Strategic Problem Solving: Reframing with Challenge Mapping

Even the most avowed innovators can struggle to find creative solutions when they’ve grown overly familiar with their problem. The only way to break out of those mental shackles is to start by looking at their problem through a different lens and reframing it until the solutions reveal themselves. One of the most effective and deliberate ways of doing this is a method called challenge mapping.

Challenge mapping is a visual way of broadening and narrowing your problem to conduct deeper exploration so that you select the RIGHT question to answer.

Using Challenge Mapping

Challenge mapping is one of the most powerful deliberate problem solving techniques that you’ve never used before. What makes it powerful is that it’s simultaneously intuitive and nuanced. Even better, it relies on two straightforward questions: Why and What’s Stopping?

Asking WHY broadens the focus and helps to uncover goals, objectives and ambitions. Conversely, asking WHAT’S STOPPING US helps to uncover underlying barriers and pain points which narrow the focus. Even if a problem seems relatively straightforward, by mapping the problem and teasing out the nuanced language around the problem, we can better pinpoint the more precise question we need to answer.

Mapping is a powerful technique but also one that requires patience, curiosity and a lot of practice. Challenge mapping is a continuous and iterative process. You can test your questions with team members, partners and even customers. It can be a quick and dirty exercise. Or a very extended process. Some teams will even use their challenge map as a tool for ongoing strategic planning.

Let me bring this method to life with a real example.

The Vegetable Dilemma

As a parent, from time to time I can get a wee bit irritable with my son. Like most kids, I can be sure to find his clothes scattered around his bedroom or an endless supply of damp towels left in an exhausted repose on his unmade bed. But the thing that frustrates me, and my wife, most is my son’s avoidance of any food that remotely resembles a vegetable.

No matter how much my wife and I persuade, argue or insist on him eating vegetables, he refuses to eat a vegetable. And it has caused a lot of angst and unnecessary stress at mealtimes. So I decided it was the right time to take a more deliberate approach to solving this domestic problem.

Practical Application

The first step in challenge mapping is to start with the initial problem statement. There may be multiple questions that you’ve identified. And arriving at the initial question can be a multi-step process. But for the purposes of this exercise, I recommend using the question that best represents the issue that you’ve been facing, or your stakeholders describe as the biggest unmet need or pain point.

In the case of my son and his vegetable avoidance, my wife described the problem as:

“How might we get my son to eat vegetables?”

Broadening the Challenge

My next step is to diverge upwards or broaden our map. I recommend following this simple process:

First, begin by using this sentence starter: “Why would we want to… or Why is it important To…?” We use this prefix together with our starting challenge question. So for my vegetable dilemma, I would ask:

“Why would we want to get my son to eat vegetables?

While this may sound ridiculously obvious, by systematically asking ourselves “Why” it pushes us to think about our deeper ambitions and goals for solving this challenge.

Some of the responses that were sparked by this question of Why were:

• To lead a healthy life
• To have proper nutrition
• To develop healthy eating habits

The next step is to focus on one response at a time. This is hard. But make it a point to ask the group which one you want to start with. It doesn’t need to be a formal vote. Just enough consensus to keep moving forward.

Once you’ve made that selection, you want to continue the exploration by laddering up. As the facilitator, I might ask:

“Why would it be important to develop healthy eating habits?

And the answer to this question can once again yield numerous responses, including:

• To reduce the risk of chronic health issues as you grow older
• To build a positive relationship with food
• To improve your mental and social wellbeing

You can continue to expand your map almost indefinitely. But once you feel you’ve sufficiently explored WHY…it’s time to diverge downwards or to narrow the focus of the challenge. To do that, we follow the same facilitated process.

Narrowing the Challenge

Sometimes the problem can be too abstract or broad. And that’s where the “what’s stopping” step is very powerful and important. It helps us to identify underlying barriers and issues that we might otherwise overlook.

To do this, I would recommend going back to your starting question, which in my case was:

“How might we get my son to eat vegetables?”

And the first question I would ask, would be: “What’s one thing that could be stopping us from getting my son to eat vegetables?

So in response to that question, you should solicit a complete answer from your participants. In my vegetable dilemma example, some of the responses could be:

• The look and feel of vegetables is unappealing
• The taste of vegetables could be unpleasant to his taste buds
• He’s stubborn and he doesn’t like being told what to do

Each of these answers are a potential reason. But not all reasons are of equal importance. Therefore, it’s critical to explore the underlying causes in determining which of these is most important to tackle and, if solved, could crack our problem.

As a next step, I would invite my participants to help me prioritize which of these three do they want to focus on first. And assuming the look and feel is the most compelling, I would turn that into another question and ask:

What’s stopping you, or is getting in the way, of making the look and feel of vegetables more appealing?

And a few answers that might be given could be:

• The texture of vegetables can be unpleasant to kids
• The color of some vegetable is unappealing (green is yucky!)
• Vegetables aren’t packaged as attractively as snacks or candy.

Just like the broadening exercise, we can further drill down deeper and deeper until we feel that we have exhausted the underlying causes. In practice, I will usually go down 3 or 4 levels in both directions. This can take some time. But I assure you it will be time well spent and it often uncovers questions and issues you may have otherwise omitted.

Once you have completed your map, you will want to carefully review the various question options as a team. And then select the question that your team is ready to move on to more deeply explore.

Using the example of my son and his vegetable aversion, after reviewing the options, we decided to focus on “Vegetables aren’t packaged as attractively as snacks or candy.” I specifically chose this barrier because it is one that we had never considered before and could lead to some novel solutions and experiments that we could conduct in our household.

The final step is to turn the selected barrier from the challenge map into a question that will be a direct prompt for user research as well as ideation.

My new question would be:

How might we make the appearance of vegetables as attractive as snacks or candy?

When I posed this very question to group of parents struggling with the same issue, the ideas began to explode by freshly made popcorn.

• Snack Packs: What if you served vegetables in small, snack-sized portions that are easy to pick up and eat.
• Creative Arrangements: Cut vegetables into fun shapes or use decorative cutting techniques like spiraling, crinkle-cutting, or using cookie cutters to create interesting shapes
• Purposeful Pairings: Pair the vegetables together with delicious dips, sauces and other complements to reframe the way your child perceives veggies.

Just know, I could have selected multiple challenge questions from the challenge map to explore. However, to get the best outcome, I recommend focusing on one question at a time. So choose wisely, and keep in mind your key decision making criteria when selecting the right challenge question.

And with that, you’re ready to start mapping your business or family challenges!