Are You Solving The Right Problems?

Picture the scene, you’re in a meeting room with a group of colleagues — part of a crack team brought together to draw up a plan around how to address a key business problem; not enough people are using the customer portal. There are lots of people in the meeting, from different areas of the business, and everyone has got an opinion. After much enthusiastic discussion, the general consensus is that customers aren’t using the portal because they don’t know about it. An action is made for a task group to go away and look at ways of designing an attractive marketing campaign to drum up customer interest.

But do they really understand the problem?

When we spot something which isn’t working, a natural response is to start thinking about ways we can make the situation better. However, by jumping to conclusions and rushing towards a solution that addresses what we think is the problem, we can often miss a whole heap of opportunities to treat the root cause, rather than just the symptom. In our enthusiasm to get things done, we miss the most fundamental thing — a real understanding of the problem at hand. Unsurprisingly this results in organisations spending a great deal of time and resources implementing solutions that can fail to hit the mark.

Charles Franklin Kettering, Head of Research at General Motors in the early 20th century, famously said that “a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved”. This stands true today. Rather than getting bogged down in features, functionality, and ideas, taking a design-based approach allows us to step back and consider the problem more objectively. Whilst to non-designers this can feel like it’s going to protract project timelines, actually, it’s about slowing down to speed up.

In order to build the right foundations for service design, we use divergent and convergent thinking to arrive at a clear understanding of the problem at hand, before we set about trying to solve it. At least 50% of the work we do is about understanding the problem, the other 50% is about exploring the opportunities the problem presents.

Design Council Double Diamond

Problem statements allow us to frame a problem without proposing solutions. They guide us and enable us to focus on key challenges by grounding our thinking on the insights and customer needs we identify during discovery activity.

I’m a big fan of the ‘how might we’ question as a way of framing problems or challenges. Reframing insights as how might we questions allows us to turn challenges into opportunities by suggesting that a solution is possible, whilst also opening up scope for generating ideas and promoting a collaborative approach to problem-solving.

• How is humble enough to acknowledge that we don’t have the answer.
• Might is confident enough to suggest that a solution is possible and open enough to accept that there is likely to be more than one.
• We acknowledges that solving problems is better when working in collaboration with a range of stakeholders.

Problem definition is an integral part of the design process and arguably forms the most fundamental part of responding to a design challenge. A well-defined problem will kickstart the design process in the right direction and will bring both clarity and direction to design work. Problem statements, in the form of questions, act as catalysts for creative thinking during idea generation and provide a useful reference point all the way through to implementing a solution.

There are a wealth of resources available to help you generate great problem statements. Here are five steps I take to help me:

1. Start with insights

If we generate problem statements that are not grounded in the insights we identify through discovery activity, all we are really doing is making stuff up. Focusing on real customer needs means we are able to address the things that matter to them. We can surface those needs by generating need statements that combine the following elements:

User [customer] needs to [need] because [insight].

For example, People who live in older tower blocks often need better access to the internet because the built-in infrastructure isn’t always good enough to provide the level of service they require.

2. Turn identified needs into problem statements

Once we have a good understanding of customer needs we can start to generate problem statements that provide a clear articulation of the problem, without suggesting a solution:

How might we [action/experience] for [customer] so that [outcome].

For example, How might we improve internet access for customers living in older tower blocks that struggle with poor levels of service provision?

3. Frame the problem statement well

In order to achieve the best outcomes, it’s important that we start off with the right how might we question; too narrow and we limit the possible directions we can take to find a solution, too broad and we don’t have enough context around which to shape ideas.

Too narrow: How might we improve the built-in infrastructure within tower blocks to enable faster broadband speeds for customers? Too broad: How might we enable customers living in older tower blocks to feel better connected to the world? 4. One size does not fit all

This question is too specific. It presumes that improving the built-in infrastructure is the only option and also focuses on poor internet speeds as the primary problem.

This question is too broad. It doesn’t provide sufficient context and risks generating ideas that don’t address the issue of internet service provision.

A piece of research will generate a number of insights and identify a number of user needs. We shouldn’t try to create a single problem statement that addresses them all. Instead, we should create as many problem statements as necessary.

5. Focus on making an impact

Once we have our how might we statements, we should work in collaboration to look for similarities, merge any that appear to be the same, and group them by theme. We can use dot voting to prioritise which one(s) to focus on and set some criteria, for example, voting for the problem statement(s) which will have the greatest positive impact on customer experience. Resist trying to think of solutions at this stage and instead focus on the statements which provide the biggest opportunities.

Originally published at http://simonpenny.wordpress.com on March 20, 2022.