How Framing Turns Disruption into Systemic Change

How framing turns disruption into systemic change

When societies face unfamiliar change, they tend to do something very human: they extrapolate from what they already know.

At the end of the nineteenth century, transport meant horses. Cities, roads, supply chains, labour markets and even social status were organised around them. When transport problems became visible, congestion, waste, limits to speed and distance, the intuitive response was not to imagine a different system, but to improve the existing one. Better breeding, stronger animals, better carriages.

This is where the well-known “better horses” anecdote comes from, often attributed to Henry Ford. Whether Ford ever said those exact words is almost irrelevant. The story endures because it captures a deeper truth: people cannot ask for what they cannot yet imagine.

The car did not replace the horse because people demanded it. Nor did it emerge from a fully articulated reframing of transport in advance. Early automobiles entered a world still organised entirely around horses and were initially judged by horse-era standards. They were unreliable, expensive and often impractical. What followed was not a single moment of insight, but a gradual disruption. As cars accumulated practical advantages, speed, endurance, mechanical consistency, the existing frame began to strain. Roads, laws, insurance, cities and supply chains could no longer be organised around animals alone.

Only then did the reframing occur. Transport stopped being understood primarily as animals pulling vehicles and became something else entirely. Not because someone declared it so upfront, but because reality forced imagination to catch up. The system reorganised around a new narrative of mobility, and what once seemed implausible became inevitable. This distinction matters. Disruption made change possible. Framing made it scalable, legitimate and irreversible. This is not historical trivia. It is how systemic change happens and how it repeatedly stalls.

The extrapolation trap

Behavioural science, psychology and systems theory all describe the same dynamic. Humans rely on familiar reference points when facing uncertainty. We default to what already exists because it feels safer, more rational and easier to plan around. Economists call this status quo bias. Systems thinkers call it path dependence. Psychologists speak of mental models.

Framing defines the boundaries of what feels realistic. As long as a problem is interpreted through an existing frame, solutions remain incremental. Disruption may appear, but it stays marginal, treated as an anomaly rather than a foundation. Only when a new frame takes hold can institutions, investments and behaviour reorganise at scale. This is why transformational change often looks unrealistic until it suddenly looks obvious. It is also visible in how we talk about climate change and nature.

Climate: from emissions to system stress

For most people, climate change does not appear as atmospheric data. It shows up as rising food prices, higher insurance premiums, heatwaves that make cities unliveable, floods disrupting supply chains. Yet public debate has long framed climate narrowly as an emissions problem. Reduce here, offset there, optimise the margins. This framing produces “better horse” solutions, incremental improvements that leave the underlying system intact. Where action has accelerated, the frame has changed.

Insurance markets no longer treat climate as a distant environmental issue. They focus on exposure, resilience and insurability. Central banks have moved climate risk into financial stability assessments, not as sustainability policy, but as a structural threat to economic systems. Cities increasingly redesign urban space around heat and water management, treating adaptation as core infrastructure rather than a secondary add-on. What changed was not the science. The facts about warming and volatility have been clear for years. What changed was the frame: from climate as an external problem to climate as a condition that determines whether financial, urban and economic systems remain functional.

Once that frame takes hold, action stops looking like sacrifice and starts looking like maintenance. The question becomes not how to save the planet, but how to keep everyday life working in a more volatile world. That question produces different answers: resilience over efficiency, diversity over optimisation, adaptability over fixed plans. Disruption, renewables, climate modelling, adaptation tools, made alternatives possible. Framing is what allows institutions to treat them as defaults rather than exceptions.

Nature: from protection to infrastructure

Biodiversity loss follows the same pattern. Nature is still widely perceived as something “out there”, forests, parks, wildlife, separate from economic life. Protection then appears as a moral choice, often framed as a trade-off with growth. Yet most people already experience nature loss without naming it. Pollinators decline and food prices rise. Degraded soils reduce yields. Lost wetlands amplify flooding. These are not environmental side-effects but rather system failures. Here too, disruption came first. Ecological science has long shown that ecosystems regulate water, climate, food production and disease. What changed more recently is how this knowledge is framed and applied.

Nature is increasingly understood as infrastructure. Wetlands, mangroves and soils are treated not as amenities, but as systems that perform economic functions, often more effectively and cheaply than engineered alternatives. Financial institutions are beginning to assess ecosystem degradation as a material risk, integrating biodiversity loss into credit and investment decisions. What shifted was not the underlying evidence that ecosystems provide trillions of dollars in services. That evidence existed for years. What shifted was the frame: from nature as an environmental concern to nature as a foundational system underpinning economic stability. Again, disruption made new approaches possible. Framing is what allows them to reshape decision-making at scale.

Why storytelling matters for reframing

Frames do not shift through data alone. They shift through narrative, through stories that help people interpret unfamiliar realities. Storytelling is often misunderstood as persuasion or simplification. In reality, it is a cognitive tool. Stories provide structure before detailed plans exist. They translate technical evidence into meaning, and meaning into coordination. This is why the “better horses” anecdote endures. It helps people recognise when they are trapped in incremental thinking. It reframes failure of imagination as a systems problem, not a personal one.

The insurance sector did not change its climate framing because of new emissions data. The shift occurred when actuaries began telling stories about uninsurable coastlines and stranded assets. Climate moved from abstraction to operational reality. Data proves something works. Stories explain what it means. Without that step, disruption remains marginal. With it, systems can reorganise.

From imagination to systems design

Every major transition follows a similar arc. New possibilities emerge, but remain foreign. Existing frames struggle to accommodate them. A new narrative then links the unfamiliar to the present, making it legible. Imagination becomes structured. From there, systems can be designed, investments aligned and institutions reshaped.

Cars were not better horses. Renewable energy is not cleaner fossil fuel. Nature-positive economies are not greener versions of extractive ones. They are different systems altogether. The real barrier to change is rarely technology or capital alone. It is imagination constrained by outdated frames.

The leadership challenge ahead

Future-ready leadership requires more than targets, metrics or incremental reform. It requires the ability to recognise when disruption has already occurred and to reframe the system so institutions can reorganise around it. That means thinking in systems rather than silos, anticipating second-order effects, and designing for resilience rather than optimisation.

Bold framing is not idealism. It is strategic. In complex systems, framing is what converts novelty into normality.

We do not need better horses. We need better questions. Because once the question changes, the future stops being abstract and becomes something that can be deliberately and collectively designed.

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