Module 03: Problem Discovery and Definition

This module is entirely about the first stage of creative problem solving. It never asks you to generate a solution. It teaches you to separate symptoms from problems, to find root causes, to decide which problems are worth your time, to explore a problem with seven named methods, to prioritise what is left, to empathise with the people inside the problem, and finally to frame the problem so that solving it is even possible.

Memory hook: "A problem fully understood is half solved." The whole module is an argument for slowing down before you solve.

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3.1 Process of creative problem solving

The three-step process

Abraham Lincoln's axe. "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening my axe." Sharpening the axe is understanding the problem. Soni's own version: with eight hours to solve a problem he would spend the first six understanding it.

Why quantity produces quality

The coconut farmer workshop. Soni ran a two-hour workshop near Coimbatore with coconut-growing farmers, partly in English and partly in Tamil. They generated more than 550 ideas, which he then reduced to a top 50.

The crucial detail is how he reduced them. He went from 550 to 50 by fusing ideas together, not by deleting 500 of them.

Memory hook: Ideas are like Lego blocks. One block does nothing. Ten let you build something. A hundred give you effectively infinite combinations. Good ideas come from the combination of average ideas.

How to be a good problem solver

Divergent and convergent thinking

The teaching illustration: instead of asking "what is 7 plus 3?", ask "how many ways can you make 10?" The first has one answer. The second has infinitely many.

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3.2 Getting to the root of a problem

Symptoms, problems and root causes

Go to a doctor and you report a headache, a stomach ache, poor sleep and no appetite. Those are symptoms. You do not walk in announcing that you have a viral, bacterial or fungal infection, because you do not know your own problem, and yet you claim to know other people's.

Memory hook: The moment you classify something as a problem, you try to solve it. The moment you classify it as a symptom, you try to understand it.

The diabetes exercise. Five symptoms: frequent urination, dry mouth, hunger immediately after eating, weakening eyesight, blisters on the feet. Almost everyone correctly names the problem as diabetes without being a doctor, because they have seen the pattern before. But nobody can say why the person is diabetic, and the candidate root causes are many: heredity, lifestyle, a medicine allergy, a malfunctioning organ, or the early onset of something else.

It is root causes, plural. Several things acting together in concert produce what presents to you as a problem. Getting from symptoms to problems to root causes is diagnosis.

Quick fix versus perma fix

Common trap: Solving a problem is not the same as creating a solution. Being jugaadu does not make you creative, because a quick fix is common sense, and common sense is not creative.

The impact-frequency matrix

This is the tool for deciding which fix a problem deserves. Plot impact against how often the problem occurs.

Common trap: Module 4 has a different matrix with the same first axis. Module 3's matrix is impact against FREQUENCY and answers "quick fix or perma fix?" Module 4's matrix is impact against TIME TO IMPACT and answers "which idea do I execute first?" They have different second axes, different quadrant names and different questions. Do not merge them.

The deeper point, borrowed from Viktor Frankl: what distinguishes a human from an animal or a machine is the zone between what happens to you and how you respond. Protect that zone, expand it, and put more options in it, and you become creative.

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3.3 Knowing if a problem is worth it

Pharmacist, doctor, surgeon

Before asking how to solve a problem, ask why it should be solved at all.

Aim to be the surgeon. Understanding a problem deeply cannot be automated or delegated, which is precisely why it is worth building as a skill.

Memory hook: "You will be remembered for what you create, not what you manage." "Create solutions that outlive you." And: creativity is not about working hard, it is about thinking hard.

Zone of concern and zone of influence

The prescription: shrink the zone of concern, expand the zone of influence. You shrink it by controlling your input channels: cutting small talk, cutting the reel habit, being comfortable sitting alone with a book, and letting people hold whatever opinion of you they like, because an opinion does not change who you are.

Memory hook: MS Dhoni: "Control the controllables."

The test to apply to any global concern: what can you personally do about it? Take public transport, raise awareness, donate, write. If you can do something, do it. If you cannot, it does not belong in your zone of concern.

Problem solving as sculpting

The solution is already inside the problem, and you reveal it by chiselling. Only the artist can see the idol inside the stone slab. Most people chisel at a gross level and stop. Fine chiselling is what gets remembered: the sculptures of Ajanta and Ellora, and Kailasa in particular, took roughly a hundred years, which is three generations, and we are still discussing them a thousand years later.

Bruises and cancers

Every problem does one of two things over time.

Common trap: Every problem looks like a cancer when it arrives, and you feel that hell will break loose unless you act now. The statistics say otherwise. Step back intellectually, emotionally, physically and philosophically and ask what happens if you do not address it right now. Acting immediately on a bruise wastes your time and can make the problem worse.

The COVID lesson: life goes on, with you or without you. Trains, flights, hospitals, electricity and water all continued. Even with your best effort you can never fully ascertain the outcome.

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3.4 Problem solving in teams

Vertical thinking versus parallel thinking

Teams generate friction even when everyone wants the same outcome, because of vertical thinking: stacking one thought on top of another inside your own belief system, agreeing with those who share it and vehemently dismissing those who do not. Soni's examples of clashing belief systems are whether to talk to strangers, whether to give money to beggars, and vegetarianism.

Edward de Bono's answer is parallel thinking: with five people in a team, everyone thinks in only one dimension at a time, and it is the same dimension for everyone.

The Six Thinking Hats

How to actually run a Six Hats session

1. Everybody wears the same hat at the same time. This is the rule the method lives or dies by.
2. Time-box each hat. Two or three minutes on white, ten minutes on green, two minutes on black.
3. Follow a sequence. Soni's default: white (get all the data on the table), then red (what do you feel about that data, what is missing from your own experience), then green (generate ideas), then black (what can go wrong with these ideas), invoking yellow whenever the group sinks into digression.
4. One person stays in blue throughout, moderating.

Common trap: The classic failure is assigning a different hat to each person. That reinstates exactly the conflict the method exists to remove. Conflict happens when one person is offering intuition while another demands proof. Announce the hat beforehand and both are legitimate in turn.

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3.5 Problem exploration methods

Seven named methods, all of which explore rather than solve.

3.5.1 The 5 Whys

From Toyota. Ask "why?" up to five times to descend from a symptom to a root cause.

How to run it:

1. Write the symptom at the top.
2. Ask why and record the first plausible answer.
3. Ask why of that answer, not of the original statement.
4. Repeat up to five times. Three or four often suffice, but five usually lands on something actionable.
5. Run a second, different line of enquiry from the same starting point, because one chain gives one root cause and you want several.

Worked chain A: students are not attentive in class.

The intervention therefore sits on teacher incentives, not on student attention.

Worked chains B and C: people break traffic signals. The same symptom, two lines of investigation.

Common trap: Do not irritate people by asking why five times in conversation. It is an analytical tool, not an interrogation style.

3.5.2 The 5W and 2H analysis

The five Ws: Who, Why, What, When, Where. The two Hs: How, How much.

Worked example, children watching mobile phones:

The insight the method produces: the problem is multi-dimensional, so there is no single solution and you cannot simply snatch the phone. What works is substituting the stimulus: if a child sees a phone they pick a phone, if they see a book they pick a book. Fill the home with books and instruments instead of gadgets, and let the child see you reading.

The physiological reason it matters: the brain does not differentiate between a cigarette and a mobile phone. The dopamine released by a reel is the same as that from a cigarette, and withdrawal symptoms are the same as for alcohol, drugs or nicotine.

5W2H transfers to any problem: why students do not reach school on time, why abuse against women goes unreported, why educated people cannot find jobs.

3.5.3 The fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram

Named after Kaoru Ishikawa. It is a cause-and-effect diagram: the effect is the problem, at the fish's head, and the causes are sorted into six categories along the bones.

The six Ms: Man (or woman), Machine, Material, Method, Measurement, Mother Nature.

How to run it: write the problem as the effect, then work each of the six categories in turn and force yourself to populate every one, including the ones that feel irrelevant.

Worked example, frequent bike breakdown:

Memory hook: Without the method you would never have surfaced this many causes. That is the entire argument for the method.

Common trap: Soni's aside on why Indians avoid methods: we do not trust processes, and we want to break a process before perfecting it. "Creativity is discipline. You need to trust the process before you break the process. Don't break the process without perfecting it."

3.5.4 Mind mapping

A visual, branching representation that gives you the whole picture of a problem's complexity in one shot.

How to run it: write the problem in the centre, radiate a branch for each broad cause, then sub-branch each cause. You are not solving. You are only understanding.

Worked example, why people do not wear helmets, with six branches:

The same map works on other problems: why placements are not happening (curriculum out of step with the market, fewer jobs because of AI, teachers not raising standards, students studying only for placements, missing practical understanding).

3.5.5 Stakeholder mapping

A stakeholder is any individual or group who influences the problem, is impacted by it, or could be instrumental in solving it. No single person causes a problem and no single person solves one.

How to run it: list every constituency, then ask of each one specifically how it contributes to the problem.

Worked example, why voter turnout is low (turnout as low as 50 to 60% in the world's largest democracy). Note that this is technically a symptom, not a problem.

Memory hook: Because the problem is multi-faceted, the solution must be too. "Creativity requires complex thinking on a complex problem to create a simple solution." Creativity is complex thinking, because you have to hold many moving parts in mind at once.

The same map applies to student internships: student, placement officer, placement committee, employer recruitment team, reporting supervisor, family and friends, campus peers, faculty and supporting organisations.

3.5.6 Journey mapping

Also called a value stream map. A temporal understanding of an event: break the experience into a few critical stages in sequence, then ask at each stage what typically goes wrong.

Worked example, the airport journey in four stages:

Memory hook: Journey mapping is the only exploration method that is explicitly about time order. Stakeholder mapping is about who, fishbone is about what category, mind mapping is about branching causes, 5 Whys is about depth, 5W2H is about dimensions.

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3.6 Problem prioritisation methods

You will finish exploration with more problems than you can solve. Prioritisation reduces the book of problems to the few worth going after. A good problem is one that gives you high leverage when you solve it.

Pareto's law

The 80/20 rule: 20% of causes produce 80% of the effects, and 80% of causes produce only 20%.

How to actually reduce ten problems to four:

• Mathematically. Assign a weight to each problem, rank them and skim the top.
• Intuitively. Form a judgement about which two or three carry the maximum impact and go only after those.

Either route is legitimate. What is not legitimate is trying to solve all ten.

Applied to voter turnout, the two high-leverage interventions Soni picks out are:

1. Make enrolment easy, especially for migrants living away from their home constituency, by accepting any local proof for enrolment in the constituency where they actually live.
2. Mobilise NGOs, help groups and volunteers as the election approaches, to help first-timers understand what voting involves, how far in advance to prepare and where to go, and to use technology to signal queue lengths and the best time to leave home.

He notes online voting has its own limitations, and that India was the first country in the world to use electronic voting machines, while many countries still use physical ballots.

MECE

From McKinsey. Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

The illustration: divide a class into boys and girls. Is it mutually exclusive? Yes, they are two separate sets with no overlap. Is it collectively exhaustive? Yes, adding both gives the total class strength.

Why it matters when carving up problems:

How to run it: take twenty problems down to about five, and check both properties on the resulting set.

Reusing the impact-frequency matrix

The impact-frequency matrix from 3.2 is deliberately reused here. Having decided quick fix versus perma fix with it, you now use the same grid to judge the gravity of a problem: high impact and high frequency together means pick it up.

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3.7 On empathy

Why empathy belongs in problem solving

Most problems are tied to human behaviour and therefore to emotion, so they cannot be solved as purely technical exercises. Emotional intelligence is essential for personal success, relationships and effective problem solving alike.

Goleman's four levels of emotional intelligence

Daniel Goleman's levels build on one another in order.

Common trap: Empathy is level three, not level one. You cannot understand someone else's emotions before you can recognise and manage your own.

Goleman's three types of empathy

Memory hook: Empathy is not an emotion. It is an emotional action. Also recall Module 1: sympathy is reactive, empathy is proactive.

Einstein, quoted here: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

The three listening positions

Stephen Covey: "Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply."

Neither end of any pair is universally right. The skill is choosing the position that the moment calls for.

RASA

Julian Treasure's method, and the single most practically usable tool in this section.

Memory hook: "Unless sought, never offer advice."

The empathy map

Break a person's experience into four quadrants to surface their motivations, pain points and challenges.

How to run it: fill all four for one specific person, not an abstract average. The gap between what someone says and does and what they think and feel is usually where the real problem is hiding.

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3.8 Problem framing

Why framing matters

Kennedy's brief: "We need to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of this decade." It moved millions of people well beyond America and ushered in the space age.

A well-framed problem defines the boundary condition: where you will focus, and the point at which you will declare the problem solved. Without it, problem solving is an endless pursuit.

The three conditions: Impact, Constrained, Vague

A well-framed problem must satisfy all three simultaneously.

The attrition worked example

Three ways of framing the same problem. Only one is well framed.

Common trap: Vagueness sounds like a defect, and in ordinary usage it is. Here it is a required property, and it applies specifically to the solution direction, never to the objective or the constraint. Impact and constraint must be sharp. The route must be left open.

The Ratan Tata brief for the Tata Indica

The Indica was the first substantially indigenous Indian passenger car, from a company that had made trucks, jeeps and the Sumo. The brief: design an Indian car from scratch, with the internal volume of an Ambassador, the external size of a Maruti Zen, ease of entering and exiting particularly for the rear seat, priced close to the Maruti 800, with the economy of diesel, packaged into a contemporary design.

Analysed against the three conditions:

The Indica was a hit and is still on Indian roads roughly thirty years later.

Framing with metaphors

A metaphor is a compact way of loading a brief with many requirements at once, and the Japanese are unusually good at it.

Memory hook: "A problem fully defined and fully understood is half solved." Define the problem well, go only after problems worth solving, and enter ideation on a problem that would give high mileage if solved.

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3.9 The FAB model

A model for keeping the framing anchored to what the user actually values.

Memory hook: "Always think about the benefits, not the features." Features are what you built. Benefits are why anyone cares.