About me – im an IA & interaction designer & i find it important for designers to co-shape the strategy of things – define & understand why I‘m building stuff & for whom & what makes it successful
In that context … Stumbled upon 2011
It's 1959, British billionaire Henry Kremer offered an award of 50.000 Pound for the first person to build an airplane that could fly a figure eight around two poles 800 meters apart.
Dozens of engineering teams tried and failed to build that airplane, years went by.
Paul McCready, aeronautical engineer, decided to take the challenge in the seventies, and he allegedly coined the phrase “The problem is we don’t understand the problem”
His insight was about the problem, not the solution.
He found out that everyone would spend more than a year planning and building an airplane that would then crash within minutes of its first test flight, and then the team had to spend another year building the next version.
Mc Cready came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that can be rebuilt in hours not months?
In 1977, eighteen years after the prize was awareded and within just half a year, McCready won the prize.
He built this thing here, the Gossamer Condor,with new lightweight materials that could be re-built easily
Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day.
Two years later he won the second Kremer Prize with another man powered plane for flying across the english channel.
Great legend to convey the benefits of agile and lean thinking - iterating through quick builds, fail fast & often, Build Measure, learn and so on
But the Story struck me for a different reason –
According to this story, McCready didnt win the prize for designing the best plane but for being the only one to ask the right question.
Regardless of the process, regardless of the respective design domain we‘re in – taking a close look at the problem to solve is a step that is often rushed by, and this bears the risk of designing the wrong solutions.
Comes from Lean Startup thinking, - the startup world, where building the right product (not just: a good product but the right one) is a matter of life and death
Helped me figure out how to put this into practice
Major german corporation hired me as a designer for a new major digital project
As it goes often times, it was more or less technically predefined what was going to be built. But it was unclear what the whole thing really was going to be good for
There was substantial mgmt attention on the project and lots of stakeholders needed to be aligned and everybody had a different idea about this upcoming new product.
The lead designer in the project who hired me said: “We need to figure out what problem this thing will solve. I stumbled upon this problem framing technique called 4Ws by the Lean UX Guru Will Evans, let’s try this.”
it really helped to get people on the same page, figure out the actual purpose and the goal of the product and get a clear vision of the design challenge.
It didn’t all work out pefectly and it didn’t have that huge enterprise transforming impact I’d love to tell you about, but I was struck how powerful this approach of collectively framing a problem at the start of a project can be. So I kept delving into the topic ever since and I’m seizing the opportunity here and now to share with you what I’ve learned and figured out so far.
Of course you can spend ages on diagnosing a problem.
But getting your fingers dirty right away instead of ana
Nobody really likes dealing with problems. in the problem-solution couple, it‘s the unattractive one.
You dont want to examine it, you want to kill it with your solution. But in reality, you shold embrace it.
Ist a question of motivation
6 Blind men from Indostan
Cynefin framework situation typology
The problem comes from just somewhere
Either black Black Box, or if its transparent, in both cases we dont validate & change it
Classic Problem-Problem in the COMPLEX domain, where theres no troubleshooting manual or expert to help you
Get all the assumptions together & work to the core
Share and challenge analyses drawn so far
Get everybody on the same page
Verbalize
There are many problems, which ones important?
Discuss to narrow down
Frequency, impact are good criteria
There are many problems, which ones important?
Discuss to narrow down
Frequency, impact are good criteria
Nobody really likes dealing with problems. in the problem-solution couple, it‘s the unattractive one.
You dont want to examine it, you want to kill it with your solution. But in reality, you shold embrace it.
Nobody really likes dealing with problems. in the problem-solution couple, it‘s the unattractive one.
You dont want to examine it, you want to kill it with your solution. But in reality, you shold embrace it.
1909 Givaudan