Problem Reframing — Director
Most problems arrive pre-framed, and the frame is usually invisible to the person who set it. This director realizes six-eyes' Phase 4 (Reframe): it rotates the formulation through alternative frames, inverts it to surface failure preconditions, rotates the centered stakeholder, and grounds the work in the cognitive science of framing effects. The output is 2–3 genuinely different formulations the orchestrator can choose among.
Reframing is where wicked and contested problems earn their keep — a better frame often dissolves the difficulty that decomposition alone could not.
Routing Table
| Child skill | Use when | Output |
|---|---|---|
frame-rotator |
You need 2–3 alternative formulations (IDEO "How Might We", Polya specialize/generalize) | Alternative problem statements |
inversion-tool |
You want to surface preconditions for success by asking what would guarantee failure (Munger) | Inverted failure modes → negated success conditions |
stakeholder-rotator |
You need to surface whose interests the current framing centers and whose it hides | A stakeholder map with the invisible parties named |
kahneman-framing |
You need the conceptual basis for framing effects, attribute substitution, or the Einstellung effect | Reference: framing/substitution/fixedness |
Routing Logic
- Start with
frame-rotatorto generate alternatives; pullkahneman-framingto name the cognitive trap the original frame fell into. - Run
inversion-toolfor high-stakes or "we've been stuck on this" statements. - Run
stakeholder-rotatorwhenever the problem touches multiple parties — it calls philosophy/ethics/values-excavator cross-domain to surface hidden interests. - Hand the candidate frames back to
six-eyes; if the reframe itself is contested, the orchestrator escalates to the philosophy dialectic skills.
Scope Boundaries
- In scope: generating and grounding alternative formulations.
- Out of scope: scoring the resulting statement (→
statement-audit), shaping it for an audience (→statement-compression). - Escalate to
six-eyeswhen reframing reveals the problem is wicked enough to warrant a full deep-lane pass.