The Achievement Habit (7 page)

Once we are aware of a problem, we tend to plunge ahead in search of a solution, yet often we’d do better to first reconsider
the question. Reframing problems can lead to much better solutions. Mental health professionals also use reframing; it is a powerful therapeutic technique. The basic idea behind reframing is to introduce a change of perspective into your thinking. This is illustrated in a variant of the classic light bulb joke:

Question: How many design thinkers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer from a design thinker: Why use light bulbs?

There are various forms of problem statements. In the business and design thinking world they have names such as opportunity statements, how-could-we statements, and points of view.

The form I favor is point of view (POV). It is not a rigidly defined concept.
¹
Its purpose is to define what a person needs—not what
we
think she needs, rather what she
actually
needs. If you want to find something new, it is important to start with a problem and not with a solution. Once you introduce solutions prematurely, you shut down the discovery process.

Reframing a problem is essentially a change of POV. At the d.school we’ve had several instances where reframing led to spectacular results.

Students from the “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability” course were asked to go to Myanmar to work on a project having to do with irrigation. As part of this work they spent time with poor farmers to determine the farmers’ basic problems with watering their crops. The students noticed that because there was no electricity, farmers used candles or kerosene lanterns for lighting. The students could smell the toxic fumes in the poorly ventilated farmers’ huts. They also learned that candles and kerosene consumed about 25 percent of the farmers’ annual income.

In some cases the farmers had old car batteries rigged to lamps so their children could do homework after dark. In these families, mothers were forced to repeatedly make tedious bike trips of several hours to get the batteries recharged. All in all, the Stanford students learned that lighting was a big issue for these farmers, so they convinced the teaching team to let them change their POV from dealing with the need for irrigation to dealing with the need for lighting.

The students developed solar-powered LED task lights that were affordable and more user-centered than alternative solar lights. They established a for-profit company called d.light that by the end of 2013 had sold over two million lights in forty-two countries. They expect to continue to grow and provide affordable solar lighting to places in the world that have either no electricity or only intermittent service. In this case it was a good thing that the students did not charge full speed ahead into the water issues. Rather, they reframed their POV to meet the needs they found on the ground.

A different type of reframing was done by students in a project named Embrace. At the request of a medical nonprofit organization, students from the “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability” course went to Nepal to deal with problems related to incubators for premature infants. The incubators cost about $20,000 each and are equivalent to the ones used in American hospitals. The problem the students were asked to deal with was twofold: the incubators were difficult to repair locally, and power disruptions often compromised their performance. While still at Stanford the students thought in terms of battery backups and of redesigning to simplify the number of parts. Interestingly, once they got to Nepal they noticed that the usage of even the fully functioning incubators was low. The
more they traveled around the country, the more they noticed that only in towns did clinics have incubators; many women living in the mountains would have great difficulty getting to them in time to save their premature infants.

The students thus reframed their POV. They realized that rather than solving the doctors’ problem of keeping the incubators functional, they should be solving the mothers’ problem of keeping their premature babies alive by providing the necessary warmth where and when it was needed. This led to the design of what is essentially a miniature sleeping bag with a removable pouch containing a block of waxlike material that, when heated, becomes a liquid that remains at the required temperature for nearly five hours. The heat could be supplied by boiling the pouch in water, which could be accomplished without electricity.

The device they developed sells for 1 percent of the price of the conventional incubator and offers lifesaving availability far beyond the domain of traditional incubators. The students’ big breakthrough came when they realized that the initial question they were presented with—how to improve the incubators—was in fact an answer that could not work. By asking themselves what it would accomplish to have the incubator improved, they came to the real question: How could they keep babies warm enough to stay alive?

By April 2014 Embrace’s infant warmers were being used in eleven different countries on three continents. The warmers provided innovative, low-cost, lifesaving technology for over fifty thousand low-birth-weight and premature infants. The number of surviving infants is increasing daily.

Reframing can also be useful in making improvements after a solution has already been found. Doug Dietz is a longtime
designer of medical diagnostic equipment at GE Health Care. He had a life-changing experience when he went to a local clinic that used an MRI machine that he had designed. He introduced himself to a technologist; she told him how highly regarded his machine was, and he felt ten feet tall. Then a family appeared, trying their best to calm a screaming child. As soon as the young girl was exposed to the scary room, strangers, and the huge MRI scanner, she broke into tears and had to be sedated to hold still for the exam. Doug had no idea children were being sedated as a matter of course. When he found out that close to 85 percent of the children between three and eight years of age had to be sedated, he felt like a failure.

Shortly thereafter, while participating in a three-day intensive executive education workshop at the d.school, Doug got an insight about a shortcoming in his design process. He realized that although he had consulted widely with customer engineers, marketing people, salespeople, technologists, and doctors, he had actually never spent much time with the families and the young patients in need of the equipment he had designed.

When Doug went back to work, he consulted hospital child-life specialists, child psychologists, teachers, parents, and children. He enlisted staff from a children’s museum; they spent time with kids and parents. He organized an advisory team of children who had undergone a lot of health treatments. Working with the children’s museum and the children, he designed a series of MRI experiences he calls the Adventure Series.

The Adventure Series reframes the MRI experience as an adventure and not a medical procedure. Doug did this by having the rooms, floors, and MRI machines redecorated. He also developed coloring books to explain the procedure for the child at
home the night before. One adventure was going away to camp and being in a tent, where if you lie very still on a sleeping bag (table) you can see the stars. Another was being in a ship lying very still, hiding from pirates.

Reframing the situation from a medical procedure into an adventure was a huge success. The child sedation rate dropped to almost nothing. Apart from the savings in time and cost, there was a notable positive difference in the experience for the children and their families. Doug reports that after their MRI examination, some children would ask their mothers when they could return to have another adventure!

The device was exactly the same; only the user experience was reframed.

These three inspirational results illustrate an important basic principle: When thinking about how to achieve your dream, don’t simply charge ahead. Pause and think about what the problem really is. Go to a higher level and consider what else might be at the heart of the problem. Now reframe it. Change your point of view. Then change it again and see where you are. The real problem will reveal itself to you.

Another useful technique for getting unstuck when you’re solving a problem is one I accidentally stumbled upon when I was writing my PhD dissertation. I had completed most of my research and had been invited to present a seminar on my work at Yale University. I had given a somewhat inflated title for the seminar. The evening before the talk I started to think about my presentation and got a little nervous. I thought I should start off by coming clean about my title. I imagined myself saying,
“Although my title implies I can solve the general case, the fact is that I can only do it for special cases. I cannot solve the general case where
N
is any integer. The reason for this is . . .”

Then a miracle happened. As I was explaining to my imaginary audience why I could not solve the general case, it suddenly occurred to me how I could do it. I was thrilled! The next day at Yale, I gave my talk and it went well. I felt good about the presentation and the fact that I didn’t have to hide behind an inaccurate title. I still think it was one of the greatest
Aha!
moments in my life.

Two important lessons emerged from this incident. The first is perhaps something you’ve heard before: if you get stuck while working on a problem, try putting it aside for a while. This process of mentally clearing the decks will allow your subconscious to have a crack at the problem, often resulting in new and better solutions.

The second is to take the time to explain (whether to yourself or to a friend or family member out loud) exactly why you can’t solve the problem. In my case, when I explained to my phantom audience why I could not solve the general case, I was able to see that the reasons were not actually valid and that I could do it easily, using methods I knew quite well.

When we’re searching for solutions to our problems, we tend to choose the first decent idea that we come up with. Once we have an idea we feel we can fall back on, we tend to stop working hard and just go through the motions of pretending to look for better solutions—or perhaps we stop entirely. Yet this too is a form of getting stuck. We are denying ourselves the opportunity to find a more practical, elegant, or inexpensive solution.

This idea of premature closure can rear its head during any phase of any design or problem-solving process. When it occurs at the problem formation or POV generation stage, it leaves us working with the original concept for the problem statement. This severely limits the reframing, which is often the key to more effective and delightful solutions.

If it occurs during the ideation phase, it can doom the project to a mundane brute-force solution. Better results can often be obtained if more ideas are generated and used to enhance or replace the original concepts.

Consider the following problem: How do I increase my purchasing power? If I reach into my pocket and I find a dollar bill, I have a solution. If I keep looking and find a five-dollar bill, my situation has improved. Further searching might reveal a twenty. If I am lucky, upon opening another compartment in my wallet I find a blank check and maybe various credit cards. Now I have a lot of options to choose from, and I could combine or use any single one that I feel is best for the given circumstances. Either way, I have come a long way from my first solution—a single dollar bill.

The proper state of mind is one that welcomes each subsequent solution with as much joy as the first one, and then puts each aside and keeps looking. Ultimately you’ll face restrictions that will end the solution-seeking process. You’ll run out of time. You’ll run out of resources. Or you’ll find the solution that you’re sure is exactly the right one and no longer be tempted by the challenge to find something better.

One spring day I was riding my bicycle in Death Valley when I came upon an astonishing sight. A section of the roadway was
covered with thousands of dead caterpillars squashed flat by cars as they attempted to cross the road. Looking more closely, I could see masses of caterpillars on each side slowly making their way toward the road. There were as many on the left side of the road headed to the right side as there were on the right side headed toward the left.

This was barren country, and as far as I could make out, the landscape was identically empty on both sides of the road. What motivated the caterpillars to cross? I have no idea! Probably entomologists have a
goooood
reason. Yet the memory has stayed with me as a constant reminder of analogous, meaningless dysfunctional behaviors in my life. How many times have I crossed a road pointlessly when staying where I was would have been fine?

Like those caterpillars, we are often more interested in what we do not have than in what we have. We may strive for something, and the effort may consume us. Once we have obtained our goal, it tends to lose its hold on us, and we are off to the next pursuit. Currently in America, approximately 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Many of these are followed by remarriages. We are always looking for something different, something better.

People change jobs because they get bored. They travel not for the joy of traveling but simply to get away. It is common for people traveling to other cities and countries to visit museums, even though they never bother to go to the ones in their own hometowns. In some people’s lives there is constant change for change’s sake, like the caterpillars crossing the road to reach an identical piece of Death Valley real estate. Maybe going from one place to another does no harm, or maybe you get flattened while you are crossing the road.

Some professions have motivation for road-crossing behavior
built in. In sports there is always the next game and the next season to work toward. In research there is the next project and the next paper, always more knowledge to achieve. In school, there is always the next exam, class, and term. Then there are the various levels to graduate from: grade school, junior high school, high school, college, and graduate school. In jobs we work our way up the ladder, always looking ahead. In these examples, at least, there seems to be something bigger and better on the other side of the road.