Method Initiative – Exercise 2: 5 Unsolved Problems
Post-Exercise Reflection:
For Initiative Exercise #2: ‘5 Unsolved Problems’, the goal is to identify 5 unsolved problems that a specific group of people feel, and come up with a rudimentary solution for them. The exercise was one that I found pretty difficult the first time around – it’s surprisingly hard to think of a problem before a solution…My mind wants to jump to solutions right away and then reverse engineer the problem from the solution. Here’s what I mean…For example, the first time around, my brain instantly went to thought “Solar panels are good, right? Okay, so…’solar panels solve the problem of relying on fossil fuels for energy.” While this may (or may not) be true, we haven’t identified a person who’s having a problem I could help, nor what negative feeling I’m trying to help them eliminate, so it doesn’t count as a problem/solution for this exercise.
The first time around, coming up with 5 problems took me a lot of time and effort, and the problems that I came up with weren’t great, and often didn’t even align well with my goals in a way that felt meaningful. This time around, I was able to come up with the problems (and simple solutions) in less than an hour. For one, I had the practice from the first time around, and now that I’ve made the shift to focusing on problems rather than on solutions, it was much easier to come up with problems and negative emotions people feel. Second, the field I chose was more focused – because I want to potentially do something in either sustainability coaching or the construction industry (which I already work in), I just had to identify people who need help in those two sectors.
The Problem/Solution Pairs
The problem/solution pairs I came up with were…
- People who are concerned about the increasing pollution, climate change, and destruction of natural spaces feel frustrated, hopeless, and powerless to do anything about it.
-Solution: Start a coaching service that, over multiple sessions, identifies individual, personalized actions/steps to improve their lives through sustainable living. - Top executives in the construction industry feel a growing pressure to become more “green” from governments and society.
-Solution: Create a framework/guide that would give them step-by-step actions they could do to move their company in a greener direction. - CEOs of companies with lots of money in the bank feel clueless and lost with how to use it or what to do with it, even if they know they want to use it toward sustainability.
-Solution: Devise a plan to utilize company funds to invest or otherwise use internally to make the company more sustainable. - Project managers on construction sites feel frustrated with the wasted resources and costs that come from excessive waste on a site.
-Solution: Devise an action plan for a zero waste jobsite that helps identify points of waste in all stages of a project and suggests guidelines and steps to reduce waste, starting with the most polluting. - People in the sustainability movement feel frustrated that companies and governments don’t do more without realizing there is more that they can do themselves.
-Solution: Offer a coaching service to turn that frustration into sustainable actions in their own life that have real impact and can be built upon to culminate in leading others to do the same and make real change.
How Viable Are They?
If I had to rate my own problem/solution pairs, I’d give myself a solid “not bad.” And that is pretty much by design. Thinking a bit more of them, I’m not even sure some of these negative emotions are actually felt by the groups I mentioned, but that’s OK. Having done this before, I know that the Initiative process is going to refine the problems and solutions and evolve them over multiple iterations, and because I think the problem/solution pairs I’ve selected this time are more in line with what I actually want to do, I’m more excited to go through this process than I was before!
On to Exercise 3! Time to start making some calls and asking for some advice!