Concrete Practices to Be a Better Leader: Framing & Intention

[Music] the way this talk came about is that I spoke here two years ago at the Game Developers Conference and I talked about leadership and as part of that talk I kind of gave some thoughts about heartfelt communication but I didn't get very technical about it and afterwards that kind of bothered me like I felt like it maybe chickened out a little bit because I do get very technical about it in my day-to-day work and I give some very specific advice but it's a it's kind of a delicate subject which is why I avoided it so it's incredibly important but it can also be difficult to talk about here's an example of what might make it difficult when someone wants to do more at a company when they want to increase the scope or value of their work or if you want to be you know a little bit vulgar but if they just want a promotion right often what stops them is that they get perceptually pigeon-holed you know you can't actually do senior work if you're in an environment where everyone still treats you like your junior and so in those

cases I'll say if I'm managing this person part of your work here is to change perceptions and to do that I'll get really specific I'll say forward me drafts of your emails before you send them out and I'll write back and say stuff like you know your tone in this part is a little conciliatory I think that sends the wrong message I'd actually be a tiny bit patronizing here you know when I put in those terms that I'm like giving people calculated advice to be patronizing on purpose it sounds pretty manipulative and manipulative I think is a dirty word to us and that's what makes it hard to talk about here's another way putting that take two people who I'm gonna call Dale and Eugene both of them send emails with a patronizing tone Dale is very analytical and he employs his patronizing tone on purpose to alter the way others see him Eugene on the other hand writes the patronizing email because he's just a patronizing kind of guy take a moment to reflect on Dale in Eugene and get a sense for what

your gut reaction is to people like each of them like what do you think about their behavior you probably know people like each of them while their outward behavior is the same in my experience the general tendency and maybe you've got a sense of this as you were just thinking about it is we tend to react very negatively to Dale much more so than Eugene there's this basic sense that because Dale knows what he's doing because he's doing this consciously his behavior is somehow dishonest or even immoral both Dale and Eugene's emails are examples of framing which is the thing I want to talk about though in Dale's case the framing is conscious and intentional if you're talking to someone and they're being condescending towards you and so you patronize them a little bit in reply to try to combat that you are reframing the power dynamic of the interaction a frame to define it is just a context it is a

set of basic assumptions it is a perspective that you bring to and impose upon your interactions with people there's these two guys Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and they're the founders of an academic field called behavioral economics and they first used the term framing back in 1981 to describe this phenomenon in their studies of human decision-making they noted that phrasing the same choice in different ways can drastically alter the way people make that choice in Kahneman's most recent book which is excellent everyone should read he gives an example of one of their classic framing studies which has come to be known as the Asian disease problem and it goes like this pretend all of you in this room right now are public health professionals like you work for the CDC or something I have gathered you two here today because there's a disease sweeping through Asia and despite our best quarantine efforts we expect it's going to make it to the US and when it does we expect that it's going to kill 600 people we have two avenues for treatment but we only have the resources to pursue one of them and

your job is to decide which one we pursue treatment option a is a sure thing if we pick option a 200 people will be saved of the 600 if we pick option B there is a one-third chance that all 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds chance nobody will be saved so which would you choose think about it for a sec save 200 people for sure or the one-in-three gamble to save everyone in their studies they say a large majority chooses the sure thing they choose to save 6200 people but a different group of people from the same background or given a slightly different choice faced with the same disease they were also given two treatment options if you choose option A they were told four hundred of the people will die for sure if you choose option B there's a one-third chance that nobody will die but a two-thirds chance that all six hundred people will die now I can't give

you the full sense of what it's like to hear this because I just told you the other groups choices but what do you suppose this group would have chosen to lose four hundred people for sure or to gamble to save everyone in the study large majority chose to gamble if you're paying attention you've already noticed those two groups were given the exact same choice it was just a difference of framing save two hundred and lose four hundred described the exact same outcome but that choice of phrasing changed the way two people chose and their conclusion was people will take a sure gain over a gamble but they will take a gamble over a sure loss but whether it's a sure gain or a sure loss is really just a question of how you describe it that's the framing effect but now comes the part that really blew my mind when I was reading this Kahneman gathered the two groups together and explained like I just did to you the two different frames he told them you chose to save 200 lives

in one formulation and you chose to gamble rather than accept 400 deaths in the other now that you know these choices are inconsistent how do you decide and the answer he says is usually embarrassed silence why is it embarrassed Islands when people are given one frame or the other they answer quickly but when they're given both frames they're paralyzed why it turns out this is a really illuminating question here's the way I think a lot of people see framing there's some core issue or decision to be made and we have some feelings or moral intuitions about that issue frames are different ways of looking at the issue and they can distort the issue and thereby distort our feeling for the core issue if this is our model and I think it's a really common one I think that people generally approach it this

way then we would naturally regard framing with distrust we say see it as a way of manipulating us of tricking us into making the wrong choices but when you put it that way if there's a wrong choice it implies that we think that there is a right choice and that right choice is the way we would decide if the problem were not framed at all and that is why this model is wrong there is no such thing as a none framed problem you have to say it somehow and in the Asian disease problem the reason that final question is met with embarrassed silence is that once were presented with both conflicting frames we actually don't know how to decide gamble or certainty when you frame it one way we prefer one choice but when you frame it the other way we prefer the other choice but then when you give us both frames at once were paralyzed we have no intuition we have no right choice Kahneman puts it this way he says

framing should not be viewed as an intervention that masks or distorts an underlying preference at least in this instance there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame like no matter how many times we read that that is still crazy to me think about that we do not have underlying preferences Kahneman continues your moral feelings he says are attached to frames to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself or to put another way with no frames we do not have moral intuition I'll walk you through this whole line of thinking to make a single point and that is that framing itself is a deeply moral act we tend to think of people who actively unconsciously frame their conversations as manipulative Machiavelli and even dishonest people

but in the Asian disease problem let's say you're the person that has to write the email that's gonna go to the experts that have to make the choice it's very clear now that the way you choose to frame the choice in your email is the point at which the decision actually gets made because your email phrasing will determine which decision gets made let's go back to our friends Dale and Eugene if you are ignorant of frames if you don't take the time to carefully consider how you frame the choice if you just pick whatever phrasing seems natural you still framed it and you are still responsible for the results of your actions ignorant of the law is no excuse though I should be clear that when I say that framing is immoral Act I'm not saying that every frame itself is good I just mean that when you decide how to frame something that decision has moral implications and thus the choice is a moral one and so for Dale here it's

really a question of his intention if his intention is good then he is making a sound moral decision framing is a tool if we wield it with both skill and wisdom it can do great good but if we are unskilled or unwise it can cause great harm so I spent some time thinking about when I was putting this talk together like what can I actually talk about in regards to framing skill that would be helpful right like what can I give you that you might actually bill to actually use in your daily work I will quote Kahneman one more time he says unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences our frame bound rather than reality bound it takes attention and deliberate effort to hear something and to take a step back before you respond and say how is that framed and

to analyze it and to consider its impact but in my experience once you are paying that attention once you notice it happening around you the rest of the skill like how to respond and what to say how to behave will follow naturally it's not easy it takes a lot of work but you'll be able to figure it out because you're now noticing the opportunities to do so the initial sensitivity is the thing that really needs a jump start it really needs your initial attention to get the ball rolling so I thought it might be helpful since I actually tend to think about the stuff kind of borderline compulsively I collect archetypes of situations of framing situations that I thought maybe I could describe there are cases that I encounter frequently and I think about them a lot and I have them filed away mentally and I find that it helps because one of one of these situations arises during the work day because I've kind of thought about it and categorized it away in the moment that it happens I'll notice it's like I have kind of a spidey sense going off in the back of my head and I'll think like wait this is one of those times

so the first situation I want to talk about is when you are collaborating sorry directly with someone else in a different team or department or organization so I've drawn it out as this big formal org structure here but the relevant thing is actually just that it's a cross discipline kind of thing that's a salient point you were working with someone that you don't work with every single day I was not on your immediate team and these collaborations I find are usually prompted by a specific thing that you guys need to get done together when I'm doing this I start first by bringing to mind one model of game development which is this you can just think of game development as solving a set of constraints because my engineering is coming out your ship date is a constraint right design goals are all constraints your target framerate is a constraint the process of shipping and game is just satisfying all of these constraints other constraints fall out from them you know how many animations you need and what subsystems you have to code and all that good stuff and in this model every single team

members job is simply to own some set of those constraints and to ensure that they are satisfied I like to bring this model to mind and kind of roll it around in my head to kind of get myself in this mindset when I'm working with people across team boundaries because when we have some conflict as inevitably happens with creative work I can think of this model and remind myself you're just trying to satisfy your constraints I am just trying to satisfy my constraints and when I'm able to stay in that mindset I find that I naturally frame the situation as you and me versus the problem which is collaborative instead of getting stuck in you versus me which is actually really easy trap to fall into now this frame is helpful but just the simple intention is rarely enough because conflict still happens people misinterpret and miss communicate you know we do things trying to help what our actions come across the wrong way and though rationally we all know we're working towards the same goals it's very

easy and practice to lose sight of that sometimes the waters get rough and navigating them takes a little bit more nuance so for that nuance I'm gonna turn to another researcher Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics and an expert on human community communication has written a bunch of books and in her book on family relationship she has a model for understanding conflict that I really like and actually think is super applicable to professional relationships too you can see your relationship she says existing somewhere in this two dimensional space one axis is a continuum from closeness to distance and the other one is a continuum from equality to hierarchy now when you and I we have some relationship it exists in both of our heads don't worry about drawing this is gonna be on like a million slide so everyone who's writing down you can know when you have some when you and I have a relationship it exists in both of our heads so we each have some idea of where we are in this space and it can be more or less aligned you know maybe you think that we're

closer than I do or maybe I think that we're peers and maybe you disagree so what I'm showing here right now is kind of an extreme extreme case especially at work because in my experience I think most working relationships by default most of the time are pretty well aligned we usually have a pretty good mutual understanding of where we are with respect to one another here's the important thing your view of where we are on this chart whether you are conscious of it or not is a frame that you bring to all of our interactions you behave differently towards me depending on where you think we are in this space and of course for me it's the same my behavior towards you is framed by my view and then you can steer us around on this chart by behaving in certain ways so it's a feedback loop where we think we are in the chart affects our behavior and then our behavior affects where we think we are on the chart arguments often result Tannen says when you feel yourself or someone else moving around the grid in ways that make

you uncomfortable too much closeness and too much hierarchy for example or too much equality in too much distance in cross team collaborations then I want us always to be at the bottom of this chart I am always shooting for equality that's part of my frame we both have our constraints we're both trying to solve them both of our constraints are important and we're interacting as peers I use a tone I would use when talking to appear I spend time listening to the other person and understanding her concerns but I regard them as equal to my own I try not to be dismissive but I also try not to be deferential I deliberately behave in a way that communicates we are equals as for whether I am to the left to the right that's more of a case-by-case thing it depends on how close I think we are if she and I are friendly I'll lean on that a little bit our rapport means I can assume a bit more not have to spend as much time reassuring her of my motives if she and I don't know each other as well I'll corporate a little more

distance into the way I frame things just as kind of a matter of common respect given this when we conflict that means that she disagrees with what I am communicating about where we are in this chart which means that one of the few things has happened perhaps I have misread where we are on that horizontal axis the closeness closeness to distance spectrum if I'm treating her as closer than she feels we are I can come off as invasive I can come off as overly patronizing where to her it feels like I'm trying to pretend we're closer than we are in the hopes that she'll go along with things like he used car salesmen kind of pretending you're kind of chummy and she will likely react by pushing in the other direction being distant being cold clamming up if on the other hand I am the one being too distant and she feels they were closer than that she can end up feeling abandoned or left out or she can infer that I'm deliberately being cold or callous because I expect that we're gonna fight and I'm preparing for

conflict so those are the errors of closeness and distance and the good news there's those signs are pretty easy to spot as long as you're looking for them and then the other way that things can go wrong is the vertical axis I can simply fail to communicate equality and something about my behavior can convey an unintended frame of hierarchy and Tannen says at the hierarchy end every relationship is a power struggle someone is one up and someone is one down when cross team collaborations end up stuck in conflict at the hierarchy end of things I think it's always almost always because someone feels that one of their constraints something that they're responsible for is not being respected and that is an assertion of control by the other person which is a quality of hierarchical relationships and not equal relationships the important thing here to internalize is that every time your constraints are disregarded it makes your job harder you know if I tell you I

can't build you a tool because someone else's needs have priority that means now you have to work harder to get your job done and that is why these kinds of conflicts can be so emotionally charged if what you're hearing is is that I don't respect your constraints then you're also hearing me say I don't value your time and by extension I don't value you so in cross team relationships the challenge is to bring the right frames to your work together so both of you understand your relationship to be in the same place on this chart you want it all the way down into quality and in the appropriate spot between distance and closeness when there's misalignment when you are either miscommunicating or actually disagreeing about your location on this chart it damages your interaction and then that damage is the result of your work together and the severity of that damage gets worse the more misaligned you are and it gets worse the longer you allow that misalignment

to continue you know a couple awkward minutes in a meeting is one thing but if you don't resolve it you let it stew overnight that can really damage the relationship more and more and impair your ability to do great work together that is why it's crucial that you do two things first do your best to read the situation clearly in the first place so you know where on this chart to aim and then second always be reading the other person as you're going watching for that feedback and responding to it with no delay it can be kind of a delicate dance sometimes and it definitely takes a lot of practice and that's why it's important to have a really good model in your head for it and then pay it the attention that it deserves all right situation number two I began the stock by describing a situation where I was giving someone advice to be patronizing on purpose over email and maybe you're wondering what that was about so let me go back and fill in the blanks

situation number one was about relationships between equals but obviously not all team relationships are between equals again I've drawn this out as a kind of formal or guitar but whether you have a very formal rigid org chart or no org chart at all it remains the case that some relationships are more hierarchical than others hierarchy reinforces perception if we hire someone as junior I will perceive him to be junior to begin with and I'll interact with him as I would a junior employee and unless something really happens to change my perception it's gonna tend to stay there perception reinforces hierarchy because I see him as junior I'm not gonna go to him with the kinds of questions I would ask someone senior I'm not readily gonna trust him with the kinds of responsibilities I'd trust to someone senior so because I see him as junior I'm less likely to give him the opportunity to do more senior work on the other hand someone who is already

senior who I perceived to be senior has to really screw up to push my perception very far down right I think the reality is as humans were very susceptible to confirmation bias which is where we pick the evidence that confirms the conclusion we want to draw and so our perceptions of people are stable you know this loop here represents cognitive bias and cognitive bias causes us to pigeonhole people where they are a good example of this a number of years ago a friend of mine got his PhD at UT Austin and then he started looking at other universities to go to for his postdoctoral work and I was like wait a minute you love Austin why let you stay here and do your postdoctoral work and he laughed and he was like everybody knows you don't do your postdoctoral work at the same University you get your doctorate from because they knew you when you were a grad student and they will always see you as a grad student the unsavory reality of cognitive bias means that if you're trying to to put in these terms if you try and get a promotion you have to be doing better work than the people who are already there at that

level because they have inertia keeping them there and you have inertia keeping you down a clarification before I go further with this example you may be listening to this and being like I don't know what he's talking about I'm not trying to get a promotion I'm using you in a casual sense take this example however it's relevant maybe it's pertinent to someone on a team that you manage maybe it's pertinent to a colleague that you're friendly with in any case obviously to be more senior you need to actually do more senior work you need to step up you need to take more initiative you need to contribute more value to your team in your company I'm not suggesting that you should be deceiving people into believing you were doing better work than you are on the other hand sometimes there's this idea that it should just be enough to do the better work and everyone should just notice and that should be fine and humans don't work that way that's kind of a naive way to approach it there are a set of people that you work with who do know exactly what you do you know they're they're close to you they're reviewing everything you do they sit next to you they talk to you all the time these people won't need any more

any convincing when you're doing more senior work they're already gonna know about it but right now as you and I sit here in this room together there is someone influential on your team who is more senior than you who has basically no idea what you do and that person has a perception of you and it's probably outdated and if you've been kicking ass and hoping for recognition that person is going to cause you difficulty if humans were completely rational that person would recognize that he knows nothing about what you're doing in conversations about you that person would say head on have any factual evidence to back this up so I'm gonna sit this one out that is not how humans work in fact if you read the news you may know sometimes having less factual evidence makes our opinions stronger that person's perception of you is compelling to him

right he can't help but feel it viscerally that's just how humans work and so if someone suggests hey we're gonna give this person a promotion that person can't just sit back and be like Oh that's cool you know you know better than me at the very least even if that person's being responsible he's probably gonna say you know ok we'll convince me at least and convincing him is going to take time it's gonna take effort putting together proof talking through it going back and forth documenting it that's bureaucracy which is overhead which is inertia which is holding you back you can complain about how unfair this is but the truth is it is your fault this person sees you this way because you teach people how to treat you his perception of you is largely based on the way you frame your interactions with him to change his perception you have to change the framing remember that earlier quote unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise most of us passively passively accept the frames that we are given

those frames aren't gonna change themselves when he talks to you he's going to frame it as I'm more senior than you not because he's a jerk but because that's how he sees things that's his view of the world and unless you're really paying attention you will use his frame when you respond without even realizing it for example he might write to you and say sounds like things in your area are running behind a bit I need you to send me the current schedule so I can figure out how it impacts my team I just made this up this is not actually a real quote but it seems pretty reasonable right it's not like he wrote you was like get me a coffee [Music] but let's take a minute and analyze the frame of the message so look at the first sentence sounds like things in your area are running behind a bit he could have phrased this as a question like hey someone said your schedules changed I just wanted to ask you what was up but he didn't he said it as a

statement he told you how your work is which is talking down and then is the second sentence I need you to send me the current schedule so I can figure out how it impacts my team again there's a power dynamic there right he could have qualified it he could have said hey when you have time or hey sorry for the short notice he didn't do that and he could have phrased it as a question he could have said could you send me your schedule or he could have shown deference by being oblique you know like hey would really help me out if I had your schedule and he didn't do any of that the only way he could have been more hierarchal about it would have been to actually issue it as a direct order you know but he came pretty close if you reply to this email and you do not actively change the frame in your response you are confirming his frame even if you just write back and say like sure okay sounds good I'll send that to you you're implicitly telling him this is the right way to treat me this is the right way to see me right the way that

you view our relationship is correct because I didn't bother to try to challenge it so at this point you have to stop and think about what you want the power dynamic to actually be so take tannins vertical access here let's say you want to relate to this guy as a peer so you want to push down towards equality okay frame it that way I find it this part actually takes a certain amount of active visualization so you kind of come up with the frame in your head so in this case let's say it's you and I are peers you have to roll it around in your head until you start to believe it you have to really kind of try it on and see how it fits and it's very important because if you've just been going with the flow for a while like it or not you have his frame stuck in your head you have to convince yourself before you have any hope of convincing anyone else and so that is where I would give advice like don't be deferential here in fact turn the tables

by being a little bit patronizing you know he's talking down to you talk down to him right back and say oh that's funny you know I was about to write and ask you for the same thing anyway I'd be glad to make some time to help you understand things a bit better let's grab coffee this afternoon do you I mean do you see I think it's subtle but I mean hopefully you see how you know where that's a little bit patronizing but it's it's not about being mean right or like out alpha in someone it can be playful right you can be kind of teasing about it like it's not aggression it's kind of a sly wink to it this is the way that appear would talk to him you know there's that old saying of dress for the job you want and not the job you have it's kind of like speak from the position that you want not the position you've been boxed into the only qualification that I would give to this is that people will reject frame as if they are wildly different from their own like if you're CEO sends an email to the whole company and you right back privately to him like you guys are

like pals you're probably gonna get fired but slight adjustments over time will work you know takes effort because you have to step back every single time and analyze and respond thoughtfully and get yourself out of the habit of just playing into somebody else's frame but you have to do it because it's your responsibility to teach other people how they should treat you you know don't sit by passively and let people frame you into a little box take charge all right those peer relationships and hierarchical relationships I would like to talk about one more of these archetypes this afternoon and I think it's especially an important one for those of us who manage people so it is cliche and I think rather obvious for companies to say we think that people are the most valuable asset we have and companies have ways that they can show that they can invest in perks they can invest in management training they can treat their people well they have a lot

of ways to show that they care as a leader as a manager as a as a human being as a person what do you do to show that you care and this is where I think the subtlety lies many managers and leaders that I see claim to care about their employees but actually end up using a frame like I care about your work result or I care about making you happy so you don't quit right there is a different frame and that is I care about you when I talk to people about this sometimes they'll argue they'll say well those are really the same thing right because happy people do good work so it's just good business sense and they're all really interconnected I agree that these things are inseparable but I don't agree that they're the same thing they're different things and that's important because if you want to be genuine what I have found is that they cannot overlap what do I mean by that when you're having a conversation

if your frame is I care about your work results that means it is not I care about you they are mutually exclusive frames if the person you're talking to has the sense that your first priority in this conversation is her work result she knows that she is not your first priority right let's say you the two of you are having some meeting you're trying to suss out some design problem it takes some you know some pretty rough compromises from both you things are pretty tight but after a while you work on it you come up with a plan that you're you know you think is pretty solid you can tell she knows you've both done the right things but she's really frustrated and disappointed about the compromises that she's had to make and let's say because you were an empathetic and decent human being you can feel her frustration and disappointment and you wish that you could help what I'm saying is because you've just spent a whole meeting framed in terms of the work product it's challenging to immediately shift over to saying I care about you it's easy for your words to ring hollow if she feels like you're still focused on the work

results and then even if what you're saying is I want to express my genuine compassion she may just hear you making some kind of vulgar gesture or faking concern or it may come across as like hey I really hope that your frustration does not interfere with your work so from that I would say expressing personal caring for people at work is best done in my experience by carving out a separate space for it so I myself spend a lot of time at Top Pot Doughnuts which is a two block walk from my office and I get weird looks from the employees sometimes when it's like my third visit of the day but I do not go there for the doughnuts I resist the doughnuts I go there one-on-one with colleagues because it gives us some distance some physical distance from work and thereby makes it easier to frame our conversation as a personal one you know in the example I just gave with a frustrated colleague I'd probably let the meeting end give it a couple hours and then send a quick email saying like look that that if that meeting was pretty rough I feel kind of

bad about it I think we did the right thing but like if you know you want to grab some coffee and chat about it and while I keep mentioning coffee obviously the coffee is not the point the important thing is that you carve out protected space during your workday where you can interact with people where the frame is I care about you be a good listener express your concern learn about them like do all the things humans do when they're when they're building relationships and that goes for all of your colleagues and if you're a manager I think it goes double for your reports this is why one-on-one meetings with your reports if you're a manager are so important but it's also why it's so important not to let them just turn into status meetings right because if you let your one-on-ones become status meetings what you're communicating is this space is about the work result right this space is not about you it gets a little bit tricky because sometimes status updates can actually be a good way to jumpstart a one on one if you don't really have anything to talk about but you should be viewing the status update as a as a kind

of entry into kind of the more human space and always pushing for that sometimes is easy it's it is as easy as just starting with how are you but then sometimes you'll do that and what you'll actually get as a status update like oh you know I'm fine I'm ahead of schedule on this thing I'm worried about this other thing I was talking to this guy about how we're gonna do this other thing and and that's totally fine you can be a good listener you can sit through that you can absorb it and then when the person is done talking you just smile and say that sounds great how are you in my experience from cases I've seen from managers I've had in those I've worked with this is one of the big things that separates passible managers from ones where I felt like they were really great I think it's really tempting as a manager and especially a new manager to keep your interactions with your reports entirely in kind of a work frame and to defend it as like well my job isn't to like be their best friend my job is just to you know get

the best results out of them that we can but if you keep all of your conversations to these work-related frames you'll never really get to know them as people and I don't know how you can possibly expect to manage someone well if you don't really know him I think it's some level the obvious reason why people don't employ this frame more often or it's so easy to kind of conveniently avoid it and slip into those other kind near enemy frames is that caring about people is scary because it's intimate and it means being vulnerable but strong working relationships are personal relationships right and personal relationships do involve caring for one another so you have to carve out that time and make it happen all right well those are the three archetypes I wanted to talk about hopefully some of those scenarios were interesting or thought-provoking or or gave you some new way to see a familiar situation like I said in the beginning I

think so much of this work is just starting to develop that sensitivity you know the kind of like spidey sense to know what to look for so when you find yourself sitting in a meeting or you know in a conversation suddenly the thought will kind of pop up like hey this is one of those times and when you have that thought pop up it's great because it gives you an opportunity you have the ability to suddenly make a conscious choice about how you respond towards the beginning of this talk I said framing as a tool and it takes two things it takes skill and it takes wisdom so I've been I just spent the last 40 minutes talking about the skill now I'd like to talk a little bit about the wisdom side of things because it's one thing to analyze this stuff technically but I find that viscerally people still respond to it negatively you know like maybe you were listening and in your head you were thinking like oh my god like this guy over analyze was like crazy if you did you should know you're not the first person to levy that accusation against me and there's still that question of Dale in Eugene you know I kind of like spent

some time upfront trying to convince you hey they're a bunch of Dale's out there who are using this knowledge nobly who are trying to do good with it boo I think all of us really know a number of people who who are like that who don't and I think that's reflected in the basic vocabulary we have in the English language when we talk about this stuff is stuff like manipulative or scheming or calculated and we want to believe that it's enough just to have good intentions that this kind of analysis is unnecessary is overthinking and in doing so we implicitly assume that those who do do this must be malicious you know must have some kind of ulterior motive I believe that the opposite is true I believe that this practice is a noble one I believe that it is not just okay I believe that it is vital and that doing it deeply enriches our lives

this is the woodshop that I grew up with as a kid both of my parents are skilled woodworkers and it was my mother's profession for a long time so I had to shop in my basement when I was growing up as soon as they thought I was old enough my parents taught me how to use all the tools safely what precautions to take how they worked what they did my mother's work was folk art which was a business that left her plenty of free time to spend with us kids for a good part of the year the price was that in the months approaching Christmas she was basically living down there and working every waking moment during those busy times she'd pay us to help most of her work was with standard 3/4 inch thick pine stock and it always needed sanding and I was a precocious negotiator so I talked her up to like a nickel or maybe even a dime apiece to sand her work front back and any of the flat edges on that belt sander that you can see to the left of the photo when the work was there I could make like ten bucks an hour setting that stuff which at that age was a ton of money I got so good with it I was super

fast at it and I learned every detail I learned every nuance of that belt sander sometimes the belt starts to slide off one side of the other you have to adjust the front roller just right to keep it centered and when you're using it the belt will fill up with wood dust and there's this stick of dense black gum like the world's largest pencil eraser that you press against the belt and kind of watch it strips off the caked up pine dust and reveals the deep red sanding belt underneath I started with the belt sander because it was one of the safer tools but in time I learned them all we had a shop Smith which is you can see it two left it's a big motor slides along these metal rails and they make all these attachments for it bandsaw lathes drill press jigsaw basically any wood tool you can imagine you can get us a shop Smith attachment and they last forever which is why the company is now out of business I so I learned them one by one you know I draw a little snaking lines on wood with pencil and practice tracing them on the bandsaw I'd learn how to hold a chisel against a wood blank when it was turning in the lathe

you know learning the right motor speed for each tool learning how to care for them I fix them when they broke and along the way I learned to really respect the tools in their power I still remember the sound the bandsaw made when you turned it on it's that you flip the switch on the motor it's this really loud metal clack and then it's kind of whining pitching noises the saw blade spins up no matter how many times I use did add that noise I always felt the slightest twinge of fear when it started but it was good because it kept me alert and made sure I was paying attention along the way I also learned great respect and even love for the wood itself just six months ago I made these tables out of black walnut in my backyard in Seattle I spent probably a hundred or two hundred hours surfacing and finishing the wood and almost all of that time was between me and a simple block plane her hand sander in the wood I made a few initial cuts where the table saw but other than that I did everything with hand tools I got to know every subtle curve in the surface of each table each plank was different with

her unique beauty in the grain and edge and I look back on those hours as a collaboration between the wood and me working together to bring out the potential in that grain and to make something beautiful it takes craft to make art it takes skill with any medium and any tool set to make something beautiful and communication is a craft just like any other in every way except for one in craft and an art we are accustomed to being the craftspeople in the artists but in human relationships we are also the medium we shape each other we work on each other it can help to smooth off each other's rough edges and with great skill and enough care we can refine one another we can help to bring out the beauty and potential that exists within each of us but through misuse we can and we all do harm one another and so when we meet someone who uses these tools consciously our reaction is suspicion is

apprehension and this is as it should be fear is a normal reaction to a situation that could cause us harm the fear is not the problem the problem is when we let that fear stop us the proper response to fear is gratitude is appreciation appreciation that it's there to warn you about danger appreciation that it's keeping you alert and then after that the proper response is to continue to act just with extraordinary care a life lived in the shadow of fear is one where we misunderstand what the fear is telling us with communication we misunderstand when we think the fear is telling us that the tools themselves are evil or the people who use them are villainous it is not it is simply letting us know that we need to be careful the skill of communication and the knowledge that

comes from analyzing human interactions these things are tools that we can use to do great things if we let our fear dissuade us from using them at all we forfeit the chance to do that good okay you asked but what about those people we all know who do use these tools to do harm who use them for their own personal material gain at the expense of others I think it's easy to feel anger and contempt for these people and when we have to work directly with them we can feel threatened we can feel upset but perhaps we should instead feel compassion when we learn a craft every moment of that learning is an opportunity to open our eyes to great beauty when I was a child and I didn't know anything about woodworking I'd look at a piece of furniture all I would see was the utility this one's for holding books that one's for holdin clothes practicing woodworking opened my eyes now I look at furniture and I see the utility but also the care and the craftsmanship the beauty of the wood itself and even like a little

camaraderie for the person who made it knowing though this section must have been really difficult or being able to admire the quality of a specific joint that appreciation that ability to encounter something and see not just the outer surface of the thing but also the time and care and love that it's made of that is our sensitivity to all of the beauty and joy and love in the world there is one catch our practice will teach us nothing unless we bring our attention to those moments we have to be willing to see we have to let the experience change us if we practice carelessly then our eyes remain closed and so while it's frustrating to see a skilled communicator who uses his words to harm or climb ladders to earn a bonus at someone else's expense when my mind is open I look at a person like that and it breaks my heart to have such skill with words he must have practiced for so long and the whole time he had such opportunity to see the beauty at other

people to see the beauty in himself and the joy in relationships but he didn't you can't explain those things to someone who doesn't see him it's like trying to explain colors someone who's been blind from birth and so he doesn't even know what he's missing he thinks the goal is acquisition tries to fill his life with material wealth because it's all he knows if you find yourself working with someone like this I might humbly suggest a little meditation to develop compassion for him and it goes like this when we do not know happiness and we try to fill its void with pleasure we suffer okay so if communication and the study of human interaction is a craft that opens our eyes what exactly is it does it open our eyes to well just like woodworking taught me deeply the nature of wood communication deeply teaches us the true

nature of people and the more we know something the more genuinely we're able to love it at the end of the day I think some of our aversion to this analysis is subconsciously part of us doesn't want to see our true nature we don't like the idea that we can be manipulated and someone else can trick us with a simple wording of a question we want to believe that our preferences are rational and well considered and that our behavior is governed by reason but these things are not true and believing them does us no more good than it would it would worker to pretend that wood does not burn or cannot be broken we are creatures you and I and these are our vulnerabilities we are afraid of vulnerability but it is the truth of our nature and only by acknowledging it can we truly love one another the more we practice the more we start to see just how much of our interaction with each other everyday are these ways of staying safe you know

they're nothing but boilerplate habit neurosis polite strategies for saying the right things but keeping our distance we greet one another and we converse but if we aren't really present it's like our words are just kind of read off a script the power of this work is that seeing gives us a choice we can choose not to give the boilerplate response we can choose to respond with sincerity we can choose connection and that's why I believe so strongly in the value of this work I hope something I've said this afternoon has been helpful to you thank you very much for coming [Applause]