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Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada

Reframe the problem

Gather your team to explore a problem and create a concrete problem statement. By understanding the four W’s (who, what, why, and where), your team can stay aligned and focused on the end goal of the project.

Use this play to...

  • Define the problem your project aims to solve
  • Determine the context and impact of the problem

Running the play

Sometimes a project just doesn’t come together. Unfortunately, when a problem hasn’t been properly defined, it’s tough for a team to work together. There can be seemingly endless discussions on the same aspect of the project where people disagree; or members of the team can be on a completely different track, creating a mess of ideas and solutions that don’t meet back to the original project’s goals.

By taking just 30 minutes to run the this play, your team can come together and explore the problem space to make decisions and understand – all together – the reasons behind them. Think outside your team and include people with diverse skills and experience levels to better define the problem. This play works well with the Define success with a project poster play.

Setting up (5 minutes)

Take just a few minutes to welcome the team and remind them that the goal is to define the problem, not to brainstorm solutions. The end goal of this session is to create a single problem statement.

Materials

  • Whiteboard
  • Sticky notes
  • Pens and markers
  • Letter-sized paper
  • Timer

Create the 4 W board (5 minutes)

Divide the whiteboard into four equal spaces, and label them “who”, “what”, “why”, and “where”.

If your team is large, you can divide into sub-groups and give each sub-group a piece of paper to replicate the board.

Tip

Invite people outside of your team to introduce new perspectives.

Discussion (10 minutes)

Discuss the following questions, using sticky notes to write thoughts about each W: 

  • Who: Who has this problem? Has the problem been validated / proven to be a problem? 
  • What: What is the nature of the problem? Is there research or supporting evidence? 
  • Why: Why is this problem worth solving? How major is the impact on the user? 
  • Where: Where does this problem arise? Has the problem been observed where you expected it? 

Come together (10 minutes)

Next, ask each person (or group) to stick their favourite sticky notes to the whiteboard in the corresponding area (they can also say their ideas – just be sure to record them).

If there are a lot of sticky notes at the end, ask everyone to come up and mark their favourite in each “W” to show what is the most relevant or significant to the team.

As a full group, try to reach consensus: which two points in each “W” are the most significant? Is there anything else worth researching?

Tip

If you’re having difficulty coming to a single statement, it’s likely that there just needs to be more discussion. It is also possible that there are two completely separate problems – if this is the case, your team will need to choose which problem the project is solving.

Framing the problem statement (5 minutes)

Finally, summarize the most important points into a single problem statement – no more than one or two sentences long. Make sure it contains questions under the four “W” – who, what, why, and where.

For groups larger than four, it might be best to delegate this task to just a few people. Allow them time to present back to the entire group so everyone has a chance to approve.

Next steps

Now, your team has a concrete problem statement to work from. This might be enough, but you can take it one step further with the play Analyse your 5 “Whys”.

While this play is useful at many different stages of a project, it is exceptionally useful right after a problem has been successfully framed in order to really get at the root cause and determine what your team can do to fix it.

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Materials on this website were produced and/or compiled for the purpose of providing Canadians with access to information about the programs and services offered by the Government of Canada. It is subject to the following Terms and conditions.

This work is a derivative of “Problem Framing” by Atlassian and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License ( CC BY-SA 4.0). 

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