Framers Quotes

“Framers see the world not as it is, but as it can be. They do this by understanding, considering, rejecting, or accepting frames and communicating them to others. The principle of agility of mind asks us to never stop honing our skills of framing: seeing causation, generating a variety of counterfactuals and altering their features—in short, dreaming with constraints. Just as the free flow of information is the basis of interpersonal coordination, agility of mind is the foundation of human framing.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Well-meaning white parents tend not to point out race or bring up racial issues, in the belief that such “color-blind” behavior will lead to nonracist children. The message, channeling Martin Luther King Jr., is that a person’s character counts, not the color of their skin. But black parents regularly discuss race and racial matters with their children. To be color-blind is to willfully ignore the obvious—and fail to see how it affects everyday life, from walking down a store aisle to being pulled over for a traffic stop. Black kids are taught to see the “colorful,” to be aware of race. Sociologists believe that “color-blindness,” as a frame, is actually a significant source of racial discrimination. By suggesting that race all of a sudden should not matter, white people with the best intentions are inadvertently denying the experience of people of color who live with daily discrimination. The frame of absolute color-blindness erases variation and disregards diversity, turning a rainbow into indistinguishable shades of gray. It neglects the reality that people live and vaunts homogeneity, the very opposite of frame pluralism. The alternative frame, “colorfulness” (in the words of sociologists of race), not only acknowledges variation but in so doing highlights the pain, hardships, and tensions that the differences signify, eventually translating them into the diversity that human framing thrives on. The goal of education and socialization is to see the actual differences in our society as both a responsibility and an opportunity.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“A diverse mind makes us better individual framers, and a diverse team leads to better solutions. A similar advantage from embracing multiple frames holds true for society and humanity generally. Just as individuals benefit from diversity, so too does society benefit from pluralism. The point is less moral than pragmatic: an openness and tolerance to a multitude of diverse frames improves the chances that society will progress.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“For example, until the mid-2010s many senior executives in traditional companies cackled that Amazon’s business still showed no profits. They felt it was a low-margin activity propped up by a hyperinflated share price. And within their traditional way of understanding corporate performance, they were right. But seen through a different frame, they were utterly wrong. Jeff Bezos had reframed the idea of commercial growth, away from producing annual returns for shareholders (and handing about a third of the profits to governments in the form of tax) and toward reinvesting every penny of net income to establish adjacent business lines, from Kindle books to cloud services. People see it plain as day in hindsight, but the new frame was incomprehensible to many in the moment.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“all else being equal, it is better to choose a frame with more mutable constraints, even if it fits more loosely. The disadvantage of looseness is compensated by the additional choices it lets us generate, and the sense of empowerment and agency it provides.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“When reframing, we must actively push aside an existing frame to free up the cognitive space for something new.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The starting point is to understand the sources of difficulty we face when attempting to switch frames. There are four in particular: the cognitive energy required to create a novel frame; the need to step away from the familiar; the necessity of identifying a frame that fits the circumstances; and wise timing to recognize the right moment to reframe.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“There is a risk, however, that just because someone has reframed successfully, they believe they can do it again and again. There can be a vainglory attached to reframers, who wear their achievement like a golden crown and reapply the new frame where it does not fit. The best innovators are aware of this and work to minimize it. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google all enjoyed reputations for stubbornness but at the same time actively sought out alternative views that contradicted their own. They understood the shortcoming of relying on a single frame and the value of being exposed to alternative ones.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Whether they plunder their repertoire, repurpose a frame from elsewhere, or reinvent an entirely new frame, all successful reframers share certain things in common. It isn’t a clever mind, quick memory, or deep experience. What’s needed is a willingness to risk new thoughts and forge new cognitive paths. It requires a mind that is comfortable with the unfamiliar, that can gently let go of preconceptions and presumptions, and can see and seize new possibilities.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“reframing an issue allows us to see it from a new perspective, which reveals alternatives that we might not otherwise have imagined.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Whatever strategy we choose though, reframing remains an endeavor fraught with failure. The path to reframing has no reliable signposts, no straightforward cognitive processes, no dependable schedules. A new frame may crop up in a sudden rush or after years of plodding. And there is no guarantee of success at all.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“In all these cases, the innovation was an intangible, intellectual one before it was instantiated in equations, laws, routers, or software. One’s whole mental model had to change. It is going beyond what one knows.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“If reframing by dint of repertoire or repurposing fails, we need to devise a new frame altogether, an act of reinvention. This is exemplified by Charles Darwin. He is popularly associated with the idea of survival of the fittest. But the frame he invented is more fundamental: that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors. That basic concept—literally a diagram of the tree of life—transformed how humans understood the origin of life on Earth and how species evolved. In this way, the reframing was not a matter of applying a new frame from one’s repertoire or finding and adapting a new frame from another context to a new problem. Rather, it can be seen as inventing a new frame altogether.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The economy resembles more a complex, adaptive organism that responds to changes than a slab of iron that has predictable properties of density or the diffusion of heat.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The economist Andrew Lo at MIT believes it is time to transform economics from its frame of physics and its emphasis on equilibrium to the frame of biology with a focus on evolution and growth.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The key to IKEA’s initial success was its use of an alternative mental frame of what furniture represents and is used for: not timeless but timely. Yet that frame wasn’t entirely new. It had been in the air. Other sectors were undergoing a transition from the durable to the disposable. Luckily for IKEA’s founder, the furniture sector had not yet, so his repurposed frame gave IKEA an edge.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“the idea of repurposing a frame from elsewhere. We do this when we need to reframe but have no ready alternative at our disposal, so we look to other domains for an existing frame that could be adjusted to our current circumstances. It won’t be a ready template and so may require substantial cognitive work to shape it appropriately, but at least having something to play with can get us started.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“When using our repertoire of frames, knowing the qualities of each frame we possess is crucial to identifying a good fit. But it is equally important to have a wide selection of frames at our disposal.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Especially when compared with reasoning within a frame, switching frames is more about a stroke of insight than a methodical process.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Staying within a frame comes with mental baggage. In contrast, switching to an alternative frame affords the opportunity to start anew.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Adhering to a well-honed mental model is often the default strategy for success, not the consequence of cognitive inertia. It is not a flaw but a feature of human cognition.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Reframing is special because we normally stay within a frame.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“But when and where reframing succeeds, it offers a novel way of understanding and provides us with a new set of options.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“By dreaming with constraints, we make sure that we have a bias toward impact, a bias toward effectiveness. What we achieve in our lives leaves footprints that others can follow—frames that others can adopt, adapt, and apply.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“A model’s value is in the information that is ignored as much as included.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“At the core of any frame lies a trade-off. The fewer constraints, the more counterfactuals a frame can generate. This gives a decision-maker more options, but it also means that many impractical ones have to be weeded out. The more constraints, the fewer options a frame elicits. This helps keep the decision-maker focused, but runs the risk of missing out on better choices.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Applying constraints is not about maximizing the number of counterfactuals we create. It’s about swiftly identifying a manageable number of the most effective options: the goal is to shrink the search space.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“If mutability and minimal change concern how we alter and iterate through individual constraints, consistency looks at the relations among them.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“consistency. Constraints should not be placed in direct contradiction to one another. As we envisage alternative realities, one constraint cannot go against another one; otherwise our counterfactuals would keep running into contradictions.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Even though this sometimes may lead us astray, privileging human inaction has the advantage not only of a lower mental load to imagine but also of something that’s likely easier to achieve. It’s often simpler to stop others from acting than to motivate them to act when they had no intention of doing so.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil