Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, there. If you've ever wondered if there is a better way to solve problems, you have come to the right course. Hi, my name is Hadassah Damie. In this course, we are going to go deep in how you can design better problems, and get higher values solutions. We are going be pulling from, I could say secrets, but I could also just say techniques from user experience design, service design, and design thinking in general. Think about this problems around us. Whether it is a software or a product that just doesn't seem to work correctly on your computer or your phone, or a system that you have set up at your work or in your personal life that confuses you, and doesn't exactly do what you need it to do, or it might be a problem that you've been handed by a boss or a partner or your kids to try to figure out. Now, in the world of design, we come at problems in a really specific way. In this course, I'm going to walk you through exactly how that works. Why we think about problems in the ways that we do as designers. I'm going to give you seven specific methods that you can use really quickly in a matter of minutes to re-frame and rethink the problems that you have. In this course, we are not solving problems. We're setting problems up so that they are easier to solve to begin with. I have been working in the worlds of innovation, technology, civic, and social design for about 10 years. Currently, I'm a design thinking facilitator at a venture capital production studio, which means I get to spend all day working with startups and entrepreneurs, trying to sort through their software and product design problems. I'm also a coach, and I work with individuals on their financial and economic problem-solving. In this course, you're going to hear examples that are from personal lives around finance and work professional lives around software and technology, but I really want you to think about how you're going to be able to extrapolate the things that you learn in this course into any type of problem situation that you have, because here is the thing. It's all about how you look at the problem, set it up, dig into it, and try to get to the problem under the problem. We're going to learn techniques for that in this course. I hope that you stick around and dig in. Your homework for this course is going to be with the worksheet that you will be getting when you go into the modules. You are going to come up with three problems that you're going to workshop, and revise into seven different formats. Then at the end of the course, I'm going to invite you to put your favorite or most interesting problem that you've revised into the course program area below. Can't wait to learn about how the problem solve with you, and let's get going.
2. Why Problems Intrigue Us: In this section, we're going to start talking about why problems intrigue us. What is it about problems that are so attractive? Now, a problem is a matter of situation that's unwelcome. It's something that we believe needs to be dealt with and overcome. Karl Popper, the famous philosopher, said that all of life is problem-solving. We don't wake up in the day and things just go, there's constantly things that we're thinking about how we might do, create, change, and make better for ourselves and for others. Of course, those are reward and problem-solving. We seek to understand, we see problems potentially as opportunities to engage with our lives and the world around us. As people, we also have a core need for contribution. I don't know about you, but for me I can often feel good about myself just being right. A couple of problems that I think are interesting that I'll throw out here. Say you're a city with a messy landfill, or say you're a traveler and you're trying to figure out how to eat neatly while you're on the road. Or say you're a traveler and you're just wishing it wasn't as expensive. Here's a couple solutions to those problems people have come up with. For the messy landfill in Staten Island, New York. They've kept it and made a park at Fresh Kills. If you're trying to figure out how to eat neatly while traveling, well you could use a spork or any of the other methods that are available. Airbnb is a solution that was come up with for the expensiveness of trying to stay somewhere while you travel and making it more affordable and accessible. Problem-solving can look like things that cities or governments do together, can look like business innovation. It can look like products. Problem-solving comes in many forms.
3. The Problem with Problem Solving: All right. Let's dig into some of the problems that people encounter when going into problem-solving. First and foremost, there's the psychology of problem-solving. If you approach problems as obstacles and something to avoid, rather than an opportunity to learn more or to really dig in, you're not going to have that much fun problem-solving for one and number two, you really might miss the opportunity to solve the right problem. I also hear people bring in some sort of imposter syndrome. It sounds like, "Well, who am I to solve this? Should I be solving this?" My question back is often, well, who are you not to. There's some really interesting ideas that come in when we try to solve problems that are a bit external to our experiences. Much like it's also important to have people whose out of lived experience solve problems that impact them, even if they're not experts in the fields that maybe implementing those problems.Then of course, there's the use of heuristics, which are mental frameworks that we all have that we apply to make sense of the world. Heuristics can be really helpful because they can help us reduce executive function burden. They can just help us think faster and they can allow us to make models, to understand how the world works more quickly or more efficiently. But heuristics can also help us jump to conclusions or lead us to think that we know an answer when perhaps we don't. Additionally with problems, we encounter what I like to think of as layers of complexit. There's often what we think of as a presenting problem, the problem that seems to be at the top layer versus the potential root causes of the problem. If your car just grinds to a halt one day, you might think to yourself, "Well darn it, my car's not working." But the root cause could be, well, gee, you've never done an oil change. The real problem is not knowing to maintain your vehicle, even if the presenting problem is, "Well my car's not working right now." Presenting problems versus root causes. There's also layers of complexity to problems in terms of social layers, how many people, types of people or communities are involved in the problem? Are there technical layers, if we're thinking about software, digital product? Are we thinking about operating systems and servers and different programming languages? There's also action layers. There are certain parts of a problem that are easier to act on to literally access than others. Additionally, if a problem has some sort of dishonesty to it, we're really going to struggle to solve it, which is why digging around in problems is so helpful because what's first presented to us isn't always necessarily the whole problem or the whole story. Finally, I do think it's very true that when we act in silos, we end up with artificial complications that collaboration and cross-functional problem-solving can really, really help with. Because life isn't separated simply and easily into social studies over here and math over there. We live in complex, dynamic living macro systems that intersect with and impact each other. For you my problem-solving cadre, problem-solving is going to challenge you to be multi-disciplinary, to think about the different ways that you understand the world and to really bring that information in because it's high value for you to bring in all the different things that you know.
4. Designer Mindet: Thinking Like a Problem Solver: Now, I've promised you in this course that we'd be thinking like designers, which means thinking like problem seekers. We don't just take a problem that's presented to us and say there it is, let's solve that, absolutely not. We are problems seeking. We are seeking high value, high need, or high opportunities within the problems that are presented to us. Very rarely will a designer get a problem and then just go to turn on it. We absolutely dig into them first. We ask questions, even questions about the questions. There's a ton of why. Why is this a problem? We ask something called how might we, how might we approach this problem? How might we approach a part of this problem? If a problem brings up an obvious question for you that doesn't seem to have an answer it's really important to notice something that we'd like to say is designers get to ask dumb questions. Did anyone notice? Is a turn of I wonders in here, as well as who needs this? Who, who, who is the key question because designers most importantly must center people. Because it's people who need to use and value the solutions, the products, and the outcomes that once we get to problem solving are created. So if a problem is presented to you, one of the key things that I want you to ask is why does this matter to a person? Why does it matter to you? Why does it matter to your boss? Why does it matter to your client? Why does it matter to your partner, etc. Why is this a problem for that person? Not for an archetype, not for a story that you heard once about how somebody thought this should be a problem. For a particular person, why is this a problem? When you get an answer to that, ask why again, for four or five rounds, this is technique we call why laddering. The idea is that we can get underneath a little more to the core needs or desires or values that are underneath a problem. After that, see if the problem looks different or if you've uncovered a different part of the problem to solve.
5. Project: Create a List of Problems: It is time to begin the project part and the interactive part of this course. In this section you're going to create a list of problems. Here's an example. You're going to start with what I like to call vague are crappy problems and that's completely okay. For example, you might start with something like, I know I got a budget, but I hate it. By the end of this course, you're going to be able to turn that into something a little more clear. For example, I know I receive about $3,000 a month, but I'm really struggling to track where it goes. The second one has observable clues and it's a lot easier to start to come up with solutions for something that has specifics includes within it. First, let's talk a bit more about the anatomy of a crappy problem. Again, the ones that you might start off with, which is totally okay for you to start here. A crappy problem... It might not have many specifics or anything at all. It could be full of scope, creep, gosh, if only I could have a different life. I mean, gee, that covers basically everything. It's not defined very well at all. It could be meandering, could encompass everything from world peace to, the provenance of what we're having for dinner. It could be too small. Only about tiny are minuscule things that are probably pretty quick to fix once you get in there. Or it can lack curiosity. Assuming there's no solution or a defensive looking problem that it's hard to question. A problem statement, on the other hand, has basically the opposite of crappy problems to it. In order to get to being able to make a problem statement, a nice, clear, observable problem. We want to understand the problem itself. We want to dig in. My goal for you in this course is that you're going to be able to come out with a nice clear problem statement that first you've got to dig in and mess around with the problem a bit. Here's some examples of vague problem. A few apples and oranges is what? This is much more clearly expressed by two plus three equals question mark. When we put specifics and familiar formats in place, a vague problem becomes a clear one that we know how to solve. Here's something that my friends in digital product design and web development might be familiar with. The client says the interface is weird, you have to fix it. Great. What does that mean? We can end up with a much more clear issue problem statement. If we were to say something like, I wonder if we identify the drop off point on this interface. Might we be able to test a few ideas to fix it. This is something that we can test. Did we actually execute tests on ideas to fix it? Didn't we identify the problem itself, the drop-off point, etc. The second statement has so much more opportunity for us to figure out how to get in there. Of course, we have to dig around to be able to come to that statement in the first place. In the worksheet that you have available to you, there's some sample problems. I want to invite you to think about at least three different problems that you're going to workshop throughout the next sections of this course. A work-related problem, a personal problem, and a wildcard. Could be work, could be personal, could be something else. If you're really struggling to come up with a problem that you want to look shop. Feel free to use one of the ones on this list. Those are printed at the end of your worksheet. You are going to want to go ahead and download the worksheet, make a copy for your Google Drive or put it on your computer and write out your list of problems. Again, the list can be long, short problems can start out crappy, that's totally fine. Most importantly, think about meaningful problems. If you're struggling to come up with the right sort of scope of the problem. You could try writing out a tiny medium and giant version of any problem that you're scoping out. Once you've made that whole list, stop, reread it, and circle or highlight the three that you're going to work on and then enter them into the worksheet.
6. Flip worries Into Goals: Priorities Approach: For our first method, we are going to go from feelings to facts to find our priorities. Something I like to call going from arc to accuracy. Here's an example you get home from work. You open the cupboards, and you look in them, and you say, "There is nothing to eat in here, this is terrible. Oh my God, how can I possibly be responsible for myself and other people when I can't even put anything into the cupboard for dinner." Potentially you spin out, and potentially you feel crappy about yourself. But you don't actually end up any closer to necessarily what you're going to eat for dinner. Say you were to revise that and you were to get home from work and you're hungry and you open the cupboards, and you say, "Huh, okay, well there's quinoa, there's flaxseed, there's black beans, and that looks like an old can of sardines. Huh, I don't know how to make anything I want to eat out of this, period." What's different about that? What you've done is you've listed the facts of the situation, and then what the priority is, you still need to eat. This is one way you can take what seems like a really hyped-up problem and break it down into something that's a bit more solvable. Go for the facts, go for the accuracy rather than the arc that's happening. Here's another example. Say that you are supposed to be coming up with a budget for a project for work, and you're feeling on it is like, "Oh my gosh, I'm really scared. I'm not going to be able to explain this to finance, and actually everyone on the project will lose their jobs, and I just am freaking out. I can't do this." That's going to make it hard for you to solve this problem. I suggest you list out the facts of the problem. Finance could cut our budget. I'm responsible for a lot of people, the ones on this project. I need to explain this project's costs clearly. You might rewrite the problem to end up saying, "I want to preserve headcount and budget on this project. I need to figure out how to explain this to finance in a way that helps me do both." Now you have some specifics, headcount, budget, project and what you need to do, explain it to finance. That's going from feelings to facts based on the priorities of the situation. Look at the list of problems that you have and go ahead and see if there's any ones in there that you want to try pulling some of these facts and priorities out of, especially if any of the problems you started out with are ones that have emotions or feelings attached to them. Going from arc to accuracy can be a good way to just try and rewrite that problem and see what you learn.
7. Shadowgraph: Reverse Engineering Approach: So for our next method, we're going to create a shadow graph and reverse engineer to get more information about a problem, especially if it's one that seems tricky that we don't know, we know a lot about. A shadow graph is that outline effect that you get when you cut a piece of paper and view the shape out of what remains, you might have cut out a heart shape in elementary school to make a valentine, for example, what I want you to do is to create this shadow-graph. What you actually need to do is list all of the known constraints, risks, and timeline about a problem. So you might not know much about the actual problem itself, but you might know the things around it. Here's an example. If someone comes to you and as you're working on product design, for example, you might hear, okay, there was a feature that we need to get into the next sprint and you think to yourself, what do I need to know about this? Do I even know if it needs to go in the next sprint? You start digging around a little bit. Maybe what you find out is that this is blocking something for moving forward, maybe you find out that it is really important to one of the key stakeholders. Maybe you find out that it is a really tricky engineering feat and one of your like lead engineers has been out, then that might be the person who can solve it. Now you have the shape of the problem. Even if you don't have the problem itself nailed down, what you could say then is all right, well, this needs to be solved in the current sprint because right now it's blocking us working on the next feature, you know a little bit more about the problem, even if you still don't necessarily know how to solve it.
8. Restate the Problem Like a Journalist: Just the Facts Approach: For our third method, you are going to take a just the facts approach. You're going to imagine that you are a journalist for a reputable publication and that the only thing that you can put into this description of your problem is information that could be fact validated in some way. Here's a little bit about how that works. You might start off with a problem that's like the backlog is out of control. Folks who work in digital production may be very familiar with this problem. The backlog that is out of control might be true but that's not going to help you solve the problem. If you want to go with just the facts approach, you are going to find as many specific details as you can. That might be a backlog has a 152 issues in it. Given the number of items in our backlog, it will take our current team of three, six months to get through everything or nobody on the team can explain issues, 137-142. Nobody knows where they came from or what they mean. This is where you're doing some due diligence. You're learning a little bit and you're making it more possible to figure out which part of the problem might be valuable to solve, just the facts. For your next activity on the worksheet, rewrite each of your three problems, just putting in as many facts as you know where you can find out about the problem itself.
9. Restate the Problem as if it Wasn't Yours: Get Some Distance Approach: For your next method, you are going to go ahead and restate a problem that you have from the point of view of a friend, a friend of me, or your competition as if they had the problem, not them describing it to you. Say that you were going back to this project budget idea. You might start with, "Man, I need to make this budget and I'm totally lost." That you perhaps might rewrite it to think about, well, my friend Amy is probably just calling someone on their network list to get a template to do their budget. Well, what's stopping you from figuring out how to do that. The prompts that I want you to use and you go ahead and rewrite your problems as a friend or a friend of me or hey, competitor might write your problem. How about your competition described this problem? If they have it, not if you have it, or how would your closest friend described this problem if they had it? Or how might you want to describe it to a close friend? Great. This can help us be less dramatic and more strategic about the problems that are coming at us. Go ahead and rewrite that problem as if it was somebody else's. Look at the three problems you have on your worksheet and write each of them as if it was something a friend has or somebody else who you know. See what you learn about your problem.
10. Clarify and Simplify: Edit Out Assumptions: For this method, you are going to go ahead and find the clearest issue that you can in your problem in order to simplify it, and the way that you're going to do that is you're going to name and then ruthlessly edit out all of the assumptions that are in the problem that is presented to you. For example, say you're working with a client and they came up to you and they say, "you know, you made this thing for us, but it's not our look. You need to go ahead and change that". Some of the assumptions that might be buried in there are well, the client's assuming that you know what their look is. Do you know what their look is? Do they know what their look is? What is this look that you're supposed to be going for? Within that you might restate the problem to mean that there's an assumption in there. Hey, it seems like we're assuming we all agree on the look. Can you remind me? Can you show me the style guide or whatnot that exists. For the problems that are in your worksheet right now, I want you to read each one of them and see if there are any assumptions in there about how things are supposed to work or information that was supposed to be transferred back and forth and see if you can rewrite the problem more specifically or in more contained terms by cutting out some of these assumptions.
11. Find the Middle: Three Bears Approach: For this method, what you're going to go ahead and do, is what I like to call three betters. You're going to see if you can find a really small, a giant, and then an in-between section of the problem that you're trying to learn more about. The first thing that you're going to do, is you're going to list up the stack of elements that make up your problem. An example that I want to give is the example of someone who says, 'I hate budgeting'. What goes into that? In your mind, what is going into the problem that is budgeting, that makes you hate it. People will answer all kinds of things. You might say; getting money, spending money, tracking money, well, my feelings about money, how the people around me spend, I hate having to use apps, banking apps, multiple other apps, invoicing clients and following up, and on and on. List up the stack of things that go into the problem. After that, you're going to want to look at that list, that stack, those elements of your problem, to try to find both the smallest part, the thing that is just a little teeny, little sliver, and then what seems like a big part, something that seems really challenging and sticky. In the example, for the person with the hate of budgeting, they might identify a tiny element as getting money. Because they might say: Well, I do get the same amount of money twice a month. You could restate from I hate budgeting, to: I know I receive three grand a month, but I'm really struggling to track where it goes. Interesting. Next on your list, look at a giant part, something that feels just insurmountable. For this budgeting example, the person might say: Well, you know what, how my friends and family spend, it just feels really hard to manage. It feels hard for me to get in there, to do anything about it, to change my relationship to it. Again, if you restate the problem in terms of this element, you might say: the way my friends and family spend money impacts me and my budget negatively. You're getting a little closer here. Once you've gone through for each of your three problems on your worksheet, and you've made this list of the elements and pieces of it, identify the tiny one and a big one, and then rewritten your problem in terms of it, then look back and see if there's an element in the middle. Some juicy piece that seems like it is not so tiny as to not actually help the problem feel solved, but not so big as to be overwhelming and you don't know how to even go at it, and see if there's a middle part there and just circle it, look at it, and see what you learn about your problem from observing the middle.
12. Make it Testable: Design to Learn Approach: All right, for our final method, we're going to try something a little bit advanced, I think you're ready for it. What you're going to do is you're going to restate the problem in a way that makes it testable, you're going to include your outcome or your requirement, or the thing that needs to solve for in the way that you say that you set up the problem. The thing is, when we come up with problems, if we don't know when we've got to the point of solving them, sometimes we feel like we've never solved them. The problem goes on and on. The scope creeps and creeps, we never get to that done point. After you've done the other methods we talked about here, clarified, cut out assumptions, focus on the people who cares about this problem and re-examined it in a bunch of different ways like a journalist, just the fact, et cetera. You are ready to state the problem in terms of how you'll know when and if it's addressed. Now this is why it's advanced, you need to be very careful to not include solution ideas when you build a statement like this. Just how you'll know if it's done, not what you'll do to make it done because you don't necessarily know the best solution yet, you're still just trying to understand your problem. Here's an example, you want to make sure you're including specific numbers, specific requirements or specific outcomes, and the phrases that will let you know you've done that look like, so that or we'll know when we see, or it's resolved when such and such happens. A couple of examples I want to give you, how might we revise the look on the splash page so that it matches the style guide. We'll know we're done when it matches the style guide. I know I go over my budget at least to 100 packs a month, so I'll consider that problem resolved when that overspend stops happening. When I can look back and see I'm no longer going over a $100 a month. A nice specific in there, ways that you'll know when the problem is fixed. Very important, the way that you're going to get this done without coming up with solutions because again, that's later we still just want to understand what this problem is trying to do is that you're going to try including specific numbers, requirements, outcomes, and again, these outcomes need to be really specific, not I need there to be infinite piece. No, I need there to be one small specific thing that is done, so get back over to your worksheet, see if you can rewrite at least one if not all three of your problems with this idea of like building how you'll know you've solved it into the problem statement itself.
13. Recap and Review Your Problems: You have made it to the end of this course. First of all, congratulations, because you have run those problems through a ringer. I can imagine that you understand and have learned a bit about them, if not a lot about them. Your next step is going to be to go ahead and see what you might want to try to solve them. But first, let's go over a couple of the key ideas. Let's go back to the idea of problems that we started talking about at the beginning. Key take away: People are the ones who have problems. We always want to center people in not just the solutions to our problems but in the way that we're thinking about and setting up and trying to understand what's inside of our problems, to begin with. It's always people who are going to value or use, or hopefully be delighted by the outcomes or the products or the solutions to problems. So people are at the center. Additionally, problems often go below the surface. The first problem or the first way that we think about a problem is often not how we end up thinking about it when it's time to go ahead and design an informed solution. So it's excellent idea to seek the problem under the problem. Before you begin to problem-solve, I deeply encourage you to be problem seeking. In this course, we went over a couple of methods for you to design better problems including how to think like a problem seeker. How to ask why do people like you or others want this particular problem solved? We went through seven approaches. The priorities approach to flip worries into goals go from act to accuracy. We had you reverse engineer, make a shadowgraph so you can describe the things that you know about a problem or a problem space, even if you don't understand the problem very well. We had you give just the facts, restate, as a journalist might, information that you can validate about the problem. We had you get some distance, restate it as if it was your friend's problem or your enemy's problem, not yours. How would they say it? We had you edit out assumptions you can clarify and simplify. Let's not assume what's happening here, let's be super clear. You'd try the three bears approach to find the tiny, the biggest, and the middle elements of the problem to see if you could understand a bit more about what is really important to you or to the people for whom the problem is important to solve. Finally, we thought about designing to learn. To see if we could create a problem or a description of a problem that includes the outcomes so that later we can test and see if we're actually solving the right problem or solving for the right thing. Your next steps, you're going to finish filling out your worksheet with revised problems. You're going to upload at least one of your restated problems to the project area to share your process. What did you learn about the problem while you were going through this? How do you think about it differently now? How might you approach it differently when you do go into solving this problem? Then of course finally, you're going to go onward and solve problems with better insight. Again, I want to thank you for participating in this method's class. We have been learning how to design better problems to get higher value solutions coming out of practices and user experience design. My name is Hadassah Damien and it has been excellent to work with you. Thanks so much.
Hadassah Damien, Designing for good
