicorns were developed. And basically, The idea of the unicorn in Europe was because people for the first time were describing what a rhinoceros was that are exploring in Africa and stuff. And it's like a horse, but it's got a horn and it's got this. And then so people started drawing unicorns because that was what they were interpreting what a rhinoceros looked like. Talk about framing, right? You kind of- Fascinating. So now there's this thing that we think of as a unicorn. Which is a way to kind of try to frame and get a handle on these descriptions, because there's no photographs, right? They're writing letters saying, these creatures are unbelievable. And then it creates unicorns.

Chris That's amazing. Yeah, which is a brilliant example of, you know, it's very hard to hear originally. It's very hard to receive anything new Other than, maybe it's the only way we can, other than to kind of fit it into what we already know.

Scott And we're communal creatures, right? So our frames are always constructed socially, right? So you kind of can't interpret reality without social matrices that give you... So you just, I mean, it's just inevitable.

Chris And it's the kind of the socialization of the frame that makes them so hard to break. You think of, you know, Europeans, you know, before they understood that there were, you know, North and South America existed, you know, their map of the world was the map of the Bible. Noah had three sons, and the three sons fathered Europeans and Africans and Asians, and that was the whole world. And so if you're someone like Columbus saying, let's sail off this page to the West and we can arrive in Asia across the ocean, of course that was the plan, because this is the whole world. I'm trying to get to Asia. I'm just going to go the other way. And then when you land and you find land, you're like, great, I've found a part of Asia. It's strange that there are no Asian spices and no Asian silks here.

So it must be another part of Asia that people haven't explored yet. But we know it's Asia because of the frame. And it took years before Amerigo Vespucci, he popularized the realization that No, no, no. Columbus hadn't found Asia. He had found Europe's blind spot.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah. You cover this in your book, Age of Discovery. Right, yeah. Fantastic book, by the way.

Chris It's just such a brilliant... Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the plug.

Scott I say that sincerely. I love that book.

Chris So, you're right. That's part of what makes it hard to challenge our own frames, is that they're more than my own. They're my... They're my cultures. They're my traditions.

Scott There are stories. There are stories. There are maps. There are stories.

Chris So that's the challenge we've thrown down to ourselves. And why do we do it? Why challenge our frames? I think the Goliath example is a brilliant one. I mean, there's tremendous power and possibility in being able to take off your glasses and put on a different set of lenses. So, you know, I'm excited about that challenge this month. We've given ourselves what we've got about 21 days or so, we've got a global campfire coming together in person on March 21st. And let's see who joins us with that shared intention to see what you've been missing and to help me do the same.

Scott Yeah, and if you want to join us for that global campfire, we'll look in the show notes and we'll have registration links so you can join us in the conversation.

Chris Great. I'll see you there, Scott.

Scott See everyone there.

Chris Thanks, my friend.

Scott All right.

Chris Take it easy.