Reframing human-centered problems, with Jay Melone

The following excerpt is transcribed from the FON event that took place on 22 October 2020.

Key points

Problem Framing can help us to break down and interpret a problem so that it is clear what we are trying to solve for.
The key to a successful Problem Framing is to identify the opportunities that align with the company, are the most exciting, and solve the current personas main challenges and pain points.
While it is important to identify the problems you’re trying to solve, it should also go beyond improving revenue or fixing onboarding challenges. The bigger outcome should go beyond business problems and aim to encompass the human problem.

Speaker

Jay Melone is the Founder and Principal Facilitator of New Haircut, an innovation strategy firm and global leader in problem framing and design sprints. Jay’s unique take on innovation stems from his cross-functional background in software engineering, product management, and design thinking facilitation.

Jay supports teams inside Prudential, Home Depot, P&G, and Rosetta Stone. He’s also produced several design thinking community favuorites, such as the Design Sprint and Problem Framing Toolkits, the Facilitation Mini-Course, the Innovation Leadership Accelerator, and Design Sprint app, Duco.

Problem Framing – why do we need it?

Developing a new product or service can be an exciting process but as novel ideas are explored, people can become attached to their suggestions without understanding the root problem. This can limit people’s ability to further brainstorm creative ideas while also leading to the error of jumping straight into solution mode.

Problem Framing can help us to break down and interpret a problem so that it is clear what we are trying to solve for. This helps to avoid misalignment between team members early on and sets the scene by clearly defining the challenge, ensuring that the team is working towards the same goals and solving for human-centered problems.

Prioritising opportunities

The key to a successful Problem Framing is to identify the opportunities that align with the company, are the most exciting, and solve the current personas main challenges and pain points. These should create impact for the company and add value to the customer or the user. By the end, the team should have narrowed down to a single problem that has been weighed against other problems, and identified as the best opportunity to take forward for both the business and the customers.

Humanising the problem

While it is important to identify the problems you’re trying to solve, it should also go beyond improving revenue or fixing onboarding challenges. The bigger outcome should go beyond business problems and aim to encompass the human problem. This involves asking questions such as, ‘Who are the people that are most impacted by this problem?’, and ‘Who would benefit most if we were to solve this problem?’. By putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes, and pinning down what we know (or don’t know), we can evaluate how much we actually know about our market and where the gaps lie. These gaps can further be filled in by talking to the people who are impacted so assumptions can be validated or modified according to the new information that is revealed.

Problem Framing concludes with the group consolidating insights to Challenge Statements. These Problem Statements encapsulate the opportunity; the what, why, and where. As well as detailing the value to a specific customer cohort or cohorts, as well as the expected business value. These are then ranked to determine which opportunities the team will invest further time and energy in. The Challenge Statement brings together insights to answer the following questions:

Who is having the problem?
What is the problem?
When/where is this happening (context/situation)?
If we can address this problem what do we need to change?
The stakeholder benefit, an ideal solution would benefit them how?
The business impact and value to the organisation?

Q&A

How do you ensure teams understand the difference and value between Problem Framing and the first phase of the Design Sprint?

JM – The Design Sprint promise is that we’re going to come away with some aligned vision of a potential prototype for a product or service. If you hinge all of that upon the idea that you’re working on a problem that everybody understands, that it’s important to the business and that market, but then you get everybody to unpack the problem and realise then that we have the wrong people in the room, or that the problem isn’t that important, then all expectations will fall.

That’s when you will get groups that say things like,”Design Sprints don’t work,” “Design Thinking is a joke”, or regard the program as a waste of time. The more that I can separate out those components of identifying an important problem, and spending a half a day on that conversation, to ensure the success of the next three, four or five days, the better the Design Sprint will go.

What I tried to do is sell them on the idea of making sure everything is right at first before committing to four days, because even four days is a lot of time. Four days for a team of eight people is significant, especially in the world where you’re putting people on planes to participate in workshops. It is also an economic decision.

How do you help instil the discipline in an organisation to sustain a culture of innovation beyond the ‘quick win’?

JM – My job for the most part, is being the person that teaches groups to fish, and then leave them to take the job further. Other facilitators I meet like to embed themselves into a company and a client organisation for months or years. I’m more excited to unlock new ideas and new ways of working and getting groups excited about the bigger outcomes. Then I coach and teach them and back away to let them take on the job. A single sprint is not going to change and create a culture overnight, but it will wake people up to the idea that there’s different ways to work.

I did work with Rosetta Stone a few years ago, and the Sprint that I helped to design and organise for them was used to build their organisation’s culture. They spent two and a half years building off that Sprint and taking what I taught them in terms of the principles, the conversation, the language, the tools, the methods, and now they have this culture that’s very ‘Sprint-y’.

Now when they want to have a conversation, it’s cross functional and they visualise everything. But it took them two years or so to reach that point. Another example of this is a story about Suzanne Pellican, who talks about her experience of building the culture of innovation at Intuit. It took seven years to shift the organisation out of the mindset where innovators had to be outsourced to spreading the culture of Design Thinking within the organisation.

How have you had to adapt your style and methods to respond to the ‘new normal’ of remote work?

JM – The way that the world works these days, it has allowed me to cut back on travel, see my kids more, to be home more, and it’s also created more new and different opportunities for me. But all of those opportunities have required much more work on my part. I have to communicate a lot more, I have to prepare groups a lot more, and I have to design things and organise things much more intentionally. So it just takes a lot more time for me, as a Researcher, as a Facilitator and as a Design thinker.

In the past, if a group had hired me to do a two-day Design Sprint workshop, I would mostly spend time buying sticky notes and markers, and then going in the room and designing it. Also, because I could be in the room with people, I could have side conversations with them and answer their deeper questions about what is going to happen during the workshop and how to work with the people in the room.

Instead, now I have to spend a lot more time holding and having those conversations before and after the trainings. I have had to design my pre-work to share stories about challenges that they may face and activities that they should start to think about along with some pre-work activities to be able to see the conversation. Then, I have to do multiple Q&A calls afterward, because I can’t hold peoples’ attention in those two-day workshops like I could in an in-person workshop. A two-day workshop now is more like a five-day workshop. So, it just takes a lot more time and a lot more organising. No matter how many conversations I have and how many emails and Slack messages I send about what to expect going into the room, the general rule of thumb is that only half the people are going to understand it and understand the process.

More about Jay Melone and New Haircut

About The Future Of Now series

Our goal at More Space For Light with The Future of Now (FON) series is to build a community of like-minded passionate professionals. We intend to bring together like-minded professionals to share, inspire, and explore new opportunities for growth. So you can discover new ways of working to bring back into your organisation.

More about the organisations connected to this event

morespaceforlight.com.au – A strategy and innovation consultancy specialising in both in-person and/or remote workshops, design programs and Design Sprints.
MURAL.CO – a remote collaboration whiteboard. With this platform you will supercharge your remote and in-person meetings and workshops.
hacker.exchange – a global education company that is supercharging the next generation of startups & leaders.