RETHINKING FRAMING 5
- Admin
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Making MORE Sense of Schon's Reflective Practitioner “FRAMING”
There are several sprawling wrinkles not yet unpacked related to how Donald Schon's 1983 Reflective Practitioner book projects forward that we can reflect on today. Continuing my conversation with *Claude Winkler.
G: It would be ambitious of us and useful to our readers if we could put a few finer points on the differences between the designerly "framing" that occurs, inspired by Schon's Reflective Practitioner book and the "framing" that occurs in CPS (Creative Problem Solving). There seems to be considerable confusion as the same term is being used for very different things. Indeed we should probably compare the use of the term "framing" in each of the anchor approaches; Action Research, CPS, Design and Soft Systems Thinking.
When we consider the specific context of Arena 3 and Arena 4 and then reflect on the Reflective Practitioner book several problematic issues bubble up that an arriving generation of Design for Complexity leaders should certainly be aware of.
Of the historical designerly documents inside *Four Horsemen of Lingering Misperception it is the Reflective Practitioner that has suffered the most from subsequently generated counterproductive reinterpretations.
Riffing off the 1983 Reflective Practitioner and the 1991 Four Orders of Design has become a useful, often fact-bending, credibility-hitchhiking artform going on inside the strategic design community.
ORIENTATION MISINTERPRETATION:
Suitcase 1: For practice leaders, super useful to be aware of: Schon’s noble, underlying, much needed 1983 message that “Technical Rationality” interconnected to Operations Research / Ackoff / Hard Systems Thinking / technical problem solving has unfortunately been recast, over the years, by various detractors as an argument against problem solving in general, for the purpose of competitive marketplace differencing. Call it an unenlightened miscalculation, a re-spin, a not-so-scholarly high-jacking, a simple oversight or an ongoing assassination, whichever you prefer. It was and is a forceful misdirected provocation, NOT by Donald Schon but by subsequently arriving redepicters.
That ongoing vibe makes it super important to distinguish between what Schon actually stated in Reflective Practitioner, versus the overlays of later arriving marketing schemes.
Contrary to the respin, Schon's critique within Reflective Practitioner was directed at "Technical Rationality" and "technical problem solving", not at the entire intellectual category of problem solving.
Schon helped expose, in that 1980s era, the inadequacy of Technical Rationality as a universal model of professional problem solving. *Ackoff's critique of Operations Research / Hard Systems Thinking, included in Reflective Practitioner, provided Schon with evidence from inside the technical problem-solving establishment itself.
In Reflective Practitioner Schon does not merely happen to parallel the critique of Operations Research. He explicitly incorporates that critique as evidence for his larger argument against Technical Rationality, and Russell Ackoff is one of the important voices he invokes.
The hiccups tend to occur, when the later arriving, not-so-robust discourse broadens that Schon / Ackoff Technical Rationality critique into a rejection of "problem solving" generally, inadvertently obscuring Creative Problem Solving traditions that had already developed sophisticated upstream practices of problem finding, formulation, framing, divergence and convergence, process architecture, etc.
The irony is that by 1983, the Creative Problem Solving tradition had already spent decades developing precisely the capabilities that Technical Rationality lacked. In fact, the two models are almost opposites. Calling both simply "problem solving" erases deep knowledge-related differences.
Once that distinction gets lost, a rather significant historical upside-down inversion occurs. Intentions and capacity are distorted, while opportunity to accelerate evolution is lost. Much gets truncated in the spinning.
The irony becomes even greater with Schon's "problem setting". One of Schon's most important contributions was distinguishing problem setting from technical problem solving, however CPS already had a mature vocabulary and practice around mess finding, problem finding, problem formulation, fact finding, challenge framing, and divergent exploration of alternative formulations.
For the benefit of our readers we might point out that "problem solving" can mean at least three very different things:
Type | Character |
Technical problem solving | Apply known method to defined problem |
Analytical problem solving | Analyze causes and select solution |
Creative Problem Solving | Discover/frame challenges, diverge/converge behaviors, develop and implement possibilities, includes mess finding, problem finding, |
Schon's criticism strongly attacks the first as a universal model of professional practice but does not suggest or claim a case against the third.
Today collapsing all three into "problem solving" not only produces reductionist historical distortion, but truncates vast knowledge around framing that already exists in the CPS community.
Whether we all like it or not, the entire underlying original Technical Rationality critique orientation in Schon's book has been largely overwritten and redepicted in distortion. Visible in various literatures, but poorly covered in strategic design journalism, a case could certainly be made to suggest that a rather short-sighted post-Reflective Practitioner assassination of an enormous value-add resource remains active at a time when “framing” in design, beyond “briefs” was/is in its infancy.
That misrepresentation has had tremendous counter-productive impact in the design community and continues to reverberate today. See Four Horsemen of Lingering Misperception.
In this Design for Complexity book we strongly reject that not-so-scholarly, misdirected, over-writing assassination narrative as part of embracing Cross-Community Pluralism, aka; Thinking Blending. That rejection and that forward motion embrace is part of how we have been able to undertake the sensemaking around this complex emerging subject.
ROCK-STAR CONCEPTUALIZING AS “FRAMING”:
Suitcase 2: After numerous layers of argument the “framing” that gets proposed in the Reflective Practitioner book, is kind of a 1980s version of the heroic, rock-star design model, still popular today in Arena 1 & 2 and with deep roots in design history.
In the 1983 book Schon can be seen presuming and suggesting: "The family of design professions, of which architecture is the best known, includes urban design, regional planning and the type of town planning that produces plans for physical structures of cities."....and…“The language of designing is a language for doing architecture”…”It is perhaps the oldest recognized design profession and as such functions as prototype for design in other professions.” and “If there is a fundamental process underlying the differences among design professions, it is in architecture that we are most likely to find it.”
When we look at Reflective Practitioner we are really looking in the rear view mirror at the designerly presumptions and leadership ambitions that existed for architecture at that time. Much of that did not unfold as imagined as other approaches, including the anchors seen in this book were already in motion and rapidly ascending the Arena 3 and Arena 4 activity space.
In that “Framing” model described in Reflective Practitioner the lone designer in pseudo-architect mode steps forward with a commentary on the management supplied design brief, tabling a reconsidered, by the lone designer conceptualization, as if the objective was a funky new building concept, spun out and depicted as “Framing” and “Reframing”.
That is individual author, Conceptualized Solution Framing, NOT multiple participant cocreated Open Systemic Challenge Framing. It’s a conceptualization leap, not a collective cocreated inquiry into surfacing what the actual challenges might be.
The former jumps off from a problem as given and entertains reformulation. The latter jumps off from undefined fuzz and creates a systemic map of how the many challenges, complex, complicated and simple are interconnected. Big difference. One is an apple, the other a map of the cosmos.
For some in the design community accustomed to the dynamics and rituals of Arena 1 and 2, there is a kind of familiar, feel good traditional design dynamic to the “framing” Schon depicts. Some might even refer to that as a celebrity design dynamic. Scanning across the four anchors it is a dynamic that tends to appear in traditional Design (Arena 1&2) and Soft Systems Thinking, not in Action Research or CPS.
The designer as rock-star conceptual hero model is long-standing, valid and in certain contexts useful, however that orientation, that procedure is not generally how change gets done in complex Arena 3, organizational changemaking or Arena 4 societal changemaking contexts where multiple human constituents are present and invested.
To assume that the much beloved design logics, dynamics and procedures from Area 1 and 2 can auto-transfer to Arena 3 and 4 appears to be embedded in that overly-optimistic 1980s Schon inspired approach.
Lets also keep in mind that ten years prior to Reflective Practitioner, Rittel and Webber, operating in a parallel universe, had tabled the so-called “Wicked Problems” formulation and in the 1982-83 period Checkland had delivered the crisis of Hard to Soft Systems Earthquake, blowing up the long in operation, deeply rooted, Hard Systems Thinking approach and delivered his shot at approach renewal in the form of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).
“FRAMING” OVERVIEW:
Traditional Design “Framing”
In traditional Arena 1 & 2 design practices “Framing” is delivered to the team in the form of a management generated discipline-based design brief. The degree to which that “Framing” can be questioned varies.
Schon inspired Design “Framing”
Today, in Schon inspired Design “Framing” the primary orientation is discipline-based, reframing/conceptualization. The starting point is downstream from the receipt of a management generated brief. Schon inspired Design “Framing” is essentially a reenactment of the assumptions and architectural procedural orientations made by Schon in 1983.
SSM “Framing”
In SSM “Framing” the primary orientation is discipline-based analysis of visible systems. The starting point is upstream from assumed challenges with the sidecar rider that systems are assumed.
Action Research “Framing”
In Action Research the primary orientation of “Framing” discipline-agnostic deciphering through dialogue of invisible challenges. The starting point is upstream from assumed challenges.
CPS “Framing”
In CPS the primary orientation of “Framing” is discipline-agnostic deciphering of invisible challenges, via not just dialogue, but via Open Systemic Challenge Framing. The starting point is upstream from assumed challenges.
Big differences!
Today Design for Complexity framers, working the upstream terrain, combine dialogue, visual sensemaking (not just rich-pictures) *Neurath Turn, and Open Systemic Challenge Framing as part of Cross-Disciplinary CoCreation, *Guilford Turn. The formulation of various solution/evolution concepts is an important subset activity. Without open systemic framing that activity amounts to shots in the dark.
PROCESS not CONTENT:
What gets even trickier is that Schon makes no distinction between content knowledge and process knowledge, which reflects traditional design mode. In Schonland the pseudo-architect “Framer” is in content and in process.
In CPS the Open Systemic Challenge Framer is in process, not content. Facilitation of cocreation across multiple disciplines is a process role, not a content advisory role.
These differences that become important in the context of Arena 3 & 4, represent significant complexities that the design community, for the most part, graduate design education in particular, have not even begun to grapple with.
WHAT SCHON MISSED:
Similar to the missing that took place around the Wicked Problems formulation, the Reflective Practitioner failed to grasp or acknowledge that the vast majority of the design education community, cascading into the practice communities was then and is now teaching/executing discipline-based framing interconnected to assumption-boxed methods; product, service, experience design.
To travel from that paradigm to the complexities and peculiarities of Arena 3 and Arena 4 is quite a considerable journey. Pretending that the design community is already there thanks to the Schon reflective architect model is a very different journey and indeed a different book.
Difficult subject: When it comes to open systemic challenge framing the design community, struggles with scholarship-lite in a subject terrain that has itself become highly complex.
Let's reflect before we unpack one other suitcase in the Reflective Practitioner.
On why the "prototype" claim was overdetermined to fail, even on its own terms:
C: There's a deeper problem with Schön reaching for architecture as prototype that's worth naming explicitly: architecture is a structural outlier even within Arena 1/2. It's single-client (or small client-group), single-site, single-deliverable, and the "user" is often absent from the room entirely during framing. Compare that to service design, experience design, or even product design done well — all of which already, in 1983, involved some degree of multi-stakeholder negotiation before a concept got tabled. So the prototype claim wasn't just a bad fit for Arena 3/4 — it was already a somewhat unrepresentative choice for design generally, cherry-picking the discipline with the least built-in requirement for cocreation and generalizing outward from it. That's worth stating as a standalone point: the failure isn't only "Arena 1/2 methods don't transfer to Arena 3/4," it's "even the Arena 1/2 case chosen wasn't representative of Arena 1/2."
On the citability asymmetry — a structural explanation:
C: Your Suitcase 1 argument centers on redepiction and marketing hijack as the mechanism of distortion. There may be a second, more structural mechanism working alongside it: Schön's model is more citable than CPS's, independent of any spin. When knowledge is fused into a single authorial voice making propositional claims ("the framer reflects, reframes, names"), it produces quotable, attributable sentences that travel well in academic and design literature. When knowledge lives in a distributed process architecture — a facilitated method whose "content" is produced by the group, not the facilitator — there's no equivalent quotable authorial claim to cite. The facilitator's expertise is procedural and largely invisible in the artifact it produces. This would mean the asymmetric uptake between Schön-framing and CPS-framing isn't purely a hijacking story — it's also that content-fused, individually-authored frameworks are simply easier to cite, teach, and attribute than process-owned, collectively-authored ones. Worth considering whether this belongs inside Suitcase 1.
On the Rittel/Webber vacuum:
C: You note Rittel and Webber preceded Schön by a decade with "wicked problems." Worth flagging what that formulation did and didn't supply: it named the indeterminacy problem powerfully but offered no resolving methodology — wicked problems were diagnosed, not addressed procedurally. That left an open vacuum in the design-theory conversation for something to claim as the response. Schön's rock-star reframing model rushed into that vacuum with an actual procedural answer (however individually authored), while CPS's answer — which had existed for decades already — never got positioned as the response to wicked problems, because it wasn't packaged in that literature's citational bloodstream. This might be a useful additional thread in Suitcase 1: not just redirection of Ackoff's critique, but a missed-connection story, where CPS had the more structurally appropriate answer to Rittel/Webber's diagnosis and simply wasn't in the room when design theory went looking for one.
G: Great progress. There is one more suitcase inside the Reflective Practitioner book that calls for consideration as we close this multiple part chapter.
Before we get there I am happy to point out that much of the important CPS literature predates the 1980s arrival of SSM so there is that to take into consideration as well. In addition, “Systems Thinking” is notoriously self-referencing, while simultaneously calling for pluralism, so good to have a sense of humor in this business.
The crown jewels of CPS literature tend to be highly procedural, and learning program oriented, not theoretical. There is also the previously mentioned use of plain language in some tribal literature and not in others. For practice leaders there are always pros and cons.
Here is one of many Sid Parnes sound bites from 1967: “Obviously there is an urgency for developing in people the ability to live with constant change in a dynamic society.”
These are minor literature oriented bumps in the road in comparison to the last suitcase mentioned above that appears as argument inside the 1980s era Schon book.
Suitcase 3: In Reflective Practitioner Schon attempted to construct an architecture oriented argument against the rather snobbish vibes tabled by American sociologist Nathan Glazer (1923-2019) who attributed convergence to the major professions and divergence to the minor professions! Yikes!
Schon writes: “Glazer attributed convergence to the major professions, which he applauds and divergence to the minor professions which he dismisses.” Schon points out that Glazer treated convergence as evidence of professional maturity.
Schon’s Reflective Practitioner argument landed a few punches but did not deliver a knock-out to the snobbish Glazer bias, a table-top power dynamic which had and has no relationship to known innovation methods of that time or this time, yet has cascaded forward for decades.
What Glazer had in mind would be considered counterproductive, highly toxic in the context of *Guilford Turn.
Unfortunately Schon did not have the *Guilford Turn card to table in that part of his argument. (Wish we could have been there for you Donald!) No direct connections between divergence/convergence and innovation procedural behaviors was made in his argument. The need for both to be recognized, due to the role that each plays in innovation was not directly tabled. That Schon move differs from what would occur today in practice in the face of antiquated Glazer-like dynamics..
The counter-productive *privileging of convergent thinking has deep roots across several tribes, including inside traditional management paradigms. It is a dynamic that persists. In 2026 it is a bias that is completely out of sync with a “VUCA” world.
Of all the dynamics covered in this book it is this complex, lingering odd-ball, out of sync dynamic that is constantly confronting Design for Complexity practitioners, so not to be taken lightly.
To be in this changemaking Design for Complexity business today is to be swimming around with wave after wave of change, alongside several counterproductive, counter inclusive dynamics from by-gone eras, cascading beneath for decades. That is part of the complexity of today's picture, not exactly explained by “VUCA”.
EMBRACING OUTSIDER
I do think it would be fair to say that your outsider comments regarding CPS would, in that community of practice, generally be a much preferred depiction than being inappropriately thrust into the old-school mess of Technical Rationality. CPS is one of numerous communities of practice that we at Humantific know well, participate in, contribute to and learn from.
Considering what Glazer had in mind and the traditional approaches to changemaking being "outside" is a good place to be. We are, as authors of this book outsiders.
In the context of the "VUCA" storms, having an outsider approach, built via cross-community Think-Blending, reinvention and emergence is a good ambidextrous place to be.
On the the canon that got built:
C: The three suitcases — that's not three unrelated observations about one book. It's one finding, shown three times: the canon that got built wasn't built from the fullest available knowledge at the time it was built — and each subsequent generation of readers inherited the gap along with the canon, without knowing it was a gap. That's probably the sentence that belongs at the close of this chapter.
On CPS predating SSM:
C: Osborn's Applied Imagination (1953) and the Parnes-Osborn CPS program development through the 1950s–60s put CPS's core architecture roughly three decades ahead of Checkland's 1981 formulation. That's not a minor footnote — it inverts a framing a lot of readers carry by default, where "systems thinking" and "soft" approaches feel like the newer, more sophisticated arrivals and CPS feels like an older, simpler predecessor. The chronology says the opposite. Worth making that inversion explicit somewhere in the book rather than leaving it implicit, since it's exactly the kind of thing "scholarship-lite" readers get backwards.
On the Guilford Turn point:
You're right that Schön lacked the Guilford Turn card. It's worth being precise about when that card already existed and was sitting on the table, unused. Guilford's divergent/convergent distinction dates to his 1950 APA presidential address — thirty-three years before Reflective Practitioner. CPS had already operationalized it into procedure by the 1960s (your Parnes 1967 citation is itself evidence of that). So this isn't a case of Schön reaching for a conceptual tool that didn't exist yet. The tool existed, had existed for over three decades, and had already been turned into working method by an adjacent field — Schön simply wasn't in dialogue with that literature. That reframes "Schön lacked the equipment" from an excusable historical limitation into another instance of the same pattern Issue 1 already names: relevant prior art sitting outside the citational bloodstream Schön was drawing from. It's the Rittel/Webber vacuum point again, but for Guilford/Parnes instead of CPS-as-whole.
On hierarchy of worth:
Glazer's convergence bias is a status mistake — a hierarchy of worth dressed up as a hierarchy of rigor. The procedural mistake is fixable with better method. The status mistake is stickier, because it's not really about epistemology at all — it's about which forms of knowledge-work get to feel prestigious. That's probably why you're right to end here rather than with architecture: the book's entire argument is that Arena 3/4 changemaking requires giving up the comfort of the major-profession self-image, not just adopting a different technique. Ending on Glazer ends on the thing that's actually hardest to let go of.
On "outsider" as a positive epistemic position:
C: Insider status inside any one tribe — traditional design, SSM, AR, CPS — comes with that tribe's specific blind spot built in as a condition of membership: you don't see your own frame's limits from inside it, that's what makes it a frame. The outsider/blended position isn't a lesser vantage point relative to expertise — it's structurally the only position from which the comparative work this book is doing becomes visible at all. An insider to any single anchor couldn't have written the four-anchor "Framing Review" table, because seeing all four clearly requires not being fully captured by any one of them. Worth stating that as the epistemic justification for the outsider stance, rather than letting "outsider" read as modest self-deprecation — it isn't; it's the precondition for the book's central contribution.
On Systems Thinking's self-referencing pluralism — there's a sharper version of the joke.
C: SSM's whole apparatus (Weltanschauungen, multiple perspectives, CATWOE) is built to honor that stakeholders see the situation differently — but the requirement that you model it as a system isn't itself up for negotiation among those perspectives. It's pluralism about content bounded by non-pluralism about form. That's the performative contradiction under the humor: an approach that preaches multiple viewpoints while pre-committing to the one viewpoint (systems) that makes multiple-viewpoints-talk possible in the first place.
End.
NOTES TO READERS
*Claude Winkler is Ai.
*“Messes”: Ackoff makes reference to “messes” in his 1979 "The Future of Operations Research is Past" without acknowledging that the concept of mess, messes and mess finding already existed in the CPS community, referenced by Parnes as early as 1959 and integrated directly into CPS process. Ackoff’s “mess” was never integrated into visualized systems methodology and does not appear in Checkland's post-earthquake SSM.
*Ackoff’s Critique: The text critiquing Technical Rationality and the news that Hard Systems technical problem solving logic is a no-go in terms of complex human situations appears in Ackoff’s 1979 "The Future of Operational Research Is Past."
*Privileging of convergent thinking: The pre-Guilford Turn, convergent thinking (decision-making) directed privileging arguments coming from the direction of Herbert Simon (1916-2001), Nathan Glazer (1923-2019) and Edger Schein (1928-2023) are an entire subject unto itself.
*Neurath Turn see CALIBRATING COMPLEXITY OPPORTUNITIES
For further explanation of this diagram see RETHINKING FRAMING Part 1 of 5.
Comments