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How to drive your own breakthrough through reframing
Breakthroughs that reshape business models can feel sudden, but they are rarely random. Innovation happens when you reframe challenges and opportunities, says Stefan Michel. The good news? You can learn to reframe.
Breakthroughs in business happen when individuals and organizations come up with something so new, so innovative, so intrinsically different from what we’ve seen or experienced before, that entire markets shift. I’m talking about products or services, business models or strategies that disrupt the way organizations engage with their customers, that recalibrate the competitive environment, that shake things up so much that they mark an inflection point: a before and after moment. Â
But where do these game-changing ideas come from? What’s behind their disruptive power? And what do pioneering thinkers and organizations have in common?Â
Breakthroughs often appear to happen suddenly: they can feel so unexpected, surprising, and out of the ordinary that there’s no telling how or when they will happen.Â
Like Icarus, Lilienthal framed the problem of flying through a specific lens and possibly along the lines of: I want to fly, birds fly, so I’ll copy what birds do. Â
But while breakthroughs can be sudden, they are not random. There is a discernible pattern to breakthrough thinking – one that can be identified, analyzed, unpacked, and even replicated. That pattern is fundamentally tied to the way that we frame, or more specifically, the way that we reframe the challenges and the opportunities in front of us. Â
Let’s use one of humankind’s most aspirational quests as an example: flying. You will surely be familiar with the story of Icarus from Greek mythology. To fly, to soar among the birds, Icarus and his father Daedalus fashioned wings from feathers and molten wax, but when Icarus got too close to the heat of the sun, he crashed. It was the first of many crashes in the history of flying, unfortunately. Â
The dream of flying is as old as the human race. It is a story of ambition and ingenuity, populated by daring and sometimes doomed pioneers, all of them original thinkers who have looked at problems and reframed them over and over again to create new, groundbreaking innovations.
Take Otto von Lilienthal, the German aviator dubbed the “father of flight.” Like Icarus, Lilienthal framed the problem of flying through a specific lens and possibly along the lines of: I want to fly, birds fly, so I’ll copy what birds do. Â
Lilienthal’s gliders – monoplanes, wing-flappers, and biplanes – empowered him to make no fewer than 2000 human flights between 1891 and 1896, when he finally crashed to the ground allegedly crying out “Opfer mĂĽssen gebracht werden!“ or “Sacrifices must be made” before impact. But if Lilienthal’s breakthroughs lifted mankind into the air, it’s the reframing of the problem by a succession of innovative thinkers over the years that have kept us soaring above the clouds. Â
Ferdinand von Zeppelin changed the game in 1900 when he flew the LZ1, a rigid airship, over Lake Constance in Southern Germany. He achieved this by reframing, again possibly something along these lines: instead of bird-like, moveable wings, what if we use gas, which is lighter than air? Now, the risks of using gas became clear when the Hindenburg LZ129 airship caught fire over Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey in 1937, and although Zeppelins are still occasionally flown to this day, from inception it was clear that gas-fueled aerostat would be ripe for disruption. Â
Simultaneously, in 1903, the Wright brothers flew the Wright Flyer, a heavier-than-air, engine-controlled machine at 40 meters over Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. It was a breakthrough innovation built on a new idea: if we can’t flap wings like birds or use gas to fly, why don’t we try to create uplift using gasoline to power propellers? The Wright brothers essentially reframed the problem, and in doing so created the world’s first rudimentary jet, while ushering in the modern age of aviation. Â
Reframing in business
Human history is full of breakthroughs that have advanced the way we communicate, move, work, and experience our world. From the Apple Macintosh to AI, from Macallan Non-Aged-Single Malt Whisky to Netflix Productions, entire industries and consumer behavior have been disrupted by individuals and organizations who have used reframing to address the challenge at hand.
When Steve Jobs decried most PCs as “ugly” he was reframing the idea that technology should be useful above all other considerations. To Jobs, technology should be useful and beautiful: powerful yes, but also delightful to the eye and the touch so that users fall in love with the technology. In 1984, Apple released its first Macintosh, which differed significantly from the IBM PC at that time.
Fast forward to 2013. What was behind the breakthrough thinking that powered Netflix, then a DVD rental and streaming business, to make the strategic shift from content distribution to content creation? With licensing costs going through the roof, the firm reconsidered its strategy and its unique resources and capabilities. It reframed the competitive advantage based on a huge user database of customers’ tastes and preferences, choices, and behaviors. Equipped with these insights, Netflix created a breakthrough: instead of paying for third-party content, why not use the customer data to custom create the kind of content that would resonate with them most? House of Cards, the first original Netflix series, aired on 1 February 2013 and was an instant hit. Netflix has gone on to become the world’s foremost content streaming business, with more than 300 billion paying subscribers around the globe.
Of course, the single greatest breakthrough so far this century probably belongs to advances in artificial intelligence, especially Generative AI. Again, a lot of what is powering innovation in AI is predicated on reframing. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 is the result of a fundamental shift in thinking about language. In the early days of Natural Language Processing, the consensus view in the tech world was that advanced computing should be built on language: computers should be taught to speak like human beings by coding grammar and vocabulary. Then along comes Transformers (the “T” in ChatGPT) with a new way of framing language as more of a statistical than a linguistic phenomenon. What does this mean? In a nutshell, OpenAI and other LLM creators determined that you could train AI models using tokens, or tiny bits of broken-down text, to determine patterns, make connections, combine tokens, and then generate output in response to prompts. GPT marks a decisive victory in reframing, and the end of a century-long struggle between the linguist and the statistician; one that has its roots in the famous quote by legendary IBM researcher, Frederick Jelinek, who said: “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”
Breakthrough thinking as a result of reframing has powered innovation across tech and countless other sectors over time, from Apple Macintosh to Netflix to ChatGPT and even with the rarified world of fine whiskey making. When Macallan launched A Night on Earth in 2025, it shook the Scotch industry to its core. Here was a whiskey aged just three years – a reframing of the notion that quality was the sole outcome of decades of aging in sherry barrels. With Night on Earth, Macallan was able to address its core business problem: the massive time lag between production to sale. As of 2025, a bottle of Night on Earth will set you back anywhere from $200 to $400, and the market is booming.
So what can you learn from these examples?
“Stop blaming your dog and understand that what he’s doing when he stops en route to the café is essentially the equivalent of what you, his owner, want to do.”
How to reframe
Everything that you do – the actions you take and the decisions you make as a leader, a partner, or a parent – is a result of your own framing. To create any kind of breakthrough in your life, you can learn to reframe the challenges and the opportunities that you face, large or small.
Let me share one last example before giving you a few pointers on reframing that will help you achieve your own personal or professional breakthroughs.
Like many dog owners, over the years I have walked my pet to my local café, a hallowed retreat where I like to enjoy a flat white as I read the paper. Like many other dog walkers, I must endure the endless stops, the sniffing of street corners, trees, pavements – anything and everything that my dog deems worthy of a sniff – that stands between me and my newspaper. I raised this with our local dog trainer. His advice? Stop blaming your dog and understand that what he’s doing when he stops en route to the café is essentially the equivalent of what you, his owner, want to do. He’s reading his newspaper! He’s finding out what is going on in the neighborhood.
This is an essential reframing of (admittedly a pretty insignificant problem) that has nonetheless given me a new perspective, and as of the present, I’m more at peace with my dog.
It’s a light-hearted example, but I hope you understand my point. Reframing can change the way you see things and open your mind to different possibilities and better opportunities. In my research and my work with business leaders and organizations over the years, I’ve determined a few techniques that you can use to help you reframe for breakthrough thinking. Here are five ideas that will help.
- Be a better listener and observer: I sometimes say that it took me two years to learn to speak, and 50 to learn to shut up. Because listening and observing are skills that we don’t always or automatically nurture. Think of it like this, though: every moment I speak is a moment that I am not learning. You can try to apply this to your own life. In meetings, for instance, try to prioritize the time to listen and observe and focus on receiving new information that you can process afterward.
- Switch perspective frequently and systematically: Switching perspective helps you reframe things, and the more you do so – the more purposeful and habitual you are about it – the better you will become. There are tools too that you can use to switch perspective. A simple technique is to stop if you are having a discussion or disagreement and try to summarize the point of view of your colleague or friend. Repeat what they have said, articulate their position, and ask if this is what they are actually telling you.
- Recognize your biases and assumptions. We all have our biases. From confirmation bias to affinity bias, cultural bias to the so-called halo effect – the way we form an opinion based on a single characteristic – we all subconsciously process information in ways that easily align with what we already know. Moreover, we don’t automatically enjoy or seek out perspectives and attitudes that differ from our own. Reframing happens more easily when we stop, challenge our preconceptions, and purposefully open our minds to diverse points of view.
- Assess and challenge your causal models. It’s human nature to assume that Z is the result of Y. We look for the obvious causal relations, connecting the more obvious dots that lead to certain outcomes. But as often as not, things happen because of a confluence of immediate and indirect events. If you want to reframe contexts and situations, be purposeful in your efforts to think about the indirect effects of your actions or decisions and allow for things like time lags and cross-sectional impact. This will also involve challenging your assumptions and underlying biases.
- And ask yourself repeatedly: what the heck is going on? Perhaps the biggest driver of reframing is curiosity. It’s about stopping to make sense of everything, asking questions, ensuring that you have seen the fullest picture, and filling in any blanks in your knowledge or understanding. It’s not simply accepting or being satisfied with face value. It’s about asking yourself over and over: have I got this right? Have I understood? What else is there that I might be missing?
Doing these things, habitually challenging your perceptions, your thinking, your assumptions, and your understanding will help you unlock new and potentially innovative ways of seeing the world and the situations or problems that you navigate. As a result, you will think differently, drive your ability to reframe, experience more agency and creativity in your reasoning and problem-solving, and find yourself better positioned to unlock breakthrough ideas in your personal and professional life.
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