The Art of Framing Discussions

How to make every discussion feel like progress

If you’ve been in enough meetings, you’ve probably seen how quickly meetings can go sideways. Sometimes even within the first thirty seconds.

Here’s a scene revolving around an incident:

Team A’s Engineer: “Your service is failing our checkout APIs and now customers are calling non-stop. It’s your service’s fault and you need to fix it now.”
Engineer from Team B blinks. “What? What’s going on? Why do you think it’s our fault?”

At that moment, everyone in the room can feel it. The air gets heavy. Tension rises quickly, and people start defending themselves. Before either of them knows it, voices are raised and accusations are thrown at each other. No one, especially Engineer A, knows how they even got here.

What’s missing here isn’t good intent. In fact, Engineer A probably had good intentions.

What’s missing is good framing. Framing and setting up this conversation clearly from the start would have turned this from a defensive debate into a productive discussion.