#reframing the problem

Describe the problem in your own words.

What is driving this situation?

What is a barrier to progress?

Is this opportunity distinctive in the marketplace?

What is meaningful to the customer?

Where are they at in the buying cycle?

What is a reasonable call to action?

What touchpoints are needed to communicate the offer?

What is inspirational? What is reassuring?

What if we did nothing?

What is a minimal viable solution?

What is the risk by acting/not acting?

Where did we come from, where are we now, where are we going?

What is the criteria? The platform?

What is the value proposition?

What is the market position?

What is authentic to the company?

What are common workarounds for the customer?

Tell me a story about the problem.

What is hard to do? What is easy to do? What is right to do?

Will this move us up or down the value curve?

How did we end up here?

What do we do sometimes, always, never?

What is a must? What is a should? What is a could?

What is the rose? The bud? The thorn? In this idea?

What is the design problem? Paradox, tension, skew.

What is your greatest moment? What is your worst moment?

What is your current process for decision making?

How did this problem originally start? A technology problem? An operations problem? A marketing problem? etc.

What is the ideal future state?

Are we ok with risk? How can we de-risk it? 

What is the context of this problem? Abstract it.

Who do we need to talk with?

What is the incentive to change?

What is in the pipeline already?

What are some analogous markets/companies?

What are some macro trends? 

Where are the trends on the adoption curve?

Where are we on the life cycle?

Who is our customer?

What is our category?

What do we make?

What is our culture? What does this culture support/deny?

Who owns this problem?

What are external orthodoxies?

What are internal orthodoxies?

What is the 80/20 on this problem?

What is the cost-of-entry? (Don’t overanalyze this - just do it)

How do we make money?

How do our customer define the industry?

What is the basis for our competition?

Where do innovations come from?

What is the company mythology?

What is the typology of the problem?

Is this problem complex or complicated?

Will existing best practices solve the problem?

What’s next?

What story are we telling?

What is the customer journey?

What are channels? What are the touchpoint?

What should be digital? What should be print? What should be experiential?

How do we connect the dots between internal silos for customers

What does customer experience hear about this?

What assignments do we need to make?

What is too much choice? 

How can we make this more simple?

What is too simple?

What are the metrics? You become what you measure.

Are they the right metrics?

What are the brand attributes?

Who are the attributes aimed at? (Internal, external, industry standard)

What is the over-arching philosophy?

What are the connective principles?

What are the practices?

What are alternatives for the customers? (Not who do we compete with)

Where did we come from? Where are we going to?

What methods/frameworks are we going to use?

What are our core capabilities?

What are the territories and terrains? Areas where the company plays vs. where customers daily lives are.

What is the ecosystem? How are the nodes connected? What value do they share with each other?

What is the bell curve? What is middle of the market? What are the alpha and omega user? (Look to alpha and omega for innovations)

Brand is a customer tool. Not a company tool.

What is special about us? What is the customer pain?

What is success? Is this meaningful?

What moves the needle? Are we thinking big enough for our rhetoric?

What are the metrics vs. the goals? (Good one)

Did you allow time for gathering of information? Not jump into making.

Go broad to go narrow.

Define the problem not the metric or goal.

What is descriptive? What is prescriptive?

What gives permission to act?

How do you want to be known?

How can we earn trust?

Are we at decision fatigue? Don't let this make decisions for us?

What are we asking people to join? vs. What are we selling?

What is new?

What has been reused too often?

What is the pattern?

How are diverging from our customers?

What are we over-engineering? What are we under-engineering?

Who are the yes, no, maybes. Ignore the no. Spend time with maybes.

Where do we play? How do we win?

How broadly or narrowly do we define our terms?

Who needs to be shown? Who needs to be challenged? Who needs to be educated?

What is the common thread? How far can we diverge from it?

What is the scarce resource? Physical? Mindshare? 

What is the smallest possible step forward to the big idea?

How can we make the first step more affordable and fit within our operational system?

What is a quick win? What is core innovation? What do we outsource?

EVERYTHING I KNOW - Buckminster Fuller

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist."

HISTORY (External and Internal)

How did this come into being? Why did it?

What came before?

What might come after?

What is its own internal history?

How and why has this change over time?

STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION (Unpack and pack)

How does this fit into a larger context/structure/system?

What cultures does this relate to?

How does the parts fit together into its own system?

What parts are most significant?

What are the differences? Why?

CATEGORIZATION (Clusters and Contrasts)

How can your topic be grouped into kinds?

What are the different qualities?

How are they used differently?

How does geography effect it?

How do you compare or contrast with others like it?

Ask Journalistic questions

Who, What, When, Where, How, Why (focus on How and Why)

Turn positive questions into negative ones

Why has it not grown in popularity?

What parts are not significant?

Ask What if?

What if it never existed? How would things be different?

What if it was substituted? How would things be different?

Extend questions from others

Studies show it happened in X. Did it also happen in Y?

Free will in Tolstoy

A topic stated in 4-5 words is probably too broad and static

There is free will in Tolstoy's novels.

Narrow and activate your topic by adding these words prior the initial 4-5 word phrase: conflict, description, contribution, or developing.

The conflict of free will and inevitability in Tolstoy's description of three battles in War and Peace.

Reframe the topic into a claim that the reader might find interesting by moving the second phrase first.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes three battles in which free will inevitability conflict.

Product-centered offers are facing greater competition as technology lowers the barrier for substitutes and new entrants. Customers now have more choice and power than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. What can a product centered business do to defend and expand it offer?

One strategy is consider how to translate a product into a service. IBM is an example: transitioning from Big Blue of the past to technology service provider now. However, how realistic is this? How many resources does this take? How long does this take in contrast to the speed of change in the current marketplace?

I believe Customer Centricity suggest an interesting middle ground for product centric companies becoming customer-centric.

Customer centricity is not customer service. Customer service treats all customers equally. Customer centricity is about knowing your customers, connecting with your customers and applying additional resources to nurture those relationships. This level of engagement can only happen you know your customer outside of the transaction. You are able to create value for them beyond the active purchase.

Customer data is not customer centricity There are many product centric companies who say they know their customers through CRM systems or ad hoc relationships , but it does not impact their operations, marketing or finance. Knowing your customer is not about collecting and storing data on a CRM system. The CRM system is a placebo making you feel closer to your customer as they drift further. Ultimately, using a CRM to get a holistic look at your customer encourages treating them as a homogeneous mass, instead of heterogeneous groups with different values, behaviors and goals.

Brand equity is not necessarily customer equity Customer Centricity builds out the case that brand equity is an extension from product-centricity. Branding leverages customer centric frameworks and tools to connect with people at more meaningful and differentiate level. I agree that there is important definition between these two concepts; however, I do not believe they are mutually exclusive.

A company can ramp up the “the knowns” by setting inspiring goals, but looking into “the unknown” of innovation requires that company to ask inspiring questions. Goals create clarity and alignment: “We want to reinvent the industry by 2020,” or “We want to be #1 in North American sales.” Goals such as these are inspirational, and articulate strategy expectations, but fail to explain how value will be created. The innovation process needs to ask, “What problem (and for whom) are we trying to solve?”

Normally, tactical questions fill the gap: “How can the website facilitate reinvention?” or “How can we extend our product lines into new markets?” Tactical questions assume that the website or the product lines are the starting points, the barriers, or the methods for creating new value. Jumping to solutions before fully understanding the problem prevents many inspiring goals from becoming reality.

Symptoms are the pain points felt during interactions. It is easy to let symptoms shape one’s point of view on the problem, because symptoms are clear and actionable. Within business, clarity is a prerequisite to gain alignment and resources, making symptoms the default frame through which companies view problems. In contrast, business problems are typically foggy and ambiguous. They are the unknown causes of multiple symptoms. It is relatively easy to get alignment on the symptoms, but difficult to get alignment on problems. Keeping separation between the symptoms and the problem is critical during the problem-framing process. 

Creating a solution but ignoring the problem inevitably leaves the problem to resurface elsewhere in the company. In the example above, the merger problem resurfaced in customer service, showrooms, product rationalization, and operations. For example, what brand should customer service lead with when answering the phone? Who gets the window space in the showroom? Or how do we make customer-centered decisions on which products to keep?