How to Manage: Understanding the problem

[ how-to-manage problem product ]

This is the first post in the how-to-manage series, a collection that hopefully will help managers in different areas. This one, in particular, is the basis for decision-making and understanding the problem (and the problem of understanding the problem), highly based on Microfoundations Of Strategic Problem Formulation by Markus Baer, Kurt T. Dirks, and Jackson A. Nickerson.

Before dealing with the problem

Okay, you have a problem, which can also be an opportunity instead of a crisis, something that you need to deal with or needs to be solved. The first thing that needs to be done is to formulate it, put some time and think carefully about it. The important point is: how you approach and solve the problem will be determined by how you characterize it¹.

Putting ideas together and grasping all the details of a particular problem can be nontrivial, and this is also a problem. One that we are going to address in this article. Think of it as the “problem formulation” for the problem formulation.

Note: We are not going to talk about solutions development! This may be done in a future article.

The problem of problem formulation

Before we start, there is something really important that I need to tell you. Problem formulation is also a data science problem¹ (you collect data, find patterns, and use them to make a good guess, yes that's it). Also, there is another important thing: when you have a problem or a goal, you must simplify reality and, as a consequence, you have a distorted representation of the world, and that may be enough. Without this distortion, the problem may remain too complex to handle. So, imperfect models are still useful, they make decisions possible¹.

Back to the problem formulation. This can be done by an individual or a team. Either approach has variations, advantages and disadvantages, it's a multivariable higher-order problem by itself. Something important to keep in mind is the variables in play and understand them. Let's dive deeper and see some different scenarios where problem formulation can be elaborated:

Individual

Individuals have limited time, information, memory and cognitive resources^{2 3}. They can also have different interpretations of the vision, the mission, or the values⁴, be driven by self-interest and maybe act with guile⁵.

Complex issues reside in many different individual perspectives⁶ with different experiences. Also, research suggests that individual problem formulation can be described as inappropriate⁵ or as a selection-bias problem⁷. However, the individual is part of the group, their view is important for independent symptom identification, useful for further integration and for group validation.

The weaknesses of the individual are also their strengths. There’s no need to translate communication across different mental models, no discussions around terminology, assumptions or causality, even though they are quite useful for a first quick generation. Okay, with that in mind, we can understand that, for complex strategic problems, an individual approach can be limited, since it rarely spans the problem space⁵.

Creating a team

When selecting a group of people to work on the formulation of the problem, it's necessary to select stakeholders and individuals (with different mental models) that are sensitive or aware of the problem and have information that can be synthesized⁴. It's important that the actor has practical, intellectual, cognitive and emotional aptitudes⁸. Since we are talking about different mental models, a broader cognitive divergency may result in translation costs (terms, concepts, and assumptions differ), harder perspective structure (merging different perspectives into better formulations), conscious or unconscious tendencies to avoid or cause conflicts, and lower comprehension if such gaps are not filled or minimized⁵.

Another problem to be aware of is groupthink, where groups can be overly optimistic (taking more risk in ideas), create mindguards, develop stereotypical views, express disregard for arguments considered antagonistic to loyal members, creating self-censorship (accepting status quo) and illusory unanimity⁹. If the group is under too much stress and time pressure, groupthink will be more likely to occur¹⁰.

The manager should include not only people that agree (consensus). If the team has a promotor fidei (someone to challenge prevailing assumptions) or create a dialectical inquire, it will improve the formulation of the problem with better recommendations and richer underlying assumptions^{11 12}.

Note: The perception of a psychologically safe environment enables actors to speak up, express themselves, take inter-personal risks, admit failures and openly discuss errors / weaknesses¹³.

In the end, the idea is to purposely compose a team that captures the heterogeneity of ideas while simultaneously attenuating impediments⁵.

Homogeneous motivation and heterogeneous cognition

When being part of a team, the problems of a single actor can be mitigated by different individual motivations and heterogenous cognition. However, it may not solve problems related to homogenous motivations and objectives, resulting in groupthink and related problems. This can happen when a group is cohesive and isolated⁹. The problems around this group formation are a subset of heterogeneous motivation and cognition, as pointed out in Creating a team, a series of problems may occur, but mostly from communication, integration and conflicting individual perspectives⁵.

Heterogenous motivation and cognition

This group formation helps to mitigate a couple of problems from Homogeneous motivation and heterogeneous cognition, which is also pointed out in Creating a team. With the heterogeneous motivation, groupthink (single-interest framing) is unlikely to happen. Conflict of interest will probably be exposed, assumptions justification may increase and, as a consequence, the representational gap will be reduced. But, the same problems may arise for different reasons. High stakeholders could take an overly dominant frame^{5 14}. Information may not be shared, distorted or emphasized, in order to manipulate the problem formulation for personal benefit⁵. The team may jump to a solution, to reduce time in its formulation or to engage in a dominant attitude, if an actor shares a particular solution prematurely, it will affect the search and formulations of alternatives⁵. There is also the possibility of other actors engaging more in dominance and alternative proposals by noticing that someone else is behaving in political interest⁵.

Homogeneous cognitive and homogeneous information

Teams created by low cognitive diversity (expertise, assumptions, problem-solving methods) and information, perform little beyond the individual problem formulation and even less when compared with high cognitive diversity and information. The main differences compared to other groups are time spent in translation and integration. Without such differences, the group may operate as an echo chamber, where some participants amplify and reinforce beliefs that increase social behaviour.

How to formulate the problem

The following is proposed by Microfoundations Of Strategic Problem Formulation by Markus Baer, Kurt T. Dirks, and Jackson A. Nickerson (in my vision at least), the problem formulation should be done in two phases, framing and formulation:

Framing:

1. Define an initial symptom to trigger the actors.
   • E.g.: users replace Raspberry Pi with other hardware for autonomy, image processing, AI, etc.
2. Set the rules: only symptoms and pieces of evidence, no causes or solutions.
   • Avoid directing points of view or interest by discussing solutions and causes.
3. Actors write down all symptoms with supported evidence individually.
   • Mitigate influence, dominance and early consensus while avoiding opinion or personal bias.
   • E.g.: support tickets, forum posts, custom integrators, competitors’ mentions, etc.
4. Each actor takes turns to reveal one symptom until all symptoms are revealed.
   • Again, mitigate influence, dominance and early consensus.
5. Each symptom and piece of evidence is then discussed to be excluded or included.
   • Improve comprehension and information sharing.
6. The team compiles a document with all symptoms and evidence (web of symptoms).

Formulation:

1. For each symptom, each member writes down possible causes individually—without proposing solutions.
   • Create a network ("web") of causes to avoid premature elimination or consensus.
   • E.g.: The Raspberry Pi does not have enough compute power for intensive tasks.
2. Each person presents one cause at a time until all proposed causes are shared.
3. As a group, discuss the plausibility of each cause in explaining the symptom.
   • This deepens understanding and promotes better information sharing.
4. Collect the accepted causes and the supporting reasoning into a shared document.
5. Share this document with the team and relevant stakeholders to identify any missing aspects and ensure comprehensive understanding.
   • This helps avoid blind spots and further improves group awareness and knowledge.

The important point of this approach is how it mitigates the possible problems described previously, related to individuals and group organization. An important point to take is: to not necessarily use the proposed process, but to understand and be aware of the problems and the idea behind each step that could mitigate issues to improve problem formulation.

Personal final notes

First, this article was mostly based on my personal research on the matter, many days in a café and a lot of chai latte. As a consequence, think of it as the work of an individual, with all the caveats previously mentioned.

The following notes are just things that will not be further explored here, but are important to have in mind:

• Conflict is something that I personally believe that it's necessary. Don't think of it as people fighting, but as people discussing the problems of the proposal and exploring the span of consequences to finally calculate trade-offs (empirically)¹¹.
• Neurodiversity plays an important role in problem formulation tasks, where the inclusion of such cognitive outliers may provide a broader perspective with a non-linear thinking and pattern-resistant minds, things that a conventional AI cannot replicate. ^{15 16}.

References