Effective Problem Definition

EFFECTIVE PROBLEM DEFINITION

From time to time in any innovation activity, you will face problems which need to be solved and solved quickly so that you can progress towards your objective. The way you go about solving a problem can make a major difference to the outcome you get. It can mean the difference between a quick clean, elegant and maybe even downright exciting solution or the loss of weeks of valuable time and an unhappy compromise nobody really wants. When I work in innovative companies, helping people to solve long standing, "impossible" problems, I often see people getting caught out at the first step. I see teams or individuals who haven't asked the right questions at the start of their problem solving process. That's right, hard to believe as it may seem, many times, even before people have properly defined their problem, they are off and trying to solve it. There are many reasons for this puzzling behaviour, here are a selected few:

"I'm the expert so I ought to know all about the problem"

"I'm under serious time pressure, so I need to get on and solve the problem right now!"

"from my experience of similar situations, this worked last time"

Anyway, here is a simple process which I have used and I've found can really help:

Lets explain each of these steps in turn: Step 1: Create an initial problem statement. Now this may sound really silly, but write the problem down. Committing your problem to paper can really help clarify exactly what you and maybe your team are setting out to solve. I've seen teams who have been working on a problem for weeks or months get into serious debate at this first stage about which problem they are really trying to solve. Writing the problem down gets everyone aligned about the real problem to resolve. It helps to start to write the problem down in the form "I want to ..... " to get clearer on the desired solution you want to achieve. It is also really important that you write the problem down without using technical terms and jargon. Your problem should be able to pass the My Mum test, that is if you read it to your mother, she would understand it. There are two reasons for this, first, it makes the problem easier to explain to anyone, which helps if you want to get external input to your solution and second, it starts to take out terminology which is associated with the way you see the problem now, in TRIZ terms, your psychological inertia. This immediately helps you to unblock your thinking, which is the first step towards a new way of looking at your problem situation.

Step 2: Check you're solving the problem at the right level. What do I mean by this? Let’s take an example, imagine you are work for an airline and you start with problem: I want to design a more comfortable airline seat. Rather than just look at this specific problem, it can be really helpful to spend a bit of effort to check the context for the problem and consider possible sub-areas which might yield the best results. A simple tool to help with this is why-how laddering. To move up the ladder and discover context first ask why? This will quickly get you to top level business needs for your airline. Then ask how? to expose alternative options to answer the top level needs and even drill into your problem area: Step 3: Refine the problem situation. This step helps you to identify the real tension or contradiction you are trying to resolve, in other words the gap you need to jump from where you are now (reality) to where you want to get to (expectation). Use the format I want to...but.... to frame your problem situation.

So, for the airplane seat example your problem might be: "I want to make a more comfortable airline seat but the current space available is too small for tall passengers."

Step 4: Scope the problem. In this step, you define what can and what can't be changed according to the conditions of your problem situation. Sometimes it is good to list the different components you have in the problem situation and their associated parameters and then go through each and decide which ones can be changed and which ones must stay as they are. You can use various scoping tools to help here: a simple table with can change/can't change columns, a scope box (what is inside can change) or, a personal favorite, a chalk man of scope - a dead body outline laid out on the floor to help your problem solving team decide what is in and out of scope.

At this point you have a much clearer understanding of your problem situation and you can then proceed to use other problem analysis tools including TRIZ tools to analyse and solve your problem.