Where did the missing first diamond go, you know, the one where we understand the problem?
I watched Rory Sutherland's Nudgestock talk yesterday and I have to say, he had some really good points on several subjects (it's 30 mins long, so can recommend if you have some free time)
One of those was around the fact that we have grown more accustomed to winning an argument vs solving a problem, which resonated with me.
He pointed to a paper from The RSA (The royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce) - so I went and had a look :)
In that paper (or a summary of the paper) the authors believe that there isn't rigorous systems analysis before we decide on the problem to solve - well this sounds very familiar don't you think?
They then propose to create a missing first diamond, which would look at 3 things:
1. How a problem is defined affects the range of possible solutions that might be considered
2. Understanding the type of problem (for example, technical or adaptive; simple, complicated or complex) may help to determine whether it is the kind of problem that is suited to the kinds of solutions
3. Problem analysis (for who? By who/with how?
How? As part of what?); understanding stakeholders and power (including who makes decisions, controls resources..including those that can be leveraged, holds blocking cards or might not want the competition to succeed?); considering problems that overlap; and, crucially, thinking hard about why this problem has not been solved already.
In my work and I think in general, when we put on a behavioral science lens to cultural transformation or customer experiences, we spend quite a bit of time framing the problem in behavioral terms, because if we don't then we are not going to solve the right problem.
We use logic models as a basis for our hypothesis, because we want to be able to work backward and know what we build and be able to go from the challenge we overcome to the outcome we want to get, and we make these very salient for stakeholders, so they know exactly how we are doing this.
We work in a systematic way, because we don't want to get off course later on when the excitement comes to build that winning solution (that is great on paper, but misses the mark on what problem it was trying to solve)
We go beyond the individual and also look at the system because behaviors don't happen in isolation and also because we should not just focus on the person, because so many things can influence behavior.
I really like this way of looking at things, and my hope is that more organizations normalize Problem Framing - and add it as an essential part of their processes.
To do this, you need to solve for that problem in itself....
I wonder, how would you go about solving the problem of not having Problem Framing in an organization?