Purpose-Aligned Outcomes

When it came out in 2017, the HBR article Are you Solving the Right Problems gave me a new way to think about problem solving. It shared a famous case study of problem framing. While you might think “this elevator is too slow” you can transform that problem into the better problem of “the wait is too boring.” It was a powerful and simple idea to me: the right frame helps you get to a better problem (and solution).

But the article was missing something key. How do you know “this elevator is too slow” is not the right problem? How could we rationalize “the wait is too boring” is a better problem at all? The best I could figure out, the way you would know is if someone happened to suggest something everyone liked better. And that is the methodology that the author laid out - a sequence of steps for socializing different problem statements in hopes that you would happen upon something better. Knowing that there might be a better problem out there is an important first step, but it is not the whole story.

The question of how you know if you have the right problem framing has been bothering me ever since. Practically, I have an intuition that helps me guess if we have the right problem or not. But I was missing the logic that I could use to convert others to my cause. Or really an understanding of why I felt so strongly when faced with the “wrong” problem.

Last year I was drafting a long article and figured out a solution: start from the purpose of a system. For an elevator, the primary purpose is to safely move the right number of people between levels of a building. Maybe another purpose is to have a high level of satisfaction among those people. But an invisible piece up until this point is that we want to accomplish this task without spending too much money. Building an elevator has costs and benefits, and unless we consider both sides, what justification do we have to not build a super-premium elevator? One with a vending machine just in case you get hungry on your journey?

The idea of a purpose-aligned-outcome is to distinguish between things the system happens to do and things we actually care if it does. An elevator that does not have enough capacity for the expected number of passengers? - that is a problem we can solve with more / bigger / faster elevators (or by reducing the number of passengers. Anyone want to take the stairs?). But further, it is a problem we need to face because an elevator that everyone agrees does not meet its purpose - moving the right number of people between levels of a building - that is a problem we have to solve.

The last major reason I like purpose-aligned outcomes is that there is a much shorter list of them. This is the abstract level at which everyone can understand what a system has to do. While it is true that to actually implement an elevator you need to get into a lot more detail, the design phase stays bigger picture and lays out the rules of whatever you want to accomplish.

Do you think purpose is a good way to define outcomes? How have you used a different problem framing to transform your original problem?