Many people would say that a problem is “a gap between a desired situation and the existing one”.
I don’t agree with this definition.
We would like life expectancy to be around 150 years (and come to think of it, why not even older?) The fact is that it currently isn’t 150 years, and yet we don’t really (at least not directly) label it as a problem.
So a better (and still not complete) definition of a problem would be, “a gap between a desired situation and an existing one that we have reason to believe we can eliminate”.
This is interesting: some people would regard a certain situation as a problem because they believe there may be a solution, while others wouldn’t see any problem because they can’t even envision a way to a solution.
By the way, I believe that people trained in problem solving tools such as SIT, see more problems around just because they have slightly more confident in their ability to solve them.
There are many kinds of problems. If something used to work and now it doesn’t, then it’s obviously a problem. Or is it? Sometimes things that stop working are a signal to us that something in the environment has changed.
And these environmental changes may also carry opportunities as well as difficulties, but in most cases we don’t see the opportunities because the problems take up all our attention.
Many people think that the first step in solving a problem is in defining it. I think it’s impossible to define a problem. If you look closely at the way people define problems, you’ll notice that most are either so general (such as, “How to make our workforce more productive”) that they are not operable or are much too specific.
Because a problem is a an undesired situation we have to at least have a vague vision of how we can bring to a desired one we tend to define the problem in terms of that vague envision.
This is a trap: in order to perceive a situation as a problem, we must see at least one solution.
SIT’s way of dealing with this trap is simple but powerful. In SIT, instead of a problem definition, there are actually problem definitions. These definitions are never stated in terms of what we want to achieve but in terms of what’s wrong with the existing situation. That’s why we call them “undesired phenomena”.
These undesired phenomena are structured in a hierarchal way in a cause and effect chain. We start with the first undesired phenomena that comes to mind (called the anchor) and develop the chain upward and downwards using the questions “why” and “so what”.
This way we open many new directions for solutions that were never envisioned before.
Watch this short video for a nice demonstration of a chain of undesired phenomena:
Visit Roni at the start2think website
What is interesting about the UDP process is that it takes us away from the “reacting to events” mode, leading to focus on what could be the root causes and also what consequences may appear in the future, related to an original “problem”.
And it opens many oppoortunities of intervention, helped by SIT tools and principles.
As an expansion to UDP, I would also suggest that some of the “so what”, could eventually influence some of the “whys”. Cause and effect chains might became a causal loop diagram.