Re-Framing

Successful creative people don’t merely comply with externally imposed constraints, but transform them through reframing. They adopt constraints as personal challenges rather than external impositions.

A metaphor is formed when two aspects of the world become linked together in a meaningful way. For example, we talk of a stormy meeting. We take the turmoil and chaos of a storm and make correspondences with the turmoil and chaos of a conflicted meeting.

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place... See more

While all layers are always present and all are vital to understand any situation, Inayatullah (2003b, p.6) places a “higher” value on the mythic/metaphor layer because it informs all the other layers. Meadows (2008) similarly believes the most effective leverage point in a system is one that “transcends the paradigm”. For Meadows the “highest”... See more