Exhaustive Guide to Defining Problems and Desired Outcomes

The Foundation of Problem Solving: Clarity and Shared Understanding\n\n- The Critical Nature of the First Question: The first of the $20$ questions in the framework is fundamental because it establishes the clarity and shared understanding required to define the problem or opportunity being addressed. \n- Flow of Work: All subsequent work, strategy, and innovation flow from this initial point. It acts as the setting of goalposts and defines the focus and direction for the remainder of any project.\n- The Puccio Principle: Gerard Puccio, a professor of creativity, posits that one would not attempt to solve a mathematics problem without first knowing what the problem consists of. By extension, it is impossible to determine a path to a destination if the destination itself is unknown.\n- The Challenge of Complexity: Achieving clarity is often difficult due to the nature of complex issues, which typically consist of many smaller, nested problems. Different stakeholders often maintain vastly different perspectives on the same overarching issue.\n- Examples of Nested Complexity:\n - Obesity: This is not a singular issue but a composite of interacting factors including medical issues, behavioral aspects, economic and financial influences, social influences, genetic predispositions, marketing techniques, and food availability.\n - Homelessness: This challenge can be viewed as both a result and a contributor to other issues such as unemployment, mental health struggles, housing affordability and supply, drug addiction, and family breakdown.\n- Holistic vs. Targeted Focus: It is vital to determine if a team is addressing the problem at a holistic level or focusing on a specific contributing element. Without a shared understanding, team members will follow divergent paths, leading to inefficiency or total ineffectiveness.\n\n# The Mechanics of the Problem Statement and Desired Outcome\n\n- The Transition from Point A to Point B: Problem-solving is the process of moving from the current situation (Point A) to a desired outcome or new end state (Point B).\n- Defining the Problem Statement: Verbatim definition: \"A problem statement is a succinct sentence that captures the problem you're solving or alleviating or the opportunity you're pursuing.\"\n- Defining the Desired Outcome: Verbatim definition: \"A desired outcome is a succinct sentence that clearly articulates the outcomes you want to bring about.\"\n- Terminology and Semantics: High-level goals are variously described as a vision, mission, strategic objective, or impact. The term \"desired outcome\" is specifically used to differentiate the goal from the actual, realized outcome.\n- The Utility of Clarity: Clear statements foster creativity, innovation, and motivation. They guide teams and significantly increase the statistical probability of a strategy's success.\n\n# The Importance of Purpose and the \"Why?\"\n\n- Identifying the Missing Link: It is surprisingly common for policy ideas and strategies to lack a defined problem or outcome. A specific historical example is the $2016$ debate on the deregulation of the tertiary education sector in Australia, during which a senator noted on the radio, \"We don't even know what problem we're trying to solve.\"\n- The Baird Inquiry: Former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird was known for frequently asking his teams, \"Why are we doing this?\" This served as a mechanism to ensure a true purpose existed behind policy initiatives.\n- Exploring Problematic Roots: It is helpful to ask, \"Why is this problem problematic?\" While sometimes obvious (e.g., improving health), other times the underlying purpose is obscured and requires deep exploration.\n\n# Five Tips for Framing Effective Statements\n\n1. Specificity and Iteration: Statements should be as specific as possible. While early stages (such as \"blue sky\" research) may only allow for general terms (e.g., \"understanding DNA\" or \"integrating solar power\"), the goal is to iteratively refine these as insights emerge.\n2. Sphere of Influence and Feasibility: Statements must reflect the team's available resources and actual influence. \n - Project Timeframes: If a project lasts $9\,\text{weeks}$, the outcome should reflect what will be different in $9\,\text{weeks}$. \n - Electricity Grid Case Study: A team of undergraduate students on a $12\,\text{week}$ project originally aimed for \"all Australian homes to be off the grid.\" This was outside their sphere of influence and time constraint. A refined desired outcome would be: \"By the end of this $12\,\text{week}$ project, our industry partner will have a much deeper understanding of the motivators behind Australian households moving to off-grid electricity.\"\n3. Focus on the Problem, Not the Solution: A problem statement must capture the problematic issue without pre-empting causes or solutions. \n - The Deadlines Example: When a team misses deadlines, a leader might state the problem as \"I need more staff.\" This frames the problem as a lack of a specific solution. A better statement is \"The team is missing its deadlines,\". This opens the door to other solutions like time management training or moving deadlines.\n - The Myanmar Malnutrition Example: Framing the problem as a \"lack of food\" limits the solution to providing more food. However, by identifying the problem simply as \"childhood malnutrition,\" researchers found that children's energy expenditure (carrying heavy water buckets) was the issue. Installing PVC pipe pumps reduced calorie expenditure and improved health without needing more food input.\n4. Inspirational and Guiding Values: Desired outcomes should avoid ambiguous \"motherhood statements.\" \n - The Sony Example: In the $1950 ext{s}$, rather than saying \"innovate our product line,\" Sony management told designers, \"Let's build the world's first pocketable radio.\" This was specific, inspiring, and provided guidance on size and weight constraints.\n - Strategic Successes: Jeff Mulgan notes that the success of the smallpox eradication program was due to a goal inspiring enough to \"quicken the pulse.\" Marilyn Hewson (CEO of Lockheed Martin) emphasizes that while good leaders align people on what to do, great leaders inspire them with why they do it.\n5. Framing Challenges as Questions: Turning a problem or outcome into a question (e.g., \"What are the motivators behind households moving to off-grid electricity?\") prompts a valuable answer that defines the project's work.\n\n# The Blank Time Graph: A Diagnostic Technique\n\n- Purpose: This technique is used to start discussions when consensus is difficult to reach. It highlights that multiple people can have different perspectives on the same issue.\n- Structure: It is a graph with an empty y-axis and an x-axis labeled with \"Time.\"\n- Exercise: Participants are asked to draw two graphs:\n 1. The Problem: What is getting worse over time? (e.g., something bad increasing or something good decreasing/plateauing).\n 2. The Desired Outcome: If the problem is fixed, what gets better over time?\n- Obesity Application: When asked to graph obesity, participants might label the y-axis with:\n - Incidence of chronic disease (increasing).\n - Amount of junk food eaten (increasing).\n - Amount of exercise done (decreasing).\n - Body Mass Index (BMI) (increasing).\n - Number of obese people or average weight (increasing).\n - Financial burden on social services (increasing).\n- Conclusions from the Exercise: There is no \"single right answer.\" The framing depends on the context and the specific angle the team intends to address (e.g., junk food consumption vs. chronic health issues).\n\n# Case Study: Childhood Malnutrition in Vietnam (Jerry Sternin)\n\n- Context: In $1990$, Jerry Sternin (Save the Children) aimed to alleviate rural childhood malnutrition in Vietnam.\n- Data: $65 \%$ of children under age $5$ in rural areas were malnourished. \n- Constraints: The government was fatigued from failed food aid programs; farming was no longer collective; subsidies from the Soviet Union had ended; the health system was poor; and recent typhoons had struck. Sternin was given a $6\,\text{month}$ deadline before his visa would expire.\n- Drafting Statement 1 (Problem): \"$65\%$ of Vietnamese children under $5$ in rural communities are malnourished.\" (Avoid framing this as a \"lack of food\" to prevent stifling innovation).\n- Drafting Statement 2 (Desired Outcome): A refined, inspiring version: \"Within $6\,\text{months}$, $[300]$ children who were malnourished will become healthy in a way that can be scaled up to every malnourished child in Vietnam.\"\n- The Square Bracket Technique: Sternin used square brackets ($[300]$) around preliminary figures that need confirmation as the project progresses—a technique borrowed from aerospace engineering performance specifications.\n\n# Practical Implementation and Stakeholder Engagement\n\n- Iterative Refinement: Complex problems change as new things are learned. Question $1$ should be revisited throughout the project to ensure statements remain relevant.\n- Testing with Stakeholders: Avoid the reluctance common in some sectors to test ideas early. The most effective way to de-risk a project is to get feedback on the problem statement and desired outcome and refine them through collaboration.\n- Visibility: Once agreed upon, these statements should be included in emails and documents to maintain focus.\n- The Northern Territory Workshop Anecdote: A workshop originally allocated $20\,\text{minutes}$ to discuss these statements. The stakeholders spent the full $2\,\text{hours}$ on them, followed by weeks of email discussion. This investment was deemed essential to ensure all subsequent work was productive and focused.\n- Final Philosophical Note: Gerald Weinberg and Donald Gorse ($1982$) stated that resolving a problem is often trivial once the problem is actually known. As the adage goes, \"There are no fair winds for those who don't know where they're heading.\"