Agreement Frame Exercise

1) Ask A and B what, specifically, they want, and then restate it to their satisfaction as a pace.

2) Ask both A and B what their specific outcome will do for them (their meta–outcome) and restate it.

3) Find a common outcome such that when you state it, both A and B agree it is what they want. «So what you both want is …»

When you are the programmer, I want you to get as general as you need to in order to find an outcome that both partners will agree to. Sometimes all you will be able to get agreement on will be, «So you are both here in order to find some way to continue your relationship to your mutual benefit and satisfaction.»

Determining an agreement frame also gives you a way to sort behaviors for relevance during the negotiation process itself. This is particularly important in business meetings and negotiations. Conservatively speaking, eighty percent of all the time spent in meetings is wasted, because what is said is not relevant to the outcome. It goes like this: we're talking about campaign X for product Y and Jim says «Oh, you know what we could do over here with product Z?» It's a great idea, actually. It's wonderfully creative–and wholly irrelevant in the context.

Unless you challenge that first irrelevant remark, you unleash an avalanche of free association which is more appropriate for the psychiatric couch than a board meeting. Later it will take you ten minutes to get people reoriented to the frame within which you are working. If you make the outcome frame explicit at the beginning of the meeting, you have a basis which is explicit and agreed upon for sorting out what's relevant and what's irrelevant. We call this a «relevancy challenge.» When someone becomes irrelevant, you can say «Jim, I don't understand your remark relative to what we've already agreed upon to do here at this meeting. Why don't you bring that up Friday at our product development meeting?» The next time he makes an irrelevant remark, I'll say «Well, I'm not sure how that connects with what we're doing here," and point to the flip chart. Then the next time that he starts to make an irrelevant remark, I'll probably just have to glance over at the chart, and that will be enough to anchor him into stopping.

In corporations in which we have installed these programs, after a few meetings the total meeting time drops by about four–fifths. People look forward to the meetings, because the criteria for relevancy are made very explicit and things get done. The relevancy challenge is not part of the organizational behavior of most business organizations, and it ought to be for purposes of efficiency.

You can see the same process more clearly in an arbitration situation. There are two groups head–on–head; they are just locked together, and they've completely forgotten the context. The outcome frame has been completely forgotten and most of their behavior is irrelevant with respect to it. Most negotiators will tell you that they are always brought in at the worst possible time–when there's a deadlock. I personally think it's the best possible time, because all the issues have been sharply defined and the differences are known clearly. You know exactly what needs to be done.

My first move is to get the two groups away from each other, and then I loosen the frame. I have to reestablish a broad outcome frame– which is the traditional notion of the basis for negotiation. As soon as the outcome frame is established, then I have a basis for relevancy challenges. I can dismiss certain things as being counterproductive, because both sides have already committed themselves publicly to the outcome frame.

At that point I have enough slippage that I can find ways of balancing the two proposals and coming up with a give–and–take. I will insist that the outcome frame contain what both sides should have put there to begin with: items which are not essential, which are «throwaways» for the purpose of barter. I've got to have an equal amount of those on both sides. I've got to create room to move first. If I don't have maneuvering room, then I'm stuck.

Man: Sometimes in my work I have difficulty setting a very explicit outcome frame with people. When I try, they often resist that.

Well, let me give you my frame for establishing a, frame: «Look, I'm a professional. I refuse to engage in random behavior here. I have certain criteria for my own performance, and until we know whether there is a basis for us to proceed here, I'm not willing to spend my time and skill.» I have only had that challenged once, when a man said «Well, I ain't doing that!» and I said «Fine. Goodbye.» I reserve the right to walk out on any transaction, including psychotherapeutic transactions.

By the way, if there is a category of client that you have trouble with, then seek them out. Working with them will provide you with an opportunity for developing your own flexibility. However, once you have demonstrated to your own satisfaction that you are competent to work with that class of clients, if you still don't like them, don't take them. A professional ought to have the option to engage in a business transaction or not, based on her own personal criteria.

However, in the context of professional psychotherapeutic help, I recommend that if you are going to exercise the option of refusing a patient or a client, you have a list of people to whom you can refer them, so that they do have somewhere to go. That is part of your professional responsibility. But there is no need to torture yourself. I worked with heroin addicts for a while until I satisfied myself that I could succeed with them. I don't work with them any more, because I really don't like being around them.

Woman: I'm interested in tuning myself so I can see and hear the patterns that go on between two or more people at one time. I'm trying to be aware of how a family system is interconnected, but I think it's too big a chunk. I want to broaden my ability to do that. Do you have any helpful hints?

Whenever you are learning about sensory experience, you have to chunk it small enough so that you can cope with it. The place I learn the most about multiple–person systems is in restaurants. Go sit down in a restaurant next to a family, and never look at the person who is talking. That way you can see how the others respond to the speaker.

Woman: My question is about validation. How do I differentiate between when I'm actually seeing and hearing something and when I'm hallucinating? When you think you might be hallucinating, do you use somebody else to check what you see?

No, I can induce any belief system in just about anybody, so that wouldn't work. So what if I can convince somebody else of my hallucination? That is the way that a lot of therapies operate right now. The therapist says, «Well, you know, what I'm feeling right now is X. Are you feeling that now?» The person goes «I hadn't noticed it, but now that you mention it, yeah.» So now that we have a shared hallucination, we'll act as if it is a basis for choice. That isn't going to work.

You have to learn to make distinctions, and it's probably best to start doing this with couples. You have to figure out what is going on in terms of the naturally–occurring anchored sequences. Let's say that each time he begins to use one tone of voice, you notice that she starts accessing kinesthetically, but if he uses another tone of voice, she accesses visually. When you notice that this relationship exists, then your job is to be able to test it behaviorally. You can always do that inside quotes, of course. You can say «Well, if Jane here said to you …» and then you can become Jane. As you do this, you watch Ralph, and notice whether the predicted response occurs. Then you can be Ralph and test another portion of the calibration. «If Ralph said …» So you can always test for calibrations fairly explicitly by using quotes. Or you can just adopt the calibrated analogue behavior covertly, and notice what happens.

A friend of mine is a mime. One of his great skills is mimicking another person, both tonally and visually. When we're talking, Lennie will say «Oh, yeah, I saw Jimmy the other day» … and then he will become Jimmy. If Jimmy's wife is there, she'll begin to respond to Lennie as though she's married to him. All the systems that operate between Jimmy and his wife will then operate between Lennie and her. And then he can become somebody else and she will respond differently.

One of the things that Lennie jokes about is that when my students come in and he wants them to do something, he simply becomes me. They respond immediately, because they are programmed to respond to me.

I do this kind of role–playing with individuals, too. I become one of their parts, and it works just the same way. I find out how they respond to the part. Behavioral testing is the only way I know of that you can count on for validating your sensory experience in systems relationships. You and I and Linda over there may have the same hallucination, but that's no basis on which to make a decision.

Man: Could you give us an illustration of becoming a part?

I've been doing that for two days now!

Man: Could you label one so my conscious mind would know?

I'm capable of it, but I'm not going to do it. I'm going to tell you about a family I worked with, to give you an example of how to determine and utilize the family system. In this family the mother was a matriarch. And her mother had been a matriarch. Her grandmother had founded a church, and there were streets named after her in the Midwest. This woman knew her dead grandmother's name, but she couldn't remember her grandfather's name even though he was still alive!

The one thing that was really noticeable to me was that everybody in the family responded to the mother. All she had to do was to look at them, and everyone would cringe. All the males were freaked out. The husband was an alcoholic, the older son was a hoodlum, and the younger son was failing in school and was starting to follow in the older son's footsteps. It's a typical pattern. However, there was a five–year–old girl in the family who was very cute and very expressive. She could get the mother to respond positively to her every time she did something.

In order to intervene effectively in this family, I needed to find out how the family operated as a system. I wanted to know what the natural sequence of interaction was. The best way to do that is to create a crisis, which is something that most family therapists avoid. If I make everything nice and lovely and warm, then I don't get down to the nitty–gritty. So I usually mention the most taboo things in the world for the family.

Virginia Satir taught me this. A lot of people think Virginia doesn't do it, because she does it in a nice tone of voice, but Virginia talks about everything that the family doesn't want to talk about. My style may be a little bit closer to Frank Farrelley's in the way I go about it, but it accomplishes the same thing.

So the family comes in and I say «Well, what are you doing here? What went wrong?» Immediately the mother says «This lousy kid over here has been getting out of hand.» I might turn around and say to the son «You son–of–a–bitch!» And then I ask the mother «What has he been doing, swearing?» Immediately the family goes into crazy land, and the system begins to operate. I can say «Well, what do you do if he does this? You probably don't scold him or anything.» She'll immediately start in quotes «Well, I tell him blah, blah, blah» and then immediately the kid will lose quotes and say «Look, goddamit, get off my back!» Then the father will say «Can I get a drink of water around here?» As soon as the family system starts operating, I sit back and observe, because I want to know how the family system operates without me. If it starts to slow down, then I step in and kick it to get it going again. I find out what the really sensitive areas are, so I can keep mentioning them to keep the family going.

This also wears them out, which is really useful. That's one of the things that makes my job easy. I've tried for a long time to train students to do this, but they get caught up in the content of what the family is doing, rather than stepping back and letting the family fight it out so that they can find out how the system operates.

The program in this particular family was really interesting. When the mother spoke, the husband responded like crazy. He went into what psychologists call «massive denial.» He climbed into the back of the chair and hid in the cushions. The oldest son was a carbon copy of the mother, and fought right back at her «RRrrrrhh!» And the more he fought back, the more the mother attacked him. If I interrupted the mother's behavior, the son kept attacking, but the father relaxed. That's important to know: the father was not responding to the son; he was only responding to what the mother did.

Woman: What did you do so that the father relaxed?

I shut the mother off for a while. When the fight got rolling, I just got up and stood in front of the mother, and the son yelled right through me. As soon as I cut off the mother visually, the father sighed and relaxed, even though the son was still screaming at the top of his lungs. When I stepped out of the way, the father immediately tensed up again. You can't do that kind of testing if you are glued to your chair the way many therapists are.

In this family, the younger son responded positively to his older brother. And when the mother went after the older brother, she might as well have gone after the younger one, because he responded as if the mother were going after him. He was a completely vicarious human being. If you talked to him directly, he always looked behind himself, no matter where he was sitting. He actually did that. I asked him «What do you think about this?» and he looked behind himself and said «Ah, well, ah … I don't know.» It was as if he weren't all there. But he really responded to whatever the mother did, even if the mother did it to the father or to his older brother.

The mother fought it out with me tooth and nail, and she was almost my caliber. She could hold her own against me, and there aren't too many people who can do that. But I have some really underhanded ways of fighting. I can switch logical levels so fast that I kept a little bit ahead of her, but I worked hard to do it. There were two male students and one female student in the room with me, and whenever the female student spoke to the mother, her behavior completely changed. The female student said things like «You are so unfair to your son.» The mother turned around and said gently «Well, now, dear, some day you are going to be a little older and you are going to be in my place… .«It was a completely different program. If a male had said that to her, she'd have boxed his ears off!

The mother's programs for communicating with men and women were totally different. The little girl did weird things in the session– things like getting up and knocking papers off the desk, interrupting, and making noise. If the son even took his eyes off what was going on, she'd shout «Pay attention!» But the little girl was safe from that.

Woman: And you didn't directly comment on that at all? You just watched it?

What good would it do to talk about it? If I tell them all the things I make distinctions about, that would make it easier for them to stay the same.

In order to test what I had observed, all I had to do was switch back and forth between acting like the son, the father, and the little girl, and see what different responses I got from the mother. I could actually get different responses from her by adopting the little girl's analogues. She began to respond to me in a way that mixed how she usually responded to men and to women.

There was just no way in the world to get the mother to attack the little girl. I asked «What's the worst thing the little girl's ever done?» She said in a sweet voice «Oh, one time she spilled blah, blah, blah.» When the mother talked to the little girl, the entire family loved it. They wished the two of them would run away together! They all responded positively, because the little girl got treated the way they all wanted to be treated. If the little girl communicated to the mother, the mother responded positively, but if the little girl communicated to one of the other people, the mother did not respond. That's very important. If she did, I could have made trickier interventions. I could have gotten the little girl and the brother going, and gotten the mother responding to that. But the mother didn't respond positively to anyone in the family except the little girl communicating directly to her. Everyone in the family responded to the mother.

So I had to figure out what I could get this little girl to do, to get the mother to respond in a way that would get the rest of the family to make the changes they wanted. When I first learned family therapy, I was told that everything works in triads–that when three people communicate, if person one communicates with person two, person three is always going to respond to that communication. It's not true. You can get them to respond to it, but they're not necessarily doing it already.

What I want to know in any family is what they are already doing, because then I can use what's going on now in order to change the system. This is a very important principle: How can I introduce a small change that will channel all the interactions in the family system in ways that force the system to change itself? When you can do that, the family system will do most of your work for you. If I want everybody to change in this particular family system, then I'm going to change the daughter. She will alter the mother's behavior, and ultimately everyone else in the system will change in response to the mother. However, it doesn't work the other way. If I had changed the younger son, it wouldn't have affected anyone else, because no one in the family responded to him. He was about as close to non–existence as it's possible to get. It was «to be or not to be» and he wasn't.

By setting such high standards, the mother made it easy for the men to succeed at failing. I wanted her to lower her standards and to respond in some kind of softer way with them. What I did sounds really direct, but sometimes the direct approach is best. I took the little girl aside, and I told her «Look, I need your help. I want you to play this game with me, and it's going to be our secret. If you play this game with me, something magical is going to happen when you come back here next time.» Previously the little girl had always run away and hidden whenever the mother started to criticize one of the brothers. I told her «You don't need to do that. I want you to test your powers, because I'm giving you powers that you didn't know you had, that you have now. If she's yelling at Billy, I want you to go up to her and simply tug on your mother's hand and ask her the following question: 'Mommie, do you love Billy?' and keep doing it until you are convinced that she is telling you the truth.»

Of course, this little girl was great at it. She would say «Mommie, do you love Billy?» And the mother would say (angrily) «YES!» When she asked again «Mommie, do you love Billy?» the mother would say (softly) «Yes, yes I do.» «Do you really, Mommie?» The girl just went on and on and on like that.

What's going to happen in this system as a result of this intervention? The whole family was convinced that the mother was the Wicked Witch of the North–and you'd probably agree with them! But it's very hard to be the Wicked Witch of the North when a cute little girl is going «Mommie, do you love Billy?» Now, in the middle of «Look, you indifferent slob, you forgot to take out the garbage!» Billy's going to hear things like «Yes, I love him.» That's going to change the whole ball game.

Man: So he got both the yucky negative and the «Yes, mother loves me.»

Yes. But getting negative messages became an opportunity to then have positive feelings.

Man: «Getting negative messages becomes the opportunity to have good feelings» sounds like the way to program somebody to go through behaviors in order to generate negative messages so that he can feel good.

But these people didn't do anything wrong to get criticized. And when the mother answered the little girl's question, she typically went into an explanation of what she was doing. «The only reason I'm telling him this is that I'm afraid that if I can't do something to motivate him to do well in school, then he's going to have to be a hard laborer like his father and work in the coal mines. I don't want him to have to work in the coal mines. I want him to have a job that is clean.» She started to communicate what she was trying to do–the intention behind her behavior. Basically, that little girl accomplished a reframing of the mother's behavior.

Man: The girl must have had some way of coping with the mother if the mother turned on the girl and said «Stop asking me these damn questions.»

The mother would never do that. I knew that before I intervened. The mother couldn't yell at her, or at any other woman.

Woman: The little girl anchored something for the mother.

The little girl became an anchor. Everybody wanted to hang out with her from then on. It wasn't safe to be anywhere else! This little girl had always been ignored before. Being ignored happens very often to middle children, and to children after about the fourth–born. If you decide that's not useful, find some way to make the child an anchor for all kinds of positive behaviors. That's a very powerful intervention.

When the family came back the next week, the difference in the way they looked and interacted was immense. As this new family system develops, ultimately people are going to respond to the younger son because this little girl is going to demand that they do, and it will happen through the mother. The little girl's job now is to pay attention to all these people because I told her to.

Woman: That's fascinating, because you really used the person who is least troubled. Other therapists would say there is no problem with this girl and the mother.

Well, there isn't a problem with anybody. I don't believe in problems. The important point is this: not only do I utilize the system that is there, I use the existing system to create a new system. In order to do that, I have to determine who is the one person in the system who will be able to change all the others. Very often it's not the aggressive, boisterous person who will be able to do that. People often think that persuasion comes with noise, and it doesn't. Persuasion comes with tenacity. People who are very expressive are also very changeable. Anyone who explodes in anger will also have severe polarity responses the other way.

Too often in family therapy the therapist works with a person who is easy to change, which of course means that the family is going to be able to change him back just as easily. If you change someone who is symptomatic, someone who is flipping out, someone who is already responding massively to the family, that person is going to be really easy for the family to change back. The person who has the symptoms will be the last one that you want to work with. The very fact that the family system can produce schizophrenia or anorexia or whatever means that the symptomatic person is easy to influence. If you can influence him into being normal, then the family is going to be able to change him right back. So you've got to get at him from another angle. The family member you want to go after is the one who is really tenacious. If you make a change in a really tenacious individual, everybody else will bounce around for a while, but eventually they will adjust to the way that person has changed.

Man: Can you recontextualize reframing a family system in terms of the problems that occur in business organizations?

Sure. In many ways, a business is just like an extended family, and much of what we have discussed can be applied directly. However, you have to change some of your verbal and nonverbal behaviors to be acceptable to the business world. For instance, you don't talk about the «unconscious mind," you talk about «habits," and you may need to wear a suit instead of a sport shirt. You also have to change some of your basic presuppositions.

For instance, in NLP we presuppose that choice is always better than non–choice. That is usually not true in business. There are a few business contexts where you want a lot of variability and creativity, but often a lot of effort goes into standardizing and routinizing human beings to make them dependable. You don't want assembly–line workers always trying out new ways of doing their jobs, or doing it blindfolded for variety.

Another thing you have to be aware of in the business context is that there is a certain amount of secrecy and paranoia whenever you deal with anything that business people think gives them a competitive advantage. In the therapeutic context there is no such thing as a «trade secret.» As soon as someone has a new idea, he tries to tell everyone about it so he can get some recognition. Businesses often spend a lot of money developing new techniques, and when these are successful, they try to hold on to them as long as they can.

There is also a lot of conservatism in business people, which is based on two things: (1) they don't have a good understanding of how a business organization works, and (2) they have found out the hard way that often when they try something new, it fouls up the system.

You often see this happen whenever a major position in the managerial or executive area of a corporation is vacated by promotion, dismissal, or retirement. The organization will almost always decide to search externally for a replacement. That's a behavioral statement that says business people have no idea what the qualities are that characterize a good manager or executive. Since they don't know, they have no basis for training or selection except a person's «track record.» Typically they don't want to take an employee from another position within their organization. If they had explicit criteria for what an executive position requires, it would be much more cost–effective to train people within the organization.

Even after a successful external search, when the new executive steps into the organization, typically everything in that organization deteriorates for a period of time. If the new executive really is effective, she will ultimately reorganize her departments, and usually she will fire or transfer several personnel in the process.

At least part of what goes on is that each manager tends to have a style of information handling which is unique. Since there isn't any explicit model of information handling, people fly by the seat of their pants at least as much in business as they do in therapy. One aspect of a managerial style is the amount of specificity or detail that a manager requires in reporting relationships.

Over a number of years a manager's staff learns what level of detail she is going to insist on, and they adjust their own reporting procedures to take that into account. Soon their reporting is running at just about the level of detail that is required by the manager they are reporting to. After that relationship has been established for any length of time, the staff person reporting will be upset if the manager asks for more or less detail.

To ask for more detail will be perceived by the staff person– particularly at the unconscious level–as being a challenge to his competency. «Why is she asking for more detail than I had to provide before? Does this mean she doesn't trust my judgement in reporting in this area?» The resulting negative interpersonal relationships can be very troublesome.

To ask for less detail can also cause problems. The reporting person offers a certain level of detailed information, but the new manager waves that off and asks for a more global judgement. All she wants is a «go/no–go» decision. Then the reporting person feels incomplete, and as if he and his work are not valued. He feels that the information he has worked so hard to develop is not being utilized. He also becomes concerned that now he has the responsibility for making decisions, instead of just the responsibility for gathering and presenting information. He may become quite nervous about keeping information which he traditionally had passed on to the manager and therefore no longer had any responsibility for.

One of the most powerful and immediate interventions is to instruct an incoming manager/executive in the notion of control of the quality of information. This allows you to do for verbal information the same thing that blow–up technology does for aerial photography. It allows you to control the detail of the information. You can have the most detailed, highest quality information possible, or you can reduce it to a simple decision: a «go/no–go» signal.

Once a manager is taught this, then she gains a sense of being able to exercise quality control down that information network that leads from her desk to the point of production or service. If she has no confidence that what she decides and plans can be transmitted– maintaining a high quality representation through the entire network that's going to have to respond to the change–then she doesn't make waves. She leaves things running adequately, and that's why you get the mediocrity and conservatism that is traditional in business. Any change runs a risk of a misrepresentation or misinterpretation somewhere along that chain. Therefore, it makes sense to be quite conservative.

With this understanding, a manager can exercise full control over the quality of the information flow within her network. She can make changes with the assurance that her representations will be communicated with high quality and detail. Then she can set standards of excellence as opposed to standards of mediocrity.

Once a manager has an appreciation of the notion of exercising control over the quality of information, she will be quite sensitive to that when she takes a new position. She will realize that the people who are reporting to her, and her peers, and the people she reports to, all have certain typical quality requirements for the information they process. In many instances we have taught a manager who is stepping into a new position to establish a positive frame by saying to her staff: «My understanding is that this is a well–oiled team that I'm joining, etc.» Next she explicitly brings up the notion of quality of information, and that certain adjustments will need to be made.

«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.