Do You Understand the Problem You’re Trying to Solve?

Welcome to HBR on leadership, case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Problem solving skills are invaluable in any job, but even the most experienced among us can fall into the trap of solving the wrong problem. Thomas Weddle Wedelsborg says that all too often we jump to find solutions to a problem without taking time to really understand what we're facing. He's an expert in innovation and he's the author of the book what's yous Problem? To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. In this episode, you'll learn how to reframe tough problems by asking questions that reveal all the factors and assumptions that contribute to the situation. You'll also learn why searching for one root cause can be misleading. And you'll learn how to use experimentation and rapid prototyping as problem solving tools. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in December 2016. Here it is.

Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. From Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene Carmichael. Problem solving is popular. People put it on their resume, resumes. Managers believe they excel at it. Companies count it as a key proficiency. We solve customers problems. The problem is we often solve the wrong problems. Albert Einstein and Peter Drucker alike have discussed the difficulty of effective diagnosis. There are great frameworks for getting teams to attack true problems, but they're often hard to do daily and on the fly. That's where our guest comes in. Thomas Weddle Wedelsborg is a consultant who helps companies and managers reframe their problems so they can come up with an effective solution faster. He asks the question, are you solving the right problems? In the January February 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. Thomas, thank you so much for coming on the HBR IdeaCast.

Thanks for inviting me.

So I thought maybe we could start by talking about the problem, of talking about problem reframing. What is that exactly?

Basically, when people face a problem, they tend to jump into solution mode too rapidly. And very often that means that they don't really understand necessarily the problem they're trying to solve. And so reframing is really at heart, it's a method that helps you avoid that by taking a second to go in and ask two questions, basically saying, first of all, wait, what is the problem we're trying to solve? And then crucially asking, is there a different way to think about what the problem actually is?

So I feel like so often when this comes up in meetings, you know, someone says that and maybe they throw out the Einstein quote about, you know, you spend an hour of problem solving, you spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and then everyone else in the room kind of gets irritated. So maybe just give us an example of maybe how this would work in practice in a way that would not sort of set people's teeth on edge, like, oh, here Sarah goes again, reframing the whole problem instead of just solving it.

I mean, you're bringing up something that I think is crucial, which is to create legitimacy for the method. So one of the reasons why I put out the article is to kind of give people a tool to say, actually, this thing is still important and we need to do it. But I think the really critical thing in order to make this work in a meeting is actually to learn how to do it fast. Because if you have the idea that you need to spend 30 minutes in a meeting delving deeply into the problem, I mean, that's going to be uphill for most problems. So the critical thing here is really to try to make it a practice you can implement very, very rapidly. There's an example that I would suggest memorizing. This is the example that I use to explain very rapidly what it is. And it's basically, I call it the slow elevator problem. You imagine that you are the owner of an office building and that your tenants are complaining that the elevator is slow. Now, if you take that problem framing for granted, you're going to start thinking creatively around how do we make the elevator faster, do we install a new motor? Do we have to buy a new lift somewhere? The thing is, though, if you ask people who actually work with facilities management, well, they're going to have a different solution for you, which is put up a mirror next to the elevator. Because what happens is, of course, that people go, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy. I'm. Oh, a mirror. Oh, that's beautiful. And then they forget time. What's interesting about that example is that the idea with a mirror is actually a solution to a different problem than the one you first propose. And so the whole idea here is once you get good at using reframing, you can quickly identify other aspects of the problem that might be much better to try to solve than the original one you found. It's not necessarily that the first one is wrong, it's just that there might be better problems out there to attack. That means we can do things much faster, cheaper, or better.

So in that example, I can understand how a. It's probably expensive to make the elevator faster, so it's much cheaper just to put up a mirror. And B, you know, maybe the real problem people are actually feeling, even though they're not articulating it. Right. Is like, I hate waiting for the elevator.

Yeah.

But if you let them sort of fix their hair, check their teeth, they're suddenly distracted and don't notice. But if you have. This is sort of a pedestrian example, but say you have like a roommate or spouse who doesn't clean up the kitchen, facing that problem and not having your sort of elegant solution already there to highlight the contrast between the perceived problem and the real problem. How would you take a problem like that and attack it using this method so that you can see what some of the other options might be?

Right. So, I mean, let's say it's you who have that problem. I would go in and say, first of all, what would you say the problem is like, if you were to describe your view of the problem, what would that be?

I hate cleaning the kitchen and I want someone else to clean it up.

Okay, so first observation, you know, that somebody else might not necessarily be your spouse. So already there, there's an inbuilt assumption in your question around, oh, it has to be my husband who does the cleaning. So it might actually be worth already there to say, is that really the only problem you have? That you hate cleaning the kitchen and you want to avoid it? Or might there be something around as well, getting a better relationship in terms of how you solve problems in general or establishing a better way to handle small problems when dealing with your spouse?

Right. Or maybe, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe the problem is that you just can't find the stuff in the kitchen when you need to find it.

Right. And so that's an example of a refreshment that actually, why is it a problem that the kitchen is not clean? Is it only because you hate the act of cleaning, or does it actually mean that it just takes you a lot longer and gets a lot messier to actually use the kitchen, which is a different problem? The way you describe this problem now, is there anything that's missing from that description?

That is a really good question.

Are there like, you know, basically asking, are there factors that we are not talking about right now? And I, I say this because people tend to, when given a problem, they tend to delve deeper into the detail. What often is missing is actually an element outside of the initial description of the problem that might be really relevant to what's going on. Like, why does the kitchen get messy in the first place? Is it something about the way you use it or your cooking habits? Is it because the neighbor's kids kind of use it all the time and kind of. There might. Very often there might be issues that you're not really thinking about. When you first describe the problem, that actually has a big effect on it.

I think at this point, it would be helpful to maybe get another business example. And I'm wondering if you could tell us the story of the dog adoption problem. Yeah.

This is a big problem in the US if you work in the shelter industry, basically because dogs are so popular. More than 3 million dogs every year enter a shelter, and currently only about half of those actually find a new home and get adopted. And so this is a problem that has persisted. It's been like a structural problem for decades in this space within the last three years, where people found new ways to address it. It's a woman called Lori Weiss who runs a rescue organization in south la, and she actually went in and challenged the very idea of what we were trying to do. She said, no, no. The problem we're trying to sol is not about how to get more people to adopt dogs. It is about keeping the dogs with their first family so they never enter the shelter system in the first place. In 2013, she started what's called a shelter intervention program that basically works like this. If a family comes and wants to hand over their dog, these are called uno surrenders. It's about 30% of all dogs that come into a shelter. All they would do is go up and ask if you could, would you like to keep your animal? And if they said yes, they would try to fix whatever help them fix the problem that made them turn over this. And sometimes that might be that they moved into a new building, the landlord required a deposit, and they simply didn't have the money to put down that deposit. Or the dog might need a $10 rapier shot, but they didn't know how to get access to a vet. So. And so by instigating that program just in the first year, she took her. Basically, the amount of dollars they spent per animal they helped went from something like $85 down to around $60. Just an immediate impact. And her program now is being rolled out, is being supported by the aspca, which is one of the big animal welfare organizations, and it's being rolled out to various other places. And I think what really struck me with that example was this was not dependent on having the Internet. This was not, you know, oh, we needed to have everybody mobile before we could come up with this. This conceivably we could have done 20 years ago. Only it only happened when somebody like in this case Lori went in and actually rethought what the problem they were trying to solve was in the first place.

So what I also think is so interesting about that example is that when you talk about it, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would have been thought of through other kinds of problem solving methods. There, there wasn't necessarily an after action review or a five whys exercise or a six Sigma type intervention. I don't want to throw those other methods under the bus. But, but how can you get such powerful results with such a very simple way of thinking about something?

That was something that struck me as well. This in a way, reframing and the idea that problem diagnosis is important is something we've known for a long, long time and we've actually built some tools to help out. If you work with us professionally, you are familiar with like six Sigma, tris and so on. You mentioned five whys. Root cause analysis is another one that a lot of people are familiar with. Those are good tools and they're definitely better than nothing. But what I noticed when I work with companies applying this was those tools tend to make you dig deeper into the first understanding of the problem you have. If it's the elevator example, people start asking, well, is it the cable strength or is it the capacity of the elevator? They kind of get caught by the details. That in a way is a bad way to work on problems because it really assumes that there's like a, you can almost hear it, a root cause that you have to dig down and find the one true problem. And everything else was just symptoms. That's a bad way to think about problems because problems tend to be multi causal. There tends to be lots of causes or levers you can potentially press to address a problem. And if you think there's only one, if it's like the right problem, that's actually a dangerous way. And so I think that's why this is a method I worked with over the last five years trying to basically refine how to make people get better at this. And the key tends to be this thing about shifting out and saying is there a totally different way of thinking about the problem versus getting too caught up in the mechanistic details of what happens?

What about experimentation? Because that's another method that's become really popular with the rise of lean startup and lots of other sort of Innovation methodologies. Why wouldn't it have worked to say, experiment with many different types of fixing the dog adoption problem and then just pick the one that works the best.

You could say, in the dark space. That's what's been going on. I mean, there's in this industry and a lot of it's largely volunteer driven, people have experimented and they found different ways of trying to cope and that has definitely made the problem better. So I wouldn't say that experimentation is bad, quite the contrary. Rapid prototyping, quickly putting something out into the world and learning from it, that's a fantastic way to learn more and to move forward. My point is though, that I feel we've come to rely too much on that. There's like, if you look at the startup space, the wisdom is now just put something quickly into the market and then if it doesn't work, pivot and like just do more stuff. What reframing really is, is I think of it as the cognitive counterpoint to prototyping. So this is really a way of saying very quickly, like not just working on the solution, but also working on our understanding of the problem and trying to see, is there a different way to think about that. If you only stick with experimentation, again, you tend to sometimes stay too much in the same space trying minute variations of something instead of taking a step back and saying, wait a minute, what is this telling us about what the real issue is?

So to go back to something that we touched on earlier when we were talking about the completely hypothetical example of a spouse who does not clean the kitchen, I should say yes. For the record, my husband is a great kitchen cleaner. You started asking me some questions. Questions that I could see immediately were helping me rethink that problem. Is that kind of the key, just having a checklist of questions to ask yourself? How do you really start to put this into practice?

I think there are two steps in that. The first one is just to make yourself better at the method. Yes, you should kind of work with the checklist. In the article I kind of outline seven practices that you can use to do this. But importantly, I would say you have to consider that as basically a set of training wheels. I think there's a big, big danger in getting caught in a checklist. This is something I work with my co author, Patty Miller. It's one of his insights that if you start giving people a checklist for things like this, they start following it. And that's actually a problem because what you really want them to do is to start challenging the Thinking. So the way to handle this is to get some practice using it. Do use the checklist initially, but then try to step away from it and try to see if you can organically make. It's almost a habit of mind when you run into a colleague in the hallway and she has a problem and you have five minutes, like delving in and just starting asking some of those questions, using your intuition to say, wait, how is she talking about this problem? And is there a question or two I can ask her about the problem that can help her rethink it?

Well, that is also just a very different approach because I think in that situation, most of us can't go 30 seconds without jumping in and offering solutions.

Very true. The drive towards solutions is very strong. And to be clear, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that if the solutions work. So many problems are just solved by, oh, you know, oh, here's the way to do that. Great. But this is really a powerful method for those problems where either it's something we've been banging our heads against tons of times without making progress, or when you need to come up with a really creative solution when you're, you know, you're facing a competitor with a much bigger budget and, you know, if you just. If you solve the same problem they do, you're not going to win. So that basic idea of taking that approach to problems can often help you move forward in a different way than just like, oh, I have a solution. I would say there's also some interesting psychological stuff going on, right. Where you may have tried this, but if somebody tries to serve up a solution to a problem I have, I'm often resistant towards them. Kind of like, no, that solution is not going to work in my world. Whereas if you get them to discuss and analyze what the problem really is, you might actually dig something up. Let's go back to the kitchen example. One powerful question is just to say, what is your own part in creating this problem? Because very often people, they describe problems as if it's something that's inflicted upon them from the external world and they are innocent kind of bystanders in that.

Right. Or crazy customers with unreasonable demand.

Exactly right. I don't think I've ever met, like, an agency or consultancy that didn't, like, gossip about their customers. Oh, my God, they're horrible. You know, classic thing. Why don't they want to take more risk? Well, risk is bad and it's their business that's on the line, not the consultancies. Right. So absolutely. That's one of the things when you step into a different mindset and kind of wait, oh yeah, maybe I actually am part of creating this problem in a sense as well. That tends to open some new doors for you to move forward in a way with stuff that you may have been struggling with for years.

So we've surfaced a couple of questions that are useful. I'm curious to know what are some of the other questions that you find yourself asking in these situations, given that you have made this sort of mental habit that you do. What are the questions that people seem to find really useful?

One easy one is just to ask if there are any positive exceptions to the problem. So was there a day where your kitchen was actually spotlessly clean? And then asking what was different about that day, like what what happened there that didn't happen the other day? So that can very often point people towards a factor that they hadn't considered previously.

We got takeout.

So that is your solution take out from now on that might have other problems. Another good question, and this is a little bit more high level. It's. It's actually more making an observation about labeling how that person thinks about them problem. And what I mean with that is we have like problem categories in our head. So if I say, let's say that you describe a problem to me and say, well, we have a really great product and it's much better than our previous product, but people aren't buying it. I think we need to put more marketing dollars into this. Now you can go in and say, that's interesting. This sounds like you're thinking of this as a communications problem. Is there a different way of thinking about that? Because you can almost tell how the second you say communications, there's some ideas about how do you solve a communications problem, typically with more communication. And what you might do is go in and suggest, well, have you considered that it might be, say an incentive problem? Are there incentives on behalf of the purchasing manager at your clients that are obstructing you? Might there be incentive issues with your own sales force that makes them want to sell the old product instead of the new one? So literally just like identifying what type of problem does this person think about and is there a different potential way of thinking about it might be an emotional problem, a timing problem, an expectations management problem, thinking about what label of what type of problem that person is kind of thinking as it of.

That's really interesting too because I think so many of us get requests for advice that we're really not qualified to give. So Maybe the next time that happens, instead of muddying my way through, I will just ask some of those questions that we talked about instead.

That sounds like a good idea.

So, Thomas, this has really helped me reframe the way I think about a couple of problems in my own life. And I'm just wondering, I know you do this professionally, but is there a problem in your life that thinking this way has helped you solve?

I've been swallowing my own medicine on this too, and I think I have, well, maybe two different examples. And in one case, somebody else did the reframing for me. But in one case, when I was younger, I often kind of struggled a little bit. I mean, this is my teenage years kind of hanging out with my parents. I thought they were pretty annoying people. That's not really fair because they're quite wonderful. But that's what life is when you're a teenager. And one of the things that struck me suddenly, and this was kind of the positive exception, was there was actually an evening where we really had a good time and there was no conflict. And the core thing was I wasn't visiting them in their old house where I grew up. It was actually we were at a restaurant. And it suddenly struck me that so much of like the sometimes kind of a little bit you love them but they're annoying kind of dynamic is tied to the place, it's tied to the setting you are in. And of course, if you, you know, I live abroad now. If I visit my parents and I stay in my old bedroom, you know, my mother comes in and wants to wake me up in the morning, you know, stuff like that. Right. And it just struck me so, so clearly that it's, it's, it's when I change the setting, if I go out and have dinner with them in a different place that the dynamic just, that dynamic disappears.

Well, Thomas, this has been really, really helpful. Thank you for talking with me today.

Thank you, Sarah.

That was Thomas Weddle Wedelsborg in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on the HBR IdeaCast. He's an expert in problem solving and innovation and he's the author of the book what's yous Problem? To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand picked conversation and about leadership from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. We're a production of the Harvard Business Review. If you want more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos like this, find it all@hbr.org this episode was produced by Ann Sani and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hope, Audie Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Kabaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew and you, our listener. See you next.