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The Transperience Actbook: Framing Actions
Strategic planning is essential for success, but let’s face it: too often, it falls flat. Plans can feel irrelevant, disconnected from reality, or they are seen as overly complicated, leaving everyone wondering how to actually make them work.
The reason for resistance to change is not limited to old habits and fixed beliefs. It can also arrive from an unwillingness to be squeezed into a too tight box with more command and control than flexibility and freedom.
Certainly, the path from strategic intention to tangible impact can be full of hurdles, leading to frustration and inefficiency. Sometimes even the most carefully designed roadmap leads nowhere, because the landscape is too strange, unpredictable or impenetrable, and people are too busy with their own tasks and challenges to care about it.
But having a strategy is still crucial — it shows where to focus and what direction to take. The problem is trying to force it into a rigid plan or project. That’s where framing actions can make a real difference.
Framing is about shaping change from the future you want, rather than clinging to the past. Instead of creating a fixed route, you build a flexible, dynamic space where your intentions can blend with circumstances and actions naturally follow. Such a space can take various forms and manifest itself physically, psychologically and socially.
From planning to framing
In the world of transperience, strategy is more than a growing list of things to do and spreadsheets to fill in. It is the source of inspiration and guide of decision for everybody involved. Staging the strategy makes it come alive and creates momentum. Framing actions will help you turn momentum into movement.
In cognitive science, there is a concept called the framing effect. It shows how the way you present an option — as a gain or a loss — can dramatically affect how people respond. For instance, people are more likely to choose a treatment described as “90% effective” than a treatment described as “10% ineffective,” even though they’re the same thing.
Similarly, when you frame actions positively and with purpose, people are more likely to embrace and act on them. Here’s how you can start using…
