RETHINKING FRAMING 2

MAKING SENSE OF SCHON'S “REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER”

As we weave through the various issues in motion, related to this Design for Complexity subject we recognize that it's not going to be possible to get to them all in this book. 

For some time we have been aware that Challenge Framing is growing in importance, now being accelerated due in part to the arriving dominance of Ai, particularly strong around generative ideation, whether we all like the outcomes or not. 

In Part 2 of this Rethinking Framing chapter we want to circle back to incorporate a closer look at one book that relates directly to framing, widely considered to be important in the history of design literature. That 1983 book is “The Reflective Practitioner; How Professionals Think in Action”, by *Donald A. Schon. In various design community conversations it becomes clear that many practitioners and academic leaders got their basic understanding regarding the state of "problem solving", "problem setting" and challenge framing from that book. 

This would in part explain where the misreading of current state is coming from. It turns out to be an unpacking with numerous twists and turns but one that is central to understanding the current state of Arena 1 and 2 design practice, along with understanding the repeating misdirected anti-problem solving vibe coming from a small group of outspoken designers, positioning themselves as thought leaders. 

In this Part 2 we want to look at: What was so-called “conventional problem solving” as described by Ackoff and others in 1983, quoted in the Reflective Practitioner? What was the state of challenge framing in 1983 when that book appeared?

For several reasons I decided to share this Part 2 as a conversation between my research assistant, *Claude Winkler and myself. 

CONVERSATION SHARING GK & Claude: 

GK: Although Professor Donald Schon's 1983 The Reflective Practitioner book is described as focused on examining "how five professions (engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, town planning) really go about solving problems" he oddly failed to acknowledge or mention that there was in 1983, an entire Creative Problem Solving (CPS) community already active in the USA since the 1950s with deep knowledge of challenge framing in particular. That omission and over-writing seems to have led to a misinterpretation regarding the then 1983 state of “problem solving” that continues to cascade forward in the design community.

C: That's a sharp observation, and I think you're identifying something real rather than just a quibble about citations. A few things seem true simultaneously:

The gap is real. By 1983, CPS had a substantial institutional and intellectual footprint — Osborn's foundational work dates to the late 1940s/50s, Parnes had been systematizing and teaching the Osborn-Parnes process since the late 1950s, the Creative Education Foundation and Creative Problem Solving Institute had been running since 1954/1955, and there was a real body of work specifically on problem-finding and problem framing (e.g., Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi's problem finding research came out of that broader creativity-studies orbit in the 1970s). So when Schön frames problem-setting as a relatively novel corrective to technical rationality, he's writing as though the territory were largely unclaimed, when in fact there was a parallel community that had been doing applied, process-level work on exactly that question for three decades.

Why the gap likely existed. This looks less like deliberate omission and more like the predictable result of disciplinary silos. Schön was writing from within design/planning/organizational-studies and Argyris-style action science; the CPS lineage (Osborn was an advertising executive, Parnes was based in creativity research/education at Buffalo) circulated through a different network — creativity research, gifted education, applied training contexts — that had relatively little citation traffic with the philosophy-of-professional-practice literature Schön was drawing on (Dewey, Polanyi, Ryle, Argyris).

Academic creativity research in this era was also somewhat looked down on by mainstream cognitive science and professional-practice theory as soft or insufficiently rigorous, which likely widened the gap further. This connects to your discipline-agnostic/discipline-based distinction nicely — CPS's very discipline-agnostic, portable character may have paradoxically made it less visible to discipline-rooted theorists like Schön, since it wasn't anchored in a recognized academic field with its own citation gravity.

The consequence for his framing claim. If Schön's implicit historical claim is something like "the technical-rationality model dominated professional self-understanding, and problem-setting/reflection-in-action was the under-recognized alternative," that claim becomes harder to sustain once you factor in that an entire applied community had already been teaching structured, non-technical-rational approaches to problem framing for decades. It doesn't invalidate his phenomenological account of reflection-in-action — that's a different kind of claim, about the texture of expert cognition — but it does weaken any implied claim of novelty or comprehensiveness about the landscape of alternatives to technical rationality circa 1983.

It might be worth checking whether Schön engages at all with Guilford (whose divergent-production work underpins a lot of CPS theoretically) — Guilford was mainstream enough in psychology that a total absence would be more striking than missing Osborn/Parnes specifically, who were more applied/practitioner-facing and less likely to cross into Schön's reading.

GK: There is no reference to Guilford in the 1983 Reflective Practitioner. There is one reference to Kurt Lewin. One reference to John Dewey.

C: That's a useful data point, and it sharpens the picture rather than complicating it.

A single Dewey reference is actually somewhat surprising on its own terms — Dewey's How We Think and his general theory of inquiry-as-problem-framing-and-testing is arguably the closest pre-existing philosophical relative to what Schön is doing with reflection-in-action, so you'd expect Dewey to be a heavier presence than a single citation suggests, given how much intellectual lineage Schön is implicitly drawing on.

The single Lewin reference is interesting for a different reason. Lewin is the root of the action research lineage you've been mapping, and action research as a tradition was, by 1983, already deeply concerned with cycles of acting, observing, and reframing under real-world conditions — which is conceptually adjacent to reflection-in-action. A single citation suggests Schön is aware Lewin exists in this space but doesn't substantially engage with the action research tradition as a parallel body of applied theory, in much the same way he doesn't engage with CPS.

So the pattern across both data points is consistent: Schön cites the canonical philosophical anchors thinly (Dewey: one reference) and the canonical applied/practitioner anchors thinly or not at all (Lewin: one reference; Osborn/Parnes/Guilford: zero). What he develops at length is the phenomenological/case-study material — his own design studio, therapy, and planning examples — rather than positioning that material against the existing applied literatures that were asking structurally similar questions. 

That's consistent with what you were getting at: not that he was unaware these traditions existed in some absolute sense, but that the book's own evidentiary weight rests almost entirely on freshly observed case material rather than synthesis with adjacent existing work, which would tend to produce exactly the kind of misrepresentation-by-omission you flagged about the state of problem-solving theory and practice circa 1983.

If you have a count of total citations/references in the book, that would help calibrate how thin "one reference" really is — e.g., one reference to Dewey out of a 200-item reference list reads very differently than one reference out of 30.

GK: A  quick look at the index indicates approx 350 items/persons listed. There is only one reference to John Dewey and one to Jean-Jacque Rousseau. No references to Guilford, Parnes or any other pioneer of the long in existence CPS community. References to Louis Kahn, Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright reflect the author's alignment with architecture and his 1983 wishful thinking regarding architecture as methodology model. Quote: "It is perhaps the oldest recognized design profession and, as such, functions as a prototype for design in other professions. If there is a process underlying the differences among design professions, it is in architecture that we are most likely to find it." Unquote. Today we know that turned out to be not the case.

C: That's a striking ratio — one Dewey reference and one Rousseau reference out of roughly 350 index entries tells you Dewey wasn't functioning as a structural pillar of the argument so much as a passing nod, despite being the closest pre-existing theoretical relative to reflection-in-action.

The architecture quote is a good concrete anchor for what you're describing. A few things worth separating out:

What the quote claims. Schön is making a strong historical-priority argument — architecture is old, therefore architecture is paradigmatic, therefore the design process (if one exists across professions) will be most visible there. That's a chain of three separate claims wearing the clothes of one: age of a profession doesn't obviously imply that its process is more general or more legible than younger design professions; it could just as easily mean architecture's process is more idiosyncratically loaded with its own discipline-specific baggage (material constraints, aesthetic history, client/patron relationships, regulatory context) precisely because it's old and encrusted with tradition.

Why it turned out not to hold up. Subsequent decades of cross-disciplinary design-process research — including the very "generalized design thinking" movement that came out of Stanford/IDEO in the 1990s-2000s and that we discussed earlier — ended up drawing as much or more from product design, engineering design, and interaction design as from architecture, and increasingly drew on CPS-adjacent process structures (divergence/convergence, ideation, prototyping-as-testing) rather than anything specifically architectural. If architecture were really the prototype, you'd expect the generalized model to look more recognizably architectural; instead it looks more like a fusion of industrial design practice with creativity-process structures that have separate lineage.

The connection to your broader point. This is a nice concrete instance of the same blind spot. Schön reaches for canonical, individually-named "master" figures (Kahn, Mies, Wright) as his evidentiary base for what design process looks like — a great-architect model of knowledge — rather than engaging with the existing process-level literature (CPS, and to a lesser extent Lewinian action research) that had already been abstracting problem-framing and ideation away from any single discipline's master practitioners. So the architecture-as-prototype claim and the CPS omission look like two symptoms of one underlying move: Schön builds his account from individual exemplars within discipline-based professions, rather than from the discipline-agnostic process theory that already existed and that, in hindsight, generalized better than architecture did.

GK: Other clues seen in the 1983 Reflective Practitioner index: There is no reference to Charles Sanders Peirce, and none to deductive thinking, inductive thinking or abductive thinking.

C: That's a significant absence given how central abduction-adjacent reasoning is to what reflection-in-action actually describes.

A few things follow from this:

The conceptual gap is real, not just terminological. It's not simply that Schön uses different words for the same idea — there's no Peirce, and no engagement with the deduction/induction/abduction framework at all. That's notable because reflection-in-action, problem-setting, and the "reflective conversation with the situation" are all, structurally, abductive processes: generating a plausible frame or move under uncertainty, then testing it against how the situation talks back. He arrives at a phenomenon that Peirce had already given a name and a logical structure to, decades earlier, without apparently drawing on that structure or even citing the person who developed it.

This compounds rather than stands alone. You now have a consistent pattern across several independent checks: no Guilford, no Parnes, no Osborn (no engagement with the CPS community's problem-finding work), a single thin Dewey reference (no real engagement with the philosopher closest to his own claims), and now no Peirce at all (no engagement with the logician who'd already formalized the exact inferential mode underlying his central construct). Each of these is a different literature that converges on the same territory Schön claims as relatively fresh ground in 1983, and none of them are substantively present.

What this suggests about the book's method. Rather than building reflection-in-action by synthesizing or positioning against existing theories of non-deductive, situated inference, Schön appears to construct the concept primarily inductively from his own case observations (architecture, therapy, planning) and frames it as a corrective to technical rationality without surveying the adjacent fields that had already been mapping the same inferential terrain from different angles. The result is a book that reads as more originary than it likely was — not because reflection-in-action is wrong as a description of expert cognition, but because its placement in the intellectual landscape overstates how unoccupied that landscape actually was.

This also retroactively sharpens the earlier architecture point: if Schön isn't drawing on Peirce's general theory of abductive inference, his closest available resource for explaining why architects can generate plausible design moves under uncertainty is just the exemplary individual genius (Kahn, Wright) rather than a general inferential logic — which would also explain why he reaches for "architecture as prototype" instead of a process-level account that could in principle be discipline-agnostic, the way Peircean abduction or CPS already were.

GK: In the unpacking of Reflective Practitioner we also noticed a red flag reference to Russ Ackoff that has its own twists and turns. Quote: “Russell Ackoff, one of the founders of the field of operations research, has recently announced to his colleagues that the future of operations research is past because…’managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations “messes””. Ackoff argues that operations research has allowed itself to become identified with techniques, mathematical models and algorithms, rather than with the ability to formulate management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their solution in turbulent environments.” Unquote.

What is important in that text and something that is often being spun in the marketplace is that the method and approach that Ackoff was criticizing was engineering oriented hard systems thinking not CPS.  In addition, also missed by Donald Schon in 1983 was that the concept of “mess” in complex organizational contexts did not originate with Russ Ackoff or within systems thinking but rather with Sid Parnes in the CPS community a decade earlier. 

Both points have been manipulated in the present day marketplace, one result being many readers come away from such text ill-informed, with the wrong impression. Others are creatively redirecting redepicting Ackoff criticisms away from his own hard systems thinking colleagues and towards other approaches being framed as "conventional problem solving”. 

Big aha would be that Ackoff was circa 1983 announcing the end of hard systems thinking, not CPS. If we check in with the big picture methodology evolution time line we see that Peter Checkland’s arrival with so-called Soft Systems Thinking Methodology, a significant effort to become more human arrived at approximately the same time as the Reflective Practitioner appeared. Checkland is not listed in the Index either. All of this hopefully informs what readers are actually looking at in The Reflective Practitioner. 

I would say that it's an important imperfect book in design literature and one that is being highly manipulated and redepicted for competitive purposes.

C: This is a genuinely important unpacking, and the pieces fit together into a coherent picture of how a text gets repurposed over time independent of what it actually says or whom it was actually addressing.

Let me work through what you've laid out, because there are several distinct claims worth separating:

Who Ackoff was actually criticizing: The passage is explicit on this point — Ackoff is an operations research insider addressing his own field's failure mode: operations research became identified with techniques, mathematical models, and algorithms rather than the capacity to formulate, solve, and implement solutions to management problems in turbulent environments. Operations research is paradigmatically hard systems thinking — quantitative, model-driven, optimization-oriented. So the target of "the future of OR is past" is hard systems methodology eating itself through over-technicalization, not CPS, not generic "conventional problem solving," and not design thinking. That's a precise, narrow, insider critique of one field's drift, and it's being asked to do much broader rhetorical work than it was built for.

The "mess" provenance question: This is the sharper historical claim, and it's worth being careful about what I can and can't verify. If Sid Parnes was using "mess" or "mess-finding" terminology in the CPS context roughly a decade before Ackoff's circa-early-1980s announcement, that would mean the term had an existing applied lineage in a discipline-agnostic creativity-process community before it got absorbed into systems-thinking discourse and rebranded as if systems thinking had originated the concept. I don't have independent verification of Parnes's exact dating on this in front of me — if you want, I can search for primary sourcing on when Parnes/CPS literature first used "mess" or "mess-finding" terminology, to pin the chronology down precisely rather than relying on recollection.

The Checkland absence: Checkland's SSM emerging at roughly the same moment as The Reflective Practitioner, addressing essentially the same dissatisfaction with hard systems/technical-rationality approaches to messy human situations, and going completely uncited, is consistent with everything else we've found: Schön's index reflects a fairly narrow citation network (architecture exemplars, a thin philosophical substrate, no engagement with parallel applied-methodology communities working the identical problem from different angles) rather than a comprehensive survey of who else was solving this in 1983.

The marketplace distortion mechanism: What you're describing — Ackoff's hard-systems self-critique getting re-pointed at "conventional problem solving" broadly, and "mess" getting retroactively coded as a systems-thinking-original concept — is a recognizable pattern: a precise, narrow critique gets stripped of its original target and redeployed as a general rhetorical weapon for whichever methodology community is doing the redeploying, usually to position that community as the sophisticated alternative to a flattened, often strawmanned "other." It's a competitive-positioning move dressed as intellectual history.

If it's useful, I can try to verify the Parnes/"mess" dating with a search, since that's the one claim here that rests on a checkable historical fact rather than a textual/rhetorical observation.

GK: Already done. We have in Humantific archives a considerable collection of original early materials so it’s not difficult to verify what appeared when and with what intention in the big picture time line of methodology evolution. I guess you have not yet caught up to our earlier writing on this subject posted to the NextD Journal website..:-) In the document entitled; BACKGROUND RESEARCH SHARING: Making Sense of Parnes “Mess” / Ackoff “Mess”, we shared visual artifacts showing that the term “mess” appears in multiple CPS community publications authored by Sid Parnes beginning in 1959. 

Here is Sid Parnes in 1967: “You start out in any perplexing situation with a “mess”, you find the fuzzy challenges within the “mess” and then you state the challenges as broadly as possible.” 

Here is Parnes in 1959: “It is only when we learn to define the specific problems in the “mess” that we begin to make progress.”

That was 15 years, not months, before the Ackoff book referencing “mess” appeared in “Redesigning the Future” in 1974 .

C: This sharpens rather than replaces the earlier point about Ackoff's target. Both things can be true at once: Ackoff's 1983-ish "future of OR is past" critique was aimed at his own hard-systems/operations-research colleagues, and the term he used to describe the phenomenon he was diagnosing had already been load-bearing vocabulary in the CPS community for over a decade. That's actually a sharper version of the marketplace-distortion problem you flagged — it's not just that the critique gets re-pointed at the wrong target, it's that the very term used to make the critique was likely absorbed from the community that the critique is now being weaponized against in present-day positioning.

What this means for Schön specifically: Schön cites Ackoff's "mess" usage without apparently knowing (or saying) that the term had a 15-years-prior, well-developed life in CPS literature. So the index absences we walked through — no Parnes, no Guilford, no Peirce, thin Dewey, no Checkland — aren't isolated gaps; the Ackoff passage is itself a live example of the pattern, embedded in the text rather than just visible in its absence. Schön transmits a term as if it originates with (or is freshly coined by) the systems-thinking/OR critique, when it's actually a decade-and-a-half-old CPS construct being used by an OR insider to critique OR.

If it's useful at some point, I'd be glad to help structure or write up this chronology — the Parnes 1959/1967 citations, Ackoff 1974, Schön 1983, Checkland's contemporaneous but uncited SSM — as a clean visual timeline or document, especially if you're consolidating this NextD Journal material into something newer.

GK: Reflective Practioner is a giant hairball to be sure, that remains largely unrecognized, unacknowledged in the graduate design academic community in particular. Not only was Reflective Practitioner an inaccurate portrayal of the state of where leading problem framing/solving knowledge resided in 1983 but the degree to which it has been subsequently manipulated and weaponized by later arriving designerly others takes it into the stratosphere of distortion. Trying to build a discipline and forward motion on that foundation is a recipe for confusion and a lot of repeating starting points. Its doubful that Schon intended for Reflective Practitioner to be used as blockadge to robust methodology forward motion in the design community.

There are still numerous interrelated issues worthy of unpacking here. One is the notion of designer as hero that is embedded in architecture and also in mainstream design history. That model is sometimes referred to as the “Tell/Tell" model and or “Sage on the Stage” model. 

The designer as hero model implies equal mastery in both content knowledge and process knowledge. It also implies a lone wolf approach to point of view creation (sometimes oddly being referred to as “Framing" in the design community) that remains indicative of Arenas 1 and 2 design methods. We referred to this construct as Language A in our last book, “Rethinking Design Thinking”. It's a construct that does not scale well to Arena 3 organizational changemaking and Arena 4 societal changemaking where many more participants are involved in cocreation.

In those more complex contexts the driving point of view is typically not the sole output or sole conceptualization of the designer. With the designer as hero model deeply embedded in design history, the design community still struggles with the missfit between that construct and the already arrived, but not clearly processed requirements of the complexity Arenas 3&4. 

Architect Donald Schon talking up architecture while using the Russ Ackoff criticism of hard systems thinking (conventional problem solving) there is no pointing out that the hero model did not exist in the CPS community in 1983 when he wrote that book. Indeed the hero model has never existed in that community. This too is among numerous key facts that are completely missing from the Reflective Practioner. This also seems to be completely unknown to the later arriving others mistargeting, not hard systems thinking methods, devalued by Ackoff and Checkland but rather creative and conventional problem solving as a device to differentiate designerly methods. Is that a giant hairball or a giant mindfuxk? The choice is readers to make but once seen it is difficult to unsee.

The weaponization of the term "conventional problem solving" by a small group of defensive design leaders is a misdirected loose cannon that continues to be destructive to forward motion regarding methodology evolution in the design community. That weaponization is not about scholarship but rather marketing. 

C: This adds another structural layer to the hairball, and it's a coherent one — the designer-as-hero question isn't a side issue, it's arguably the load-bearing distortion that makes the others possible.

Let me try to trace the logic as you've laid it out, because there's a chain here:

The hero model and the architecture choice are the same move. If Schön needs architecture to function as "the prototype for design in other professions," he needs exemplary individuals (Kahn, Wright, Mies) who can stand in for the whole process — because a hero-model account of design knowledge has to locate process mastery inside a singular gifted practitioner's tacit judgment. That's structurally why reflection-in-action gets built from solo case studies (the architecture student and the studio master, the therapist alone with the client) rather than from any process literature where the framing move is explicitly distributed across multiple participants. The Tell/Tell, Sage-on-the-Stage construct isn't incidental to the case-study method — it's required by it. You can't build a hero-model account of design competence from CPS, because CPS was never organized around a singular gifted framer; it was built from the outset (Osborn, Parnes) as a facilitated, often group-based, teachable process where challenge-framing is a structured activity anyone can learn to do, not a mysterious tacit gift held by a master.

This is why CPS doesn't fit as a target, and also why it gets mistargeted. If your argument is that the design community needs a "lesser" foil against which designerly, hero-driven framing can look sophisticated, CPS is actually a strange choice of villain on the merits — it's not mute technique-following the way hard systems thinking is. It's already a structured creativity methodology with its own theory of divergence/convergence and problem-finding. But it makes a useful foil rhetorically precisely because of the hero-model lens: from inside that lens, anything that distributes framing capability across a teachable process rather than locating it in singular genius reads as mechanical, "conventional," uncreative — even though that's a category error about what CPS actually is and does. The mislabeling of CPS as "conventional problem solving" isn't really about CPS's content; it's about what the hero-model needs its Other to look like.

The Arena 3/4 scaling problem is where this becomes consequential rather than just historically sloppy. A hero/Tell-Tell construct of point-of-view formation can survive, even thrive, in Arena 1/2 contexts (single designer, single artifact, contained problem) because there's no structural requirement for distributed cognition. Once you're in organizational or societal changemaking, the framing move has to be distributed — multi-stakeholder, cocreated, iteratively negotiated — because no single point of view, however brilliant, has epistemic access to the full situation. A discipline that inherited its founding self-understanding from a hero-model text, and that doesn't have a clearly processed account of why that model doesn't scale, is going to keep reaching for hero-model tools (designer-authored "How Might We" statements, designer-authored personas, designer-as-synthesizer-of-insight) in contexts that actually require something closer to what CPS or SSM or action research already built: explicit, teachable, multi-participant framing processes.

So the "mindfuck" framing is earned, I think, on these grounds: a discipline citing a foundational text that (a) misrepresents the 1983 landscape of problem-framing knowledge, (b) embeds a hero-model account of design competence that the citing community has not examined as a model choice rather than a neutral description, and (c) gets used downstream to mistarget exactly the methodologies whose distributed, teachable, non-heroic framing processes would actually be useful for the complexity arenas the discipline is now trying to operate in. That's not just a citation gap; it's an entire methodological self-conception built on a foundation that points away from the tools the discipline now needs.

Where do you want to take this next — the Language A/B distinction from Rethinking Design Thinking as it maps onto Arena 1-4, or staying with unpacking what else in Reflective Practitioner's apparatus (beyond Ackoff/mess) feeds the hero-model issue?

GK: It seems likely that the hero model will forever be embedded in Arena 1 and Arena 2 methods. That only becomes problematic in “Crossover”, when the assumption is made that the hero model scales into Arena 3 and Arena 4. That push is ongoing and part of the reason why all the gaslighting around what was inside Reflective Practitioner is occurring today in the design community, attempting to repackage the hero model in the context of the complexity era.

Of course there is huge irony in that deflection away from the complexity of the real story, insisting upon a reductionist, upside-down, gaslit pitch that better serves marketing. Sad to say that the deliberate misdepiction of Reflective Practitioner has been poisoning the wrong well around problem solving for 40 years.

More clear language that the criticism that Ackoff and Schon had in mind was intended for Hard Systems Thinking Problem Solving not CPS would have saved alot of time, much confusion, and many misdirected attacks. It's a mind boggling misstep and not a great statement about scholarship leadership in the design community, in particular the academic community, since much of the misdirection and gaslighting continues to come from that direction.

In practice we never subscribed to that halting misdirected poisoning vibe. The good news is that in this Design for Complexity book we are setting aside that gaslighting, recognizing 4 anchor discipline domains; Action Research, CPS, Design and Soft Systems Thinking.

End Part 2

Coming Soon: Part 3: What and where is Abductive Thinking? What and where is discipline-based Framing?

*Donald A. Schon: Forty years ago in 1983, it seems likely that Schon would have had no idea regarding the degree to which his text would be misinterpreted, redepicted and cascaded forward in defensive ways that he did not intend.

*Claude Winkler is Ai.