Why a “How Might We” Question Isn’t Enough

If you’re anything like me, you love a good sticky-note brainstorming session.

But getting better results than design-as-entertainment requires investing time to prepare by framing the challenge, gathering context, identifying what it is we’re optimizing for, and defining how we’ll measure progress and recognize success.

Framing the challenge, framing the problem, or framing the opportunity (whatever you’d like to call it) can be tempting to skip or simply replace with a snappy “how might we” question, but without fully immersing in the nature of the challenge, we risk causing harm with our good ideas.

Here are five risks of jumping straight into brainstorming with only a “how might we” question as the foundation.

1. If you start by focusing on the solution, you’re missing an opportunity to understand the nature of the problem.

There’s a transition and decision-point when a team moves from framing and immersing in the nature of the challenge to ideating potential solutions. For a collaborative design process to be effective, we start by immersing in the context and human experiences we will impact, empathizing, building understanding, and defining shared measures of success. Only then do we transition into ideating. If the team instead starts by jumping right into sharing their great ideas, we miss the opportunity to start with shared goals and a shared understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, why it matters, and who it will impact.

2. If you start by sharing ideas, you’re not starting by listening.

Using human-centered design means we commit to approaching our work with a foundation of curiosity and humility. We start by listening and by learning — the assumption we try to put into practice is that we don’t know anything, or at the very least that our customers, users, or community members (depending on what we’re designing for) know more than we do about the nature of the challenge. There’s nothing quite like conducting research to provide a measure of direct, personal experience. Alternatively, if you’re a design team member who wasn’t able to participate in the research, you can immerse in insights the research team produced like personas, causal loop diagrams, literature reviews, design briefs, scenarios, or other artifacts intended to synthesize and communicate insights from research to prepare collaborative design team members to generate useful, impactful ideas. Learning how to be a novice may sound counter-productive, but it opens us all up to possibilities we wouldn’t otherwise explore. Even in situations where you feel like you’re bringing your own personal, external, research-based understanding, consider the possibility of setting that aside for a moment to listen to the people you’re engaging with in the present moment to ensure they feel heard and understood.

3. You risk anchoring the group on novel, exciting ideas that ultimately stunt the creative, collaborative process of design grounded in research.

Has this ever happened to you? A few good ideas get fired off at the kickoff of a design session, and you start to wonder, why should we all invest more time brainstorming, expanding, and converging on ideas? I’m not suggesting you hold your great ideas back, but to consider when you share them and when you invite others to do the same. Much like the proverb “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” part of honoring the brilliance and creativity each person has to offer is inviting them to travel the journey from problem/opportunity framing to designing solutions together — not asking participants to jump straight into solutioning without immersing first. In our collaborative design process at Navicet, we like to look for signs of “bubbling over” as signals that the entire team (not just those involved in the research) are ready to move into ideation — the moments where the whole team can’t help but start to wonder “what if…” and propose solutions.

4. Good intentions aren’t a replacement for good insight.

It’s surprisingly easy to cause harm, unintentionally, because good intentions without context, information, and insight into the problem/opportunity space can be a risky endeavor (taking inspiration from history, the road to ahem…”harm” is paved with good intentions). If you can’t demonstrate an understanding of the unique needs, constraints, and opportunities around a design challenge, you’re likely not in a strong position to share ideas that are suitable, feasible, or respectful to the humans that will use and interact with the design concept. The great news is you can still jot down all those ideas as they occur to you, just consider setting them aside to take on the task of research, understanding, and empathy first — before ideating or future-tripping about the solution. They may still be great ideas — we just don’t yet have enough information to know whether that’s true or not. Sprinkle in curiosity and humility to reduce the risk of unintended, harmful consequences.

5. Are you sure these are new ideas that haven’t already been tested or implemented before?

It’s not inherently disrespectful to share ideas early without research or sufficient context, but be aware your ideas may be dismissed as oversimplifying a complex issue, or worse — arrogant. If you’re engaging with a group of professionals who have dedicated their career path to something and you come in with new ideas without demonstrating understanding first, it can create an unnecessary, adversarial divide when you could be working on the same team together. A catchy “how might we” question isn’t going to give you enough context to offer credible, impactful ideas. Ensuring you start with some intrinsic knowledge about the nature of the challenge builds empathy. Solving other people’s problems, or other communities’ problems, can seem obvious on the surface — but it’s important to recognize that as a member on a design team, that you may have spent a disproportionately small amount of time thinking about the problem in comparison to someone(s) who has spent the majority of their career thinking about this problem, or the majority of their lives experiencing it. And, if you’re someone that does experience the problem you’re solving for, consider how your experience may be different from others, and not-representative of the full range of experience.

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So, how do you know when you have enough context to support that “How Might We” question? Well, researching the problem can be a potentially never-ending process, and simply considering the above risks to judge the likelihood of negative impact is a great start. Consider how you might work the above five points as curious questions into your go/no-go discussion to determine whether you have enough context for a design session. You might map out the likelihood of a negative outcome and the severity if that occurs.

Whether you have enough insight and context is also dependent on the problem-space. For example, if we’re designing a new learning experience for individuals who are new supervisors at work, if we “get it wrong” as a result of our “how might we” question brainstorming, we can learn from the first time we deliver the curriculum and make improvements. We can mitigate risk and negative outcomes directly in the session and respond to new insights as they occur. Alternatively, if we’re designing for the global launch of a health initiative, the severity of “getting it wrong” is higher stakes and may quite literally mean life or death.

I’m not suggesting that preparing for a collaborative design sprint or design session requires comprehensive root-cause analysis. In fact, that’s only one way to approach framing the problem. An approach we use regularly at Navicet we refer to as the Bright Spot Methodology — to find examples of things already working well today. Is there a segment of users that have already solved this that we could learn from? Are there community-driven solutions that exist already that might require only slight adjustments to implement at scale? It may sound counter-intuitive but focusing on the causes of a problem don’t always lead to the solution. That’s one technique for problem solving, but there are alternatives like finding examples of something that already works, and magnifying what’s working well.

The best collaborative design sessions invite different perspectives to contribute. Leveraging participatory design engages team members and encourages building on the knowledge and insight each person brings. Exploring ideas together creates a sense of co-authorship and ownership — a future state where we’re not the smarty-pants designers coming in to bestow our good ideas onto others, but one where we collaboratively build impactful design concepts together. Imagining a “what if” future-state scenario is best done with a clear understanding of where we’re starting at today. Simply using a “How Might We” question to carry the full weight of team immersion isn’t enough.

Originally published at https://www.navicet.com on April 4, 2022.