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Step 4: Define the Problem

“Given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes understanding the problem and one minute resolving it.” - Attributed to Albert Einstein (probably incorrectly)

You may have started this process thinking you know what the problem is, or what strategy you’ll employ. Do you still? It will do no good to solve the wrong problem; it might actually do more harm! There are many examples of well-meaning groups attempting to solve a problem with their ‘cure-all’ and seen it fall flat--or worse, exacerbate existing problems.

To a hammer, the whole world's a nail

Many of the frameworks that inspired this approach suggest defining your group's mission at the outset. We prefer to be fully agnostic as to the solution until the problem is clearly defined and evidence supports your understanding. We recognize that your group has unique strengths and experience with some solutions more than others. If the problem doesn't call for your solution, that's fine, you can go solve a different one. The temptation is simply too great to frame the problem in terms of your solution if you come with preconceptions as to what your strategy will be.

So how do we define a problem and develop our solution? Let’s go back to our map. If you’ve developed a systems map, look for leverage points. If you’ve developed a situation model, identify key intervention points--which factor will you focus on? If you haven’t already, map other stakeholders’ interventions onto your map. Are there factors that aren’t receiving enough attention? Where could other interventions be leveraged? Don’t worry about the how (i.e., your strategy) yet.

Once you’ve identified the factor you’d like to address, review your stakeholder list. Which of your boundary partners are relevant to this factor? Refer back to their personas and describe the problem scenarios that they face relevant to your understanding of the situation scope. These can be either problems or simply jobs to be done:

Farmers aren’t sure where to find information on conservation programs. Agency staff need to develop restoration project specifications but aren’t experts in restoration. CSR managers need to meet biodiversity targets but don’t have time to develop habitat projects. You get the picture.

Depending on how broad your scope, this task may seem nebulous. Here are a few options to help clarify:

  • For each persona, draft an outcome challenge--the ideal behavior you want each persona to adopt in a world in which your vision is achieved. You can break this down into progress markers by defining what you would expect to see, like to see, and love to see from each persona.
  • Create a journey map. A journey map illustrates the steps the persona takes to complete a relevant task or solve a relevant problem. For example, if you envision restaurants sustainably sourcing ingredients, map out a typical process for creating procurement policies. Where do they begin? Who else is involved? Within the journey map, highlight pain points--areas where the process is difficult. Those pain points may just turn into the problems you choose to tackle.
  • A behavior chain is similar to a journey map, and outlines the unique, self-contained behaviors necessary to complete a more complex behavior.

To identify problems that are actually solvable, consider organizing them as parent, anchor and child scenarios. The parent problem is too big; the child scenario to small. The anchor problem, just right. For each anchor problem, consider alternatives--what is the persona doing now instead of what you want them to do; what other options currently exist that they’re not using? Understanding the alternatives is necessary to understand the baseline and to specify conditions of satisfaction--in other words, how you’ll know your solution is sufficiently better than the alternatives that the user will consider it.

Craft problem hypotheses for the problems you most want to address or think are most important. These testable propositions will be evaluated through persona interviews or focus groups (you may want to combine this step with the persona interviews in step 3).

Before moving on to the next step, where you will identify potential strategies, it is critical that you have a clear understanding of the problem space and have evidence supporting your hypotheses. By now you should have talked to experts and interviewed at least 5 relevant people. For more substantial endeavors, shoot for 30 people. There is no guarantee that this process will deliver a solution that will help you reach your vision for the world, but the chances of having an impact in a system you don’t understand with people you can’t relate to are slim.

Research all at once?

To maximize the efficiency of your research process, and avoid having to interview people twice, you may want to hold off on interviews until you've developed both persona hypotheses and problem hypotheses. If you have been working in this space for some time and have accumulated sufficient evidence that you are comfortable proposing a solution at this time, you can even hold off on interviews until the next step, once you have a proposal for a solution.