Quick Start
Tool KitQuick StartI have a problem to solve
Tool KitQuick StartI have a problem to solve
Have a challenge you need to solve, but aren’t sure where to start? Try these tools to generate ideas that will lead to fresh solutions.
Think about the following:
When you first discover your challenge, you’ll have lots of unknowns. But, sometimes, we’re so quick to jump into the project that we forget to ask very important questions, which will help us frame and understand the challenge at hand.
To ensure you’re covering all your bases, be sure that you have reviewed the following:
One of the best ways to gather information about your challenge is to experience it for yourself. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and gather your own insight firsthand. It’s one of the best ways to gather meaningful insight into your challenge.
Example: If your challenge is improving the customer experience when buying vitamins at your local drug store, go be the customer. Shop around and see what it’s like: Is it easy to find what you’re looking for? Is the selection overwhelming? Or, is it so well organized that it’s easy to look through all the options and make a selection?
Too broad, and your challenge is virtually impossible to solve. Too narrow, and you’re not leaving the team enough latitude to develop meaningful solutions.
Too Broad
An overly broad challenge would require many solutions to address the different aspects of the problem.
Too Narrow
A too-narrow challenge doesn’t allow enough of an impact to create measurable success.
Appropriate
An appropriate challenge offers an opportunity to solve the problem with a meaningful, results-oriented solution.
We frame challenges starting with, “How might we?”
Your “How might we” statement should be followed by a qualifier that explains what you’re trying to accomplish.
Examples of a qualifier are “in order to increase a new customer’s understanding of how to use the product” or “to increase homework completion by 10 percent.” This helps indicate what success will look like.
“How might we improve X to ____?” or “How might we achieve Y to ____?”
Now, it’s your turn. Use this Challenge Framing worksheet to develop your challenge statement.
Conducting interviews is a key part of doing primary research and learning what people want and need. Interviewing also helps identify barriers and obstacles that provide an opportunity for improvement.
For example, people will sometimes forget steps when describing how they do something. Or, they may explain something one way, and do it a different way… without even noticing!
By observing people, you can see exactly how they engage with your challenge.
Example: If you’re designing a new shopping cart for a supermarket, a shopper may describe how they shop but forget to point out that they often carry a cup of coffee, which makes it hard to push the cart with one hand. If you observe the shopper, you’d notice that detail.
It requires capturing what everyone learned and organizing it in a way that shows you what people feel is “good” and working well or “bad” and needs work. Here are the basics:
Positive insights go on green paper
“The service was so fast, it was amazing!” – Barb, 36, mom
Negative insights go on red paper
“I was so frustrated I couldn’t find anything, I almost left.” – Ken, 50
Facts go on yellow paper
Signage by the register to remind them about vitamins
Starter ideas go on blue paper
You should have a vitamin consultant walking the aisles
Look closely at the insights you and your team gathered to identify key themes, concepts, ideas, or feelings that are repeated over and over.
Key themes are the platforms around which you will develop your solutions.
Example: If your challenge is to build customer loyalty and your research showed that people are loyal to brands with excellent customer service, then a key theme might be:
“Customers feel high-quality and consistent customer service is key.”
The Related Worlds exercise helps you look at ways other industries have solved similar problems, so you can apply those principles to your issue.
Example: A hospital rethinking their patient experience may want to look at the ways five-star hotels, luxury car dealerships, and country clubs treat their guests. While a hospital’s purpose is different from these other places, hospitals could learn a lot about a premier guest experience by looking at how car dealerships greet customers, how a luxury hotel moves people from check-in to their rooms, and how a country club makes members feel like they belong.
One key to problem solving is reexamining standard assumptions to make sure we’re not leaning on old ideas just out of habit.
Often, we accept that something must be done a certain way because that’s how we’ve always known it to be (e.g., phones always have cables, doors need to have handles, cars must have a driver). By breaking away from those assumptions, we’re often able to come up with new ways of doing things.
This exercise is especially helpful to give folks who are less comfortable speaking up in a group or who prefer to work independently an opportunity to share their ideas. After you have lots of Starter Ideas, group similar ones together. This way, you can identify common themes to explore in more detail.
When you brainstorm, you associate ideas that occur spontaneously. With Forced Association, you trigger and stimulate that process.
Think of a random word or idea (using current trends works well) and brainstorm how it relates to the crux of your challenge. Forcing an association between these two unrelated items forces you to escape your current paradigm and discover solutions from seemingly unrelated fields.
Here’s an example: Imagine you’re trying to come up with an interesting new coffee shop concept. Forced Association involves jotting down trends that have nothing to do with the concept — like augmented reality, superhero culture, automation, and storytelling.
Put your unrelated trends into a hat and take turns pulling them out and connecting them to your concept. The outcome:
During an Idea Build Out, you need to think out your idea in detail, getting very specific, and capturing it from multiple angles.
Independence Blue Cross is a subsidiary of Independence Health Group, Inc. — independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, serving the health insurance needs of Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania.