Facilitating Collaborative Problem Framing
By Nick Scott
A few years ago a couple of my colleagues from NouLAB and I were invited to give a workshop on human centered design (HCD) to an audience of public servants. I believe the initial expectation was that we’d deliver a workshop on how to build personas, develop a customer journey map or interview users. In the innovation world, it is easy to fetishize tools. But tools aren’t everything.
What is more difficult and more important than tools, are things like mindset, condition-setting, team dynamics, and problem framing. After some discussion, we chose to focus on one of the more challenging aspects of our craft: collaborative problem framing.
Some of our starting assumptions:
Innovation starts with a problem
Co-creation should have some grounding in a shared understanding of a problem
Problem framing is hard
Collaborative problem framing is super hard.
At NouLAB, we underpinned most of our work with Theory U. This is because even though people talk a lot about working together, breaking down barriers, and making things centered around people, they often forget about the important things that happen beneath the surface to make co-creation work well. It's not just about getting a bunch of people in a room and coming up with ideas. Using Theory U in our planning helped us design processes that let us work with teams to really understand the problems they're trying to solve, and put them in the shoes of the people they're trying to help, as well as each other.
As with most practices of HCD, nothing is stand-alone, and that includes problem framing. When we're talking about figuring out what the problem really is, it's important to include the people who are affected by it. This isn't just about getting their ideas when you're trying to come up with solutions. It's about treating them like important team members, not just sources of information (Cheryl Li from Ample Labs drove this message home for me at the Code For Canada showcase).
Problem framing is a hard thing to do alone and can be even harder in a group of clashing opinions, ideas, and personalities. In our work facilitating co-creation, we spend a lot of time upfront, creating the space for teams to coalesce and arrive at a shared understanding of a problem before we start thinking about solutions.
Having a clear idea of the problem is critical because it helps the team get ready to take action collectively when the time is right.
Sometimes, what we think is the problem isn't actually the problem — it's more like a description of an issue.
A real problem definition should do a few important things:
Provide context. It should give information about what's been tried before, the scope of the problem, and who's involved
Point to solution barriers: It should show what's making it hard to solve the problem
Indicate how to gauge success: It should explain how you'll know if a solution is actually working
Inspire action: It should motivate your team and others to act
Inform evaluating criteria: It should help you decide which ideas are better than others when you're comparing them
Agility: It needs to be flexible and able to change as you learn more (this is especially critical when dealing with complex and wicked problems)
The ‘double diamond’ helps us situate our activities in a predictable flow of divergence and convergence. Below we locate where different activities and outputs fit in our overall practice.
For the activities, we follow the breath pattern of divergence, emergence, and convergence. Similar to the “1–2–4-All” liberating structure, each activity starts with a solo round before a group round (Note: if you have time, I would follow the 1–2–4-All format for each phase of divergence, emergence, and convergence). This is the general flow of each activity:
Divergence: We start by brainstorming lots of ideas on our own. Then we share these ideas with the group. After that, we work together to come up with even more ideas.
Emergence: Next, we take a moment to think on our own. Then, as a group, we organize and group our ideas, and talk about them together.
Convergence: Lastly, we each pick the best idea and complete a problem frame on our own. We share these with the group and choose the best one to work on together.
Over the years we have tried many different activities in facilitating collaborative problem framing. Below I have uploaded slides for each activity. Under each, slide one is used to capture the divergent phase, while slide two is used to capture the convergent phase.
Activity one – symptoms versus causes
Activity two – identifying actors, outcomes and their relationships
Activity three – Madlib
The Madlib is by far the favourite and probably not for the right reasons. People love templates. It’s important to note that the Madlib is not meant to be constricted in this way forever but is used to get the team started in framing.
While I have presented each of these activities separately, in practice we use a hybrid of all these activities to arrive at a shared problem statement.
Collaborative problem framing is a crucial and under-valued craft. OpenNorth | NordOuvert published an excellent report that includes some questions you can use in collaborative problem framing (available here on page 15). When dealing with complex and wicked problems that are ever-changing along with our perspectives on them, we need to keep learning and working together with lots of different people. If we want to be effective in addressing our toughest challenges, then we have to be really good at getting people to come together, learn from each other, and be ready to take action quickly.
How have you facilitated collaborative problem framing? Is this useful? What changes might you make?