What's Your Problem? - by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Date read: 2023-05-01
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Fantastic book to help you reframe your thinking of a problem to make sure you're solving for the right things. Great advice that can be applied in both work and personal life. Recommended for anyone looking to improve their critical thinking skills.

My Notes

The book’s website, www.howtoreframe.com, offers additional resources: A theory primer Checklists Print-friendly versions of the reframing canvas and more.

Sometimes, to solve a hard problem, you have to stop looking for solutions to it. Instead, you must turn your attention to the problem itself—not just to analyze it, but to shift the way you frame it.

REFRAMING
Reframing, in comparison, is a higher-level activity. It is when you ask, "Is the speed of the elevator the right thing to focus on?" Being good at reframing is not necessarily about the details. It is more about seeing the big picture and having the ability to consider situations from multiple perspectives.

There are two different ways of reframing a problem—call it exploring versus breaking the frame.

Exploring the frame is when you delve deeper into the original problem statement.

Breaking the frame is when you step away completely from the initial framing of the problem.

But in a surprisingly large number of cases—especially those encountered in our daily lives—the solution to a problem depends not on technological but on mental breakthroughs (aka process or people).

Reframing is not about finding the real problem; it’s about finding a better problem to solve. By insisting that there is one correct interpretation of a problem, we blind ourselves to the possibility of smarter, more creative solutions.

Reframing is a loop off this path: a brief, deliberate redirection that temporarily shifts people’s focus to the higher-level question of how the problem is framed. It results in getting back on the path with a new or improved understanding of the problem. If you like, think of it as a short break in the forward movement, like taking a step back from the action:

Frame the Problem --> Reframing Loop --> Path Forward

Did we learn something new about the problem, given what we did this week? Is our framing still correct?

This reframing loop is repeated throughout the problem-solving journey, with multiple breaks during your forward movement. A team might start with a round of reframing on Monday, then switch into action mode for a week, and then revisit the problem on Friday, asking, Did we learn something new about the problem, given what we did this week? Is our framing still correct?

Step 1—Frame - In practice, it starts with someone asking “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?”

Step 2—Reframe - Where you challenge your initial understanding of the problem. The aim is to rapidly uncover as many potential alternative framings as possible. You can think of it as a kind of brainstorming, only instead of ideas, you are looking for different ways to frame the problem.

The five nested strategies can help you find these alternative framings of the problem. Depending on the situation, you may explore some, all, or none of these:

Look outside the frame. What are we missing?

Rethink the goal. Is there a better objective to pursue?

Examine bright spots. Where is the problem not?

Look in the mirror. What is my/our role in creating this problem?

Take their perspective. What is their problem?

Step 3—Move Forward - Your key task here is to determine how you can validate the framing of your problem through real-world testing, making sure your diagnosis is correct. At this point, a subsequent reframing check-in may be scheduled as well.

Sharing your problem with others—especially people who are different from you—provides an extremely powerful shortcut to new perspectives and can help you detect blind spots in your thinking much more rapidly.

I recommend working in groups of three rather than two. A three-person group allows one person to listen and observe while the other two talk.

Involve outsiders in the process—people who are not as close to the problem as you and your immediate connections.

FRAME THE PROBLEM
Create a short problem statement, ideally by writing down the problem as a full sentence: “The problem is that …” If you work with a group, use a flip chart so everyone looks at the same surface.

Draw up a stakeholder map next to the statement that lists the people who are involved in the problem. Stakeholders can be both individuals and things like companies or business units.

Write it down fast. The problem statement isn’t intended to be a perfect description of the issue. It’s simply raw material for the process that follows. Think of it as a slab of wet clay that you plonk down on the table, giving you something tangible to dig into as you start working. Use full sentences. Using bullet points or one-word problem descriptions makes it harder to reframe. Keep it short. Reframing works best when you limit the problem description to a few sentences.

When people come up with ideas, you can quickly point to the statement and ask, Does that idea solve this problem? (Sometimes, an idea might make you change the problem statement; that’s fine too. The point isn’t to stick to your first framing but to keep both perspectives—problems and solutions—in view.)

Problem type 1: an ill-defined mess or pain point. Pain points often cause people to jump to solutions without pausing to consider what’s going on. For example: Our new product isn’t selling. We need to invest more in marketing. Surveys show that 74 percent of our staff often feels disengaged. We’ve got to get better at communicating our corporate purpose.

Problem type 2: a goal we don’t know how to reach. A classic business example is the so-called growth gap: the leadership team has set a target of twenty million in revenue, but regular sales will get us only to seventeen million. In a problem-solving context, goal-driven problems are first and foremost characterized by a need for opportunity identification.

Problem type 3: someone fell in love with a solution. Here are a few examples, one of which you’ll encounter later in this book: “We should build an app!” “I’m dreaming of starting a business that sells Italian ice cream.” “I saw this cool website where employees can share their ideas. We should get one of those.”

Questions to ask yourself when reviewing your problem:

Is the statement true? Examples include:

Are our shipments actually arriving late in this market?
How is the tracking data created?
How reliable is this report about weapons of mass destruction?
Is our son’s math teacher really as incompetent as I think?
How did his prior students do in the final exams?
Is it possible that the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated?

Are there simple self-imposed limitations?

How are we framing this?
Is it too narrow?
Are we putting constraints on the solution that aren’t necessarily real?

Is a solution “baked into” the problem framing? In contrast, people who are trained in reframing will ask such questions as:

Are there other things in play?
How about our promotion processes?
How about informal connections?
Do women get less exposure to senior decision makers?

Is the problem clear?

With whom is the problem located? One of the reasons you should use full sentences when describing the problem is that it allows you to spot small but critical details. One such detail is the presence or absence of words like we, me, or they—words that locate the problem.

Are there strong emotions? Always dig into emotionally charged words. Words like randomly, or the slightly more subtle phrasing people without design mindsets (translation: idiots), suggest that you’ll struggle to solve the problem on a logical or factual level alone.

Are there false trade-offs? Assuming there are only 2 options (A or B).

If you are too quick to focus on the specifics, there is a significant risk that you will get lost in the details, and forget to question the overarching framing of the problem. You have to zoom out before you dive in: don’t tinker with the specifics of the statement before you are fairly confident that you are looking at the right problem.

LOOK OUTSIDE THE FRAME
How do expert problem solvers avoid this trap? They deliberately avoid delving into the details of what’s in front of them. Instead, they mentally “zoom out” and examine the larger situation, asking questions like, What’s missing from the current problem statement? Are there elements we’re not considering? Is there anything outside the frame that we are not currently paying attention to?

If the problem you are facing is one you’ve repeatedly failed to solve with your preferred solution, then there’s a good chance you need to reframe the problem.

You can sometimes shed new light on problems by noticing what happened before the slice of time you are currently focusing your attention on. For example:

What happened last time one of our employees tried to innovate?
Which solutions did our client try to apply before coming to us?
What happened to the last group of teenagers that rented this remote cabin in the woods?

Just because two things tend to occur together doesn’t necessarily mean that one actually causes the other. Often, there is a third, underlying factor that’s the real culprit. (Scientists call this a “confounding variable.”)

To identify such hidden aspects, ask questions like:

What objects are involved in the situation?
What other properties do they have?
Can they be used in nontraditional ways?
What else do we have available?

Are there other things “outside the frame” that you are not paying attention to? Incentives? Emotions? People or groups you have forgotten about?

RETHINK THE GOAL
Are we pursuing the right goal? And is there a better goal to pursue?

You should make sure to surface the higher-level goals. Do this by asking questions such as:

What is your goal?
Why is that goal important to you? Once you reach it, what will it help you achieve?
Besides that, are there other important things that reaching the goal will help you do?

For example: get a promotion --> earn more money --> (higher level goal) send child to college

To check for similar logical leaps, look at your goal model and ask:

Are our key assumptions actually true?
Does the stated goal necessarily lead to the outcome we ultimately want?
Even if an assumption is generally true, are there special circumstances in which it doesn’t apply?
Do we need to refine or revise our thinking about how we win?

Is the immediate goal the best way to get there? Or are there other ways to achieve the outcome we really care about?

EXAMINE BRIGHT SPOTS
When do we not have the problem? Are there any bright spots?

Here are four questions to help you find them:

Have you already solved the problem at least once? When did the problem occur but not matter? The absence of bad effects of a problem is also a bright spot. For the stress problem, you might ask: Was there a day when you got stressed but managed not to let yourself be as affected by it? What did you do differently?

Are there positive outliers in our group? Has anyone we know solved the problem—or at least found a better way to handle it?

Who else deals with this type of problem? When you’re looking for bright spots, the specifics are often of secondary importance: you don’t have to find an exact match for your problems. In fact, less is more: by defining your problem in less detail, you make it easier to find bright spots elsewhere.

Can we broadcast the problem widely? But what if the useful bright spots reside in an industry you’ve never heard of? In that case, there’s another approach you can take: broadcast your problem.

Three tips for broadcasting problems:

Avoid technical language. Make sure people can understand it even if they don’t work in your industry.

Provide lots of context. Why is the problem important to solve? What are the core constraints? What have you already tried?

Don’t overspecify the solution. Instead of writing, say, “We need a cheaper way to drill wells,” write “We need to provide clean drinking water to 1.2 million people” (which might not involve wells).

LOOK IN THE MIRROR
Here are three tactics for better uncovering your own role in problems:

Explore your own contribution. Asking “who’s to blame” can be problematic, because it really means, Who messed up and should be punished? The word blame suggests that someone did something that was objectively “wrong”—say, breaking a rule or acting irresponsibly. Contribution doesn’t have that assumption: much of what you contributed might have been perfectly reasonable, but it still didn’t help. Contribution is also a more forward-looking perspective, because it tells us what we would have to change to do better next time. And crucially, it recognizes that mistakes are typically the result of more than one person’s actions.

When something had gone wrong on the factory floor, the involved parties were called into my office to talk it over and figure out how we could do better. In that situation, people are naturally worried about being blamed, leading to some defensiveness—and that’s really not a good way to prevent future problems. So I made a habit of always opening the conversation with a specific question: Tell me how the company failed you.

Scale the problem down to your level. Remember that there are often things you can do at your own level even when the problem seems big. The critical tactic is to scale the problem down, asking, Is there a part of the problem I can do something about? Can I solve the problem at a more local level? Especially when using others or the system as a scapegoat.

Get an outside view of yourself. Find a good friend or colleague and ask that person: “When people first meet me, what impression do you think they get—and how do you think it differs from the way I really am?”

TAKE THEIR PERSPECTIVE
Imagine that your neighbor is building a fence and hits his finger with the hammer. Empathy is feeling his pain when he hits his finger. Perspective taking is understanding why he thinks it necessary to build the fence.

Here are three crucial steps to getting perspective taking right:

Make sure it happens. When you wrote down your problems in the Frame step, remember how I also asked you to list the stakeholders? For each stakeholder you identified—including those you may have added after looking outside the frame—make sure you invest active effort in understanding each of them.

Escape your own emotions. Adjustment means to adjust away from your own preferences, experiences, and emotions, asking “How might they see things differently from me?” Better than simply anchoring: put yourself in their shoes.

When you try to guess what other people are thinking or to understand their motives, look beyond your first answer, even if it feels true.

Look for reasonable explanations. When anchoring and adjustment fail to provide new perspectives, there’s another method that might help—and that is to start from the assumption that people are trying to do good things (or at least, that they are not actively trying to pester you).

MOVE FORWARD
Most people know that you should test your solution before you commit to it. What is less well recognized is that before you test your solution, you should make sure to test your problem.

Plan how you’ll validate your problem framing through real-world testing. This is the last step of the reframing process.

Four specific methods for problem validation:

Describe the problem to the stakeholders. In the startup world, for instance, Stanford professor Steve Blank advocates for “problem meetings,” in which you (as an entrepreneur) go to your intended customers and try to describe their own problems to them. The point is not to convince anyone of the framing, but to test whether it resonates. As Blank puts it, “Your goal is to get the customers to talk, not you.”

Get outsiders to help you.

Devise a hard test. Recall how Managed by Q used a credit card sign-up to test whether people really felt strongly enough about the problem they had in mind. How can you set up a similar test for your problem (or your solution)?

Consider “pretotyping” the solution. Pretotyping is different from prototyping in that you don’t actually build the solution at all, but instead focus on finding ways to simulate the product and see if clients will buy it.

Problem framing is similar to ABC checks in that you don’t just assess the problem once—you have to do it at regular intervals. In part, this is important because problems change over time.

At the end of a reframing process, immediately slot the next round into your calendar. The interval depends on the “clock speed” of your project, of course, but it’s generally better to be overaggressive with scheduled check-ins.

HOW TO HANDLE CHALLENGES
We’ll take a look at how to handle three common tactical challenges:

Choosing which frame to focus on (when you end up with too many framings). The best solutions often have a ring of retrospective inevitability. Once identified, people react with, "Of course! Why on earth didn’t we think of that earlier?"

Even if a framing goes against your gut, you shouldn’t dismiss it before asking: If it were true, would this framing have a big impact?

Some of the teams I’ve worked with picked a primary frame to explore, and then designated some of the team members to explore second or third frames as well. Unless you have to commit to an immediate solution, parallel explorations can be worth the effort.

Identifying unknown causes of a problem (when you don’t have any idea what’s going on). Step into a learning mindset (aka, shut up and listen).

If conversations don’t yield any clues to the nature of the problem, another strategy might involve running a small learning experiment. A learning experiment, simply put, is a deliberate attempt to do things differently from how you normally do them, in order to shake things up and learn something new.

Instead of continuing to tweak the usability testing, "What if we make the button sliiiightly more blue?" Miah stepped back and asked, "Is there something else we can do to learn more about the problem? Something we haven’t tried before?" That is the essence of learning experiments: When you are stuck, instead of persisting with your current patterns of behavior, can you come up with some kind of experiment to help you cast new light on the situation?

Overcoming silo thinking (when people resist outside involvement). Look for boundary spanners: people who understand but are not fully part of your world. Ask the outsiders specifically to challenge the group’s thinking. Make it clear that they are not necessarily expected to provide solutions.

RESISTANCE TO THE PROCESS
Show up with a well-designed, formal-looking framework.

Educate them in advance (reference this book).

If you can’t educate the client in advance, consider sharing the slow elevator problem. It’s easy to memorize and takes little time to share. Sometimes, this can be enough to get clients to see the value of reframing.

People differ in how they evaluate new ideas. Some have a promotion focus: they are motivated to act when there are things to be gained. Others have what’s called a prevention focus: they are concerned with avoiding failure and losses.

Before launching into a campaign to overcome the client’s denial, take a second to ask yourself: "Could I be wrong about this?" Sometimes, resistance on the client side is a sign of something important that they know, even if they aren’t capable of putting it into words.

Instead of trying to convince the client yourself, can you dig up data that does the job for you?

Sometimes, clients reject your perspective because they firmly believe in another framing of the problem. In that case, try to embrace their logic—and then look for inconsistencies in their reasoning that you can point out.

As professionals, we understandably want to get it right every time. But sometimes, the right choice is to accept defeat and take the long view instead, building trust with the client until your voice carries more weight with them.

How to avoid confirmation bias: Never commit to just one explanation up front. Explore multiple explanations simultaneously until sufficient empirical testing has revealed the best choice. Be open to the idea that the best fit may be a mix of several different explanations. Be prepared to walk away if something better comes along later.

Contents:

My Notes