The problem with problems, and a better way to frame them visually
There’s a missing link in the way we (generally) frame problems in strategy and design, and it’s not the problem statement. Here’s a way to maximize the chance of better problem definition.
In strategy and design — whether it’s for a neat new app or dealing with huge intractable issues like climate change and mass migration — how we think about problems, talk about problems together, and of course solve those problems together, is critical to our success.
And that’s what problem framing tends to be all about: expressing a problem on behalf of those who are experiencing it, in a way that a whole team can get a shared understanding of it, rally around it, and take action on it. A well-framed problem sets up the whole team for success, to solve it in a better way.
The journalist and the cook
There’s a ton of great information around to help us frame problems, and to me they all boil down to getting us into two mindsets for two parts of the process:
- The journalist mindset: identifying the problem by asking who, what, when, where and why. This investigative work is essential to understanding the scope and nature of the problem.
- The cook mindset: forming a problem statement to communicate to others what the problem is, using a recipe of essential ingredients (‘mad-libs’ form, as they say), something like “[User type] wants to [Goal] by doing [Tasks] when [Trigger], but [Problem] happens, and it makes them feel [Impact]”.
Both of these mindsets and processes are essential, but you can do these and still get a lame problem statement. There tends to be a lot of complexity to navigate in there, before you land on something clear and compelling.
We often exit that complexity prematurely, because it hurts our brains, and start trying to solve something that doesn’t feel like the real problem we should be focusing on. But it’s usually in that complexity where there’s an opportunity to re-frame the problem — to see it in a whole new way — so that we can uncover a completely new and innovative way to solve that problem.
The visitor: the missing mindset
In that complexity between those two mindsets is — I think — a third mindset that we need to cultivate: the visitor mindset. The visitor is unfamiliar with your way of looking at the problem. The visitor has ‘fresh eyes’. The visitor refracts the problem by asking the dumb questions. The ‘What if…?’ questions. The visitor has her own frame, her own perspective, that needs some time and space to emerge.
Making room for the visitor mindset
I do a fair bit of training and coaching for teams to help them frame (and re-frame) problems better, and despite doing the journalist thing and the cook thing well, I’ve seen how our thinking is frustratingly shackled to 3 fundamental things that suffocate the visitor thing:
- Our wretched lizard brain — We can’t help but think fast, skip to conclusions, look for and recognize patterns, take 10% of the information and pretend it’s 100%, etc. Daniel Kahneman told us so in his popular book. Great for escaping hoary human-eating beasts a long time ago. Terrible for solving complex problems.
- Our assumptions: The mental model of our world (and how we think others see the world), based on limited information, stories and hearsay.
- Our biases: Confirmation bias, Anchoring, Sunk cost, Dunning–Kruger effect, Barnum effect, oh my, the list goes on.
If that doesn’t make it hard enough, the way we tend to communicate problems to each other tends to crowd out the visitor mindset. It’s brilliant when we use research facts, stories and quotes, as well as quantitative data and charts, but often we tend to limit ourselves to the same old tired words and empty business jargon.
Go visual as well as verbal, to solve problems better
Now, just being aware of our cognitive limitations doesn’t actually help much. It might make us feel smart, but it won’t unlock that innovative, re-framing magic that we’re all after. We have to design the way we work to expose and avoid them as best we can. Through a visualized structure of ‘brain moves’ and questions, we can help ourselves to mute the lizard brain, expose the assumptions, side-step the biases, and give some time and space to that visitor mindset.
In other words, the best thing we can do is to visualize the problem, to express it visually as well as verbally (which is a good idea for any part of the design process, really). When we do this, we can often literally see the problem in a new way, like a visitor would.
The Problem Framing Sketch
Here’s a simple sketch you can use to do just that. The Problem Framing Sketch is a visual pattern you can draw to help you explore, structure, and clarify a particular problem, especially if that problem is complex, ambiguous or misunderstood. By visually mapping the problem space, new connections and questions can emerge, to help you see a problem in different ways. It looks a bit like this:
In the middle is the existing problem statement you might start off with, (right now represented by a warning sign). The warning sign has 3 sides, which symbolize 3 different ways to explore that problem:
- 5 Whos — perspective analysis
- 5 Whys — root cause analysis
- 5 So whats — impact analysis
The ‘5’ is to encourage you to go broad, rather than just fixating on the first ‘who’, ‘why’ or ‘so what’ that occurs to you.
How do you do the Problem Framing Sketch?
You can sketch this visual pattern on paper by yourself, or on a whiteboard for (and with) a whole team to discuss together. You might like to do this after you’ve done the journalist mindset thing of asking Who, What, When, Where, and Why, if you found you didn’t go very deep the first time.
Just so you have an idea of what this looks like over time, here’s an example of a Problem Framing Sketch from a recent project at Atlassian, where I work. The problem we started with was that people find it hard to find their stuff in Atlassian products:
As you can see, the sketch itself is a framework, where stickies, drawings and notes are grouped according to the three areas, with the triangle in the centre.
Here’s how you start. Draw a large triangle in the centre of a whiteboard, and write what you think is the problem you’re trying to solve so far inside the triangle. This may well change… but you have to start somewhere!
5 Whos
Ask yourself (or everyone, if you’re doing this as a group): what 5 different types of people are affected by this problem? If your problem is a business problem or a process problem, you’ll probably need to catalog the types of people involved in the problem. Get your group to write as many as they can think of on sticky notes (one per sticky note), and group as necessary. If the group comes up with more than 5, ask them: who is most involved and most affected by this problem?
Then, take each of those types of people, and expand on their perspectives of the problem by doing an empathy map for each type. You can use a simplified version of the empathy map (below), or the full version, which you can read about on the Gamestorming website. Explore what each type of person thinks, feels, says and does about the problem.
Better still, meet with real live actual people who represent those types, ask them what their perspective of the problem is, and capture their perspectives as an empathy map.
Why do we do this? Because it’s important to stimulate the visitor mindset, and get everyone out of their own mental bubble, out of their own frame, and seeing the problem through others’ eyes instead.
5 Whys
Problems are usually tackled more effectively when they’re addressed at the source, rather than tackling just a symptom of the problem. The ‘5 Whys’ activity is well known in the design and product innovation domains, and helps us do root cause analysis. For more information about 5 Whys, see the Gamestorming 5 Whys activity, IDEO.org’s 5 Whys activity, or Atlassian’s 5 Whys activity).
Ask everyone why the problem written in the large triangle is actually a problem (or: what’s causing that problem), and get them to write their responses on sticky notes and stick them in the area below the large triangle. For example: if the problem is “We didn’t reach our quarterly target of selling 15 thousand shinklebots”, ask them “Why didn’t we sell 15 thousand shinklebots?”
There’ll probably be several different answers to this question that you can read on the sticky notes that people wrote, and you may need to group any duplicates. Now, take each response, and ask why again. For example, if one of the responses was “The shinklebots weren’t available in this season’s colors”, ask “Why weren’t the shinklebots available in this season’s colors?”, and so on.
Branching into multiple problem territories is good. Before long, you should unearth some juicy causes to the original problem that as a group you’ll want to focus on more than others. It’s tempting to now race off and solve one of those causes, but hold up! We have to explore one more side first…
5 So whats
Thirdly, it’s good to do some impact analysis. Looking at the causes of the problem and types people who are most affected by the problem you have generated so far, ask “So what?”. I don’t mean “So what?” in a glib, dismissive way, I mean: “What happens next when this problem happens? What’s the impact of that problem for each of these types of people?”. Whatever the answer to that question is, ask “So what?” again.
For example: if the problem is “We didn’t reach our quarterly target of selling 15 thousand shinklebots”, asking “So what?” generates answers like:
- We miss the company’s annual business growth target
- I don’t get my sales bonus
- Excess shinklebot stock takes up warehouse space that should be available for next season’s shinklebots
…and asking “So what?” again generates answers like:
- The market might lose confidence in our company, and our share price will go down
- The family and I won’t get that holiday in Switzerland
- We might have to trash all of last season’s unsold shinklebots
You can visually capture these in the same way as the other two ‘sides’ of the problem area, using a mix of writing, sticky notes and simple drawing on a whiteboard.
Doing this impact analysis helps insights to emerge about how the different types of people might be connected in this problem space, how you might prioritize one part of the problem over another, or one type of person over another. Or it might reveal new problems that will happen (like having to deal with excess shinklebot stock in the example above), as a knock-on effect of this current. It should also give you some good evidence for ‘selling in’ a proposition to your client or stakeholders, about why this problem is worth solving (and worth solving now rather than later), from a business perspective.
Step back and see new connections
Now’s a great time to step back and get a sense of the whole problem space you and your group have generated. You now have a ‘map’ of the problem that you may never have seen before. In this way, you now become a visitor to the problem, seeing it in a new way. It’s bound to be messy, and have some areas that are more loosely defined than other areas, but hopefully you’ll see some areas that may be completely new and insightful for you, and prompt you to ask questions that you might never have thought about before.
In the example above, visualizing these elements of the shinklebot sales problem might reveal an underlying issue with chronic overly-optimistic sales targets, or a production line that’s too slow to adapt to changing season’s tastes.
With fresh eyes and fresh questions, you should now be able to switch to the cook mindset, to generate that all-important problem statement. And hopefully this time around, the Problem Framing Sketch has helped you and the team focus on the real problem, and helped you make the problem statement much more compelling and insightful.
If you liked this post, please give it a bit of 👏 love — thanks heaps! And if you’d like to see more sketches and patterns like the Problem Framing Sketch to help you and your team think better and solve problems better, you might like to:
- Get my book Presto Sketching: The Magic of Simple Drawing for Brilliant Product Thinking and Design
- Check out sketching and facilitation tips and tricks on the Presto Sketching blog
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