Tackling Reframing: The Development and Evaluation of a Problem Reframing Canvas

The problems of today are increasingly complex in nature. Yet, most support provided by design agencies and innovation consultancies is based on unstructured approaches, guided by the facilitators own intuition. This article presents the Teckel canvas, an approach to guide problem reframing in facilitation to both tackle solution and problem understanding. After synthesising the main insights from prominent reframing methods and models, a meta-process of reframing was created, which was translated into a practical canvas. Two Dutch case studies are examined in which the proposed reframing canvas is tested. When this canvas was used in facilitation, we found out that the medium and message can be reframed separately or together and that the canvas can be used as a tool for overview on the subject. Our findings indicate that an explicit and tangible use of reframing can improve solving complex problems to be more clear, visual and reflective.