Note: This article will use the term “customers,” which, depending on the context, can interchangeably refer to employees, users, or consumers. Essentially, it’s about the mindset that the recipients of your products, services, or processes are the individuals in focus.

Overview

In the dynamic world of business, a common challenge for organisations is pinpointing and clearly defining the fundamental problems that need addressing. Teams frequently leap into action, eager to deploy solutions without fully grasping the root of the issues, leading to wasted efforts and resources. It’s crucial for success to take a step back, analyse, and ensure that the real problems are being solved.

The Define stage, the second step in the Design Thinking process, offers a powerful approach to overcome this challenge. Building on the empathy and insights gained in the first stage, this stage involves synthesizing information to clearly articulate the core problem or challenge that needs to be addressed. This critical step transforms observations about human needs and behaviours into a focused problem statement that guides the rest of the design process.

This factsheet introduces the Define stage and explores its application across various organisational contexts. By mastering this crucial step, teams can ensure they’re solving the right problems, leading to more innovative, impactful, and customer-centred solutions.

Why It Matters

Implementing the Define stage is not just about writing a problem statement but fundamentally changing how teams approach problem-solving and innovation. Here’s why this stage is crucial:

1. Focus and Clarity: It provides a clear direction for innovation efforts, preventing teams from solving the wrong problem or getting lost in ambiguity.
2. Customer-Centricity: By framing the problem from the customer’s perspective, it ensures that subsequent solutions will address real human needs.
3. Inspiration for Innovation: A well-defined problem statement can spark creativity and open up new avenues for innovative solutions.
4. Resource Optimisation: By clearly articulating the problem, teams can avoid wasting resources on misguided or unnecessary solutions.
5. Stakeholder Alignment: A shared understanding of the core problem helps align diverse team members and stakeholders around a common goal.
6. Challenge Assumptions: The process of defining the problem often reveals and challenges underlying assumptions, leading to more breakthrough thinking.
7. Measurable Outcomes: A clear problem definition provides a benchmark against which to measure the success of subsequent solutions.

By embracing the Define stage, teams can become more focused, aligned, and effective in their innovation efforts, ultimately leading to solutions that truly address customer needs and drive organisational success.

Key Components of the Define Stage

The Define stage comprises several key components that work together to transform empathy insights into a clear problem definition:

1. Insight Synthesis: Organising and analysing the data collected during the Empathise stage to identify patterns, themes, and key insights. Example: After interviewing customers about their online shopping experiences, a retail team might synthesize their notes to identify recurring pain points and unmet needs.
2. Problem Framing: Articulating the core problem or challenge in a clear, concise, and actionable manner. Example: “How might we streamline the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment rates for first-time customers?”
3. Point of View (POV) Statements: Creating customer-centred problem statements that capture who the customer is, what their needs are, and why those needs are important. Example: “Time-pressed working parents need a way to quickly reorder household essentials because they often forget to buy crucial items during their infrequent shopping trips.”
4. How Might We (HMW) Questions: Transforming problem statements into open-ended questions that invite creative problem-solving. Example: “How might we help working parents effortlessly maintain their household inventory?”
5. Persona Development: Creating detailed customer profiles that represent key customer groups and their specific needs, goals, and pain points. Example: Developing a persona for “Sarah,” a 35-year-old working mother of two who struggles to balance career demands with household management.

Each of these components works in concert to distil complex customer research into focused, actionable problem definitions that drive the rest of the design process forward.

Implementing the Define Stage

Successfully implementing this stage requires thoughtful analysis and synthesis. Here are key steps and considerations:

1. Gather and Organise Data: Collect all the information from your Empathise stage. This might include interview transcripts, observation notes, survey results, and any other relevant data.
2. Identify Patterns and Themes: Look for recurring ideas, common pain points, or shared needs across your data. Use techniques like affinity mapping to group similar insights.
3. Articulate Key Insights: Based on the patterns you’ve identified, formulate clear, actionable insights about your customers and their needs.
4. Develop Customer Personas: Create detailed profiles of your key customer types, incorporating the insights you’ve gathered. Ensure these personas feel like real people, with specific needs, goals, and pain points.
5. Craft Point of View Statements: For each key customer group, create a POV statement that clearly articulates who they are, what they need, and why. These statements should be specific and customer centred.
6. Generate How Might We Questions: Transform your POV statements into open-ended “How Might We” questions. These should be broad enough to allow for creative solutions but narrow enough to provide focus.
7. Refine Your Problem Statement: Based on your POV statements and HMW questions, craft a clear, concise problem statement that captures the core challenge you’re addressing.
8. Validate with Stakeholders: Share your problem definition with team members and key stakeholders. Gather feedback and refine as needed to ensure alignment.
9. Connect to Organisational Goals: Ensure your problem statement aligns with broader organisational objectives. Be prepared to articulate how solving this problem will create value for the organisation.
10. Prepare for Ideation: Use your problem statement, POV statements, and HMW questions to set the stage for the upcoming Ideate stage. Consider how you’ll present these to spark creative thinking in your team.

Remember, the goal of the this stage is not just to identify a problem, but to frame it in a way that inspires innovative solutions and ensures alignment with customer needs and organisational goals.

Case Study

To illustrate the practical application of the Define stage, let’s consider a case study of a large urban hospital aiming to improve patient experience in the A&E department.

Background: The hospital had been receiving low patient satisfaction scores for their A&E department, despite having skilled medical staff and state-of-the-art equipment. They decided to use Design Thinking, focusing on the Define stage, to clearly articulate the core issues and set the stage for innovative solutions.

Approach: The team implemented the following activities in the Define stage:

1. Insight Synthesis: They reviewed data from patient interviews, staff observations, and satisfaction surveys, identifying recurring themes and pain points.
2. Problem Framing: The team initially framed the problem as “How can we reduce wait times in the A&E department?”
3. Persona Development: They created several personas, including “Emily,” a 40-year-old mother bringing in her child with a high fever, and “Robert,” a 65-year-old man with chronic health issues.
4. Point of View Statements: For Emily’s persona, they developed the POV: “Anxious parents bringing in sick children need to feel their child is receiving attention and care from the moment they enter the A&E department because the uncertainty of waiting exacerbates their stress and fear.”
5. How Might We Questions: They generated several HMW questions, including “How might we create a sense of progression for patients even when they’re waiting to see a doctor?”

Key Insights: Through this process, the team uncovered several surprising insights:

• The perception of wait time was more impactful on patient satisfaction than actual wait time.
• Patients often felt “forgotten” or “invisible” during the waiting process, even when medical staff were working on their case behind the scenes.
• The physical environment of the waiting area contributed significantly to patient stress levels.
• There was a mismatch between patient expectations of emergency care and the reality of how cases are prioritised.

Result: These insights led the team to reframe their problem statement. Instead of focusing solely on reducing wait times, they defined the core problem as: “How might we create a more transparent, informative, and calming A&E department experience that keeps patients feeling cared for throughout their visit?”

This new problem definition led to several innovative solutions:

• A digital queue system that provides real-time updates on wait times and case status
• Redesign of the waiting area to create a more calming environment with privacy nooks
• Training for all staff, including receptionists and nurses, on communicating empathetically with anxious patients
• An educational campaign to help the public understand how A&E departments prioritise cases

By taking the time to deeply define the problem, the team was able to develop solutions that addressed the root causes of patient dissatisfaction, leading to significant improvements in patient experience scores.

Reflection Questions and Action Prompts

As you consider implementing the Define stage in your projects, reflect on the following questions and consider the associated action prompts:

1. How might our current problem definitions be limiting our ability to find innovative solutions? Action: Take a current project and try reframing its core problem in three radically different ways. How does this change your thinking about potential solutions?
2. In what ways could we more effectively synthesize the insights from our empathy research? Action: Organise a team workshop to review recent customer research and collaboratively identify key themes and insights.
3. How can we ensure our problem statements truly reflect our customers’ needs rather than our own assumptions? Action: Draft a problem statement for a current project, then interview three customers to get their perspective. Revise your statement based on their input.
4. What barriers exist in our organisation that prevent us from spending adequate time on problem definition? Action: Identify one upcoming project where you can allocate more time and resources to the Define stage. Document the impact this has on the project outcomes.
5. How might we adapt our problem-framing techniques for different types of challenges or contexts? Action: Choose a problem-framing technique (like POV statements or HMW questions) and apply it to three different types of challenges your organisation faces.
6. In what ways can we better involve diverse perspectives in our problem definition process? Action: For your next Define stage, include at least two people from different departments or with different expertise in the process. Reflect on how this impacts the outcome.
7. How can we ensure that our problem definitions inspire creative thinking rather than constraining it? Action: Take a current problem statement and intentionally make it broader. Then make it more specific. Reflect on how each version might lead to different types of solutions.
8. What skills or capabilities does our team need to develop to become more effective at defining problems? Action: Conduct a team assessment of problem-framing skills and create a learning plan to address any gaps.

By thoughtfully considering these questions and engaging with the action prompts, you can develop a more nuanced and effective approach to implementing the Define stage in your organisation.

Conclusion

The Define stage of Design Thinking plays a crucial role in transforming customer insights into actionable problem statements. By mastering this stage, teams can ensure they’re focusing their innovation efforts on the right challenges, leading to solutions that truly address customer needs and create meaningful impact.

Remember, effective problem definition is both an art and a science. It requires a balance of analytical thinking to synthesize insights, creative thinking to frame problems in new ways, and empathetic thinking to keep the customer at the centre of the process. The most successful teams recognise that the way a problem is framed can dramatically influence the solutions that emerge.