Is Reframing a Problem the Right Approach?

Note: My blog is now one year old - post script at the end.

There are a host of famous case studies on the importance of reframing a problem. From my favorite “is the elevator too slow, or is the wait too boring?” to others like the many challenges faced by Ikea and highlighted at the end of Loonshots by Safi Bahcall. If you read a how-to on reframing though, it can sound more like a witch’s brew than a recipe for success. The steps might fit, but it’s not at all clear how brainstorming will directly allow you to see your problem any differently.

Focusing only on the “problem” part of problem-solving is the key mistake these methods and frameworks are making.

My opening question to readers is what makes one problem better than another? Is the elevator too slow, or is the wait for the elevator too boring? What makes one a better problem than the other? If you read these case studies, it is left as an exercise to the reader to agree that the reframed version of the problem is better. Because if you’re only looking at the problem in isolation, I think it’s impossible to make the claim that one is better than the other. Consider that very tall buildings have very fast elevators to go with them.

One of my key insights over a year ago was that outcomes are what make one problem better than another. We can look at the outcomes if we were to solve the “slow elevator” problem and compare them to if we looked at the “boring wait” problem. In one case you’ve spent a ton of money and given people a few more seconds in the day. In the other you’ve spent a little money and improved the human experience. Compared in those terms, boring wait seems like a better problem (in most cases).

But if you read how-to guides on reframing, the solution side is implicit rather than explicit. Some of the methods will suggest solution-side approaches like asking “which problem would you solve if you had unlimited resources.” Even then, the focus remains problem-side and the results of the process are expected to be improved problem-statements alone.

This is why I’m so convinced that the meta-problem idea is both novel and a valuable addition to our toolboxes. You lose something if you go through a reframing exercise, identify what you would do if you had more resources for example, and then just forget about the more resources part of the prompt. My method instead asks you to think about the problems but keep them linked tightly to their respective solutions.

More than that, examining the meta-problem of problem-solution pairs gives you double the ideas for reframing. You can reframe your solution as well as the problem. As an example, would a solution be faster elevators, or some other future-state options for the elevator like an escalator. Good problem solvers already do these kinds of things by intuition, but we can do them better by making the approach explicit.

Post script

This blog is now officially a year old. I am both closer and further than I thought I would be at this point. When I started writing I had the goal to basically blog my way to writing a book. I thought I was about 18 months from writing a solid draft. A year in, I’ve figured out many things and am much clearer on the ideas I am trying to communicate. I also have not actually started writing a book. Instead I’ve written the posts, several articles, a website, and a variety of presentations.

Diligently writing one post each week has helped me continue to refine my thinking and has been completely worth it. However, it has involved a bit less feedback than I had hoped and I currently have 40 subscribers (which is both a big number, and not that many).

Given all that, I have an ask for you – my reader. If the ideas I’m sharing resonate, or your have a question / doubt, please let me know! If you know someone who might enjoy joining me on this journey, feel free to share my link with them. And if you’d rather continue to be a silent observer, I am still happy to see that my newsletter analytics show a majority of you take the time to open my emails each week.