Problem Framing Canvas
A handbook to help you imagine better responses to ‘problems’
Over the years our team members have worked in various tricky and complex contexts where we were confronted with a raft of responses ranging from: ‘quick fixes’, ‘off-the-shelf solutions’, ‘transplanted solutions’, to ‘we’re stuck’.
We’ve seen the effects of analysis paralysis, diving down wombat holes (the Australian alternative to rabbit holes!), and getting lost in problems that were not really the problem.
So, this canvas and workbook were borne out of frustration and a sense of possibility.
We started to explore ways in which we could work with people to ‘zoom out’ and focus on how they could frame and name problems more effectively, recognise different types of problems, and start to ‘learn’ their way into responding to the grand challenges they were working towards.
We developed some of our own ways of helping people, and we borrowed some of the great tools and frameworks others have used to support better framings and responses to problems.
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And because we can’t help ourselves — we love a canvas — we drew these together into a single page so that it might be easier for people to spend more time framing problems rather than jumping headlong into ‘problem-solving’.
It’s worth noting that while this way of framing problems is useful for anything from product design to marketing plans and beyond, we use it in the context of social and systems innovation. To find responses to the countless gnarly, complex, wicked problems facing people and our planet right now.
We’ve found this approach helps people to develop better skills to analyse problems and to reflect, test, and learn about possible responses more effectively.
The response from teams we’ve worked with has been very positive — and we’ve refined the canvas via feedback and testing.
In 2022 we shared the canvas in one of our social media posts and were inundated with requests for deeper explanations of each of the segments.
So, in response, we’ve made our Problem Framing Canvas workshop materials open source through a companion workbook. The way we see it — the less time spent wasting good effort and resources on the wrong problems the better! There’s far too much to do.
