Frame the Problem....

“The Somebody Else's Problem field .... relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.” ― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Issue 20.

Many years ago, when I was a young scientist working in R&D on a particularly complex issue, my Chief Scientific Officer, Jim Russell, said something I will never forget. He said, "Todd, your job is not to solve the problem. Your job is to frame the problem so that it can be solved."

That is a powerful concept - the idea that a problem needs to be structured, before it can be soluble. And that once it is structured, I may not be the one in the best position to solve it.

I wasn't the first to learn this lesson. And Jim wasn't the first to teach it. But it struck me hard. I've come back to this idea as a touchpoint a number of times in my career. The questions involved are the ones we frequently fail to ask:

• What am I missing?
• What are the most critical parts of the problem - which will determine success or failure? (See Articulated #11 - This Many...)
• What is the base rate? That is, what are the expected outcomes for problems of this type?
• Who else has solved this problem before - perhaps in another field? Can I appropriate or modify their solution? What did they learn as they worked on their version of the problem?
• Do I understand how this problem connects to other parts of the business? Other products in the ecosystem? Interconnectedness and Interdependence.....
• Who has another perspective that may change how the problem is viewed?
• Does this work even matter? Why?

Depending upon the answers to these questions, and others, you may decide to work on the problem immediately in its current form, wait for a defining piece of information, delegate or assign it to someone with more appropriate skills, re-shape it to a better form, or walk away from it as untenable or irrelevant.

Polaroid

"In an interview with Life magazine in 1972, the American scientist Edwin Land explained that he had invented one-step instant photography during a family vacation in 1944, when his daughter Jennifer had asked why she couldn’t see the pictures she had just taken “now”. Within an hour, he claimed, he had visualised the camera, film and chemistry system that could accomplish this feat." - Barbara Hitchcock, The Polaroid Story, Financial Times, Jun 16, 2017

If you've only known digital photography, this may be hard to envision. But in the days when photographs were taken on film, and then processed in a lab using chemicals, printed in an enlarger on photographic paper, and returned in several days -- the problem was how to improve the time until you held the photo in your hand. Speed up the chemistry? Move the lab closer to the photographer? Make it easier to process yourself without sending it out? But these weren't the essence of the problem ........Until a child asked the question that completely changed the perspective - why can't I see it now? Why indeed? Frame the problem.

New Frame: Create a system where the camera, film, photo processing and presentation of the final photo all occur at the time and place of the photograph.

Foldscope

"The inspiration for the Foldscope came from visits to field stations where they continually encountered bulky, broken microscopes, or a lack of microscopes entirely. As traditional microscopes are often expensive or cumbersome, they realized the universal scale of this problem and the need for a low-cost, revolutionary solution." Our Story - Foldscope Instruments, Inc.

How can we make an expensive scientific instrument available in areas of medical need around the world? And how do we keep it in working shape, given the costs of repairs? And how do we train medical technologists and laboratory personnel to use these complex instruments? These are not problems in the major cities of the first world, but in the rural areas, "field stations" associated with medical care in India, Africa and other areas, these microscopes were too often broken, too complicated to use, or unavailable.

New Frame: Manu Prakash and Jim Cybulski asked a simple, but revolutionary question: "What is the best microscope you can build for under $1 in parts?"

The result was the Foldscope, a handheld "origami-based paper microscope," made of folded paper card stock, with an embedded lens, and capable of multiple different microscope configurations (brightfield, darkfield, multiple lens array, fluorescence, etc.). Dozens of scientific publications now cite its use. It harkens back to the hand-held, single lens microscopes of Van Leeuwenoek in the 1600's, but adds many of the modern compound microscope's capabilities, including microphotography (with a cell phone). Foldscope Instruments have now distributed over 2 million Foldscopes, in use by medical workers, students, scientists, and educators all over the world. Their website includes a video of the assembly process that a user would perform.

What do I mean by "Framing the problem?"

These are a couple of examples in which the problem framework allowed astoundingly capable solutions to be envisioned and then executed. Properly framed, a problem is:

• A complete description of the customer goal
• Challenging to current perspectives as it reaches to address those goals
• The essential part of what is to be accomplished - without any frivolous side-efforts

This concept - framing the problem so that it can be solved, and so that it addresses the specific customer need - goes directly to the heart of the design process. Jordan DeVoss said:

"Framing a design problem is the first step in a human-centered design process. It prioritizes the elements just discussed: the user and the purpose they desire to accomplish."

That is, by identifying an important, unsolved problem, your embryonic product work has latency. It has the potential for a reason to exist. Getting to the underlying true needs; Selecting and articulating those needs so that they may be addressed by the product design; Keeping them from being over-constrained by things that are not really part of the unmet need - that is "framing the problem." Without this, your product will be just another cool trinket that is looking for its reason to exist in the world.

In our product work, we spend the time to understand the shape and function of the lock before manufacturing a key that will unlock it. We do NOT make the key first and then look for a lock that it could perhaps be made to fit.

We frame the problem -- so that it can be solved.

Working on a problem for your company? Need some help in business or product strategy, or in planning your commercial future? Let's talk.

(c) 2024 Todd M Boyce. Some images created by me with Adobe Photoshop 26.2.0 (beta) generative feature (Firefly) and DALL-E3.