The Problem Structuring Toolbox

You can begin to think of problem structuring like a box of tools you can pick from to analyze problems. 

The tools used in problem structuring fall into a few mutually reinforcing sets. We can organize them into a progressive order that helps you move from understanding to identifying an intervention:

• Gathering what is already known about a problem situation
• Creatively assessing, filling in, or reconceptualizing gaps in that knowledge
• Prioritizing factors contributing to the problem situation, based on complexity, cost, creativity, relevancy, etc.
• Mapping the interconnections between various factors that collectively result in the situation
• Selecting and clarifying a problem that will be addressed through intervention and/or evaluation

However, problem structuring does not have to be an ordered process. You can use these tools in any order to consider what may have been missed when setting up, evaluating, or redesigning a project. 

For example, you can start with an intervention. To address hunger in a particular lower-income community, a possible intervention is direct food assistance, and you want to decide where to best apply it. Here are different possibilities of how you could start:

a. Reimagining the problem situation: 

• explore how to implement direct food assistance in a new community by stakeholder analysis and researching community practices that influence the implementation of assistance (gather);
• look at rival explanations about the reason for hunger that might influence outcomes in your community (creativity);
• check if those rival explanations impact your ability to determine whether direct food assistance is effective (clarify).

b. Seeking a new approach: 

• use creativity techniques to reimagine how to create food security, for example identifying more innovative approaches to distribute food (creativity); 
• reorder different factors that lead to hunger (prioritizing); 
• use available data to run analysis (clarify);
• based on your findings, you can define a new “problem”, like unequal access to resources to acquire food (select).

c. Applying a well-used intervention in a new context: 

• research if direct food assistance has been successfully implemented in other countries (gather);
• map your knowledge onto your community of interest based on the most relevant factors (prioritizing).

FAQ: 

Who conducts problem structuring? Who is involved? 

Generally, problem structuring and its associated techniques are best suited for use by collaborative teams, though they may also be conducted by people in different roles, including:

This list is NOT exhaustive–you do not have to fill one of the above roles to be a problem structurer! These are just common roles of people working on these projects and will provide different perspectives and approaches to the problem.

What are the Pros and Cons of Multiple Perspectives? 

There are pros and cons to involving multiple perspectives in the problem structuring process. While it’s important to understand who can be involved, it is also important to consider how the outcome may be affected by who is not involved in the process. 

Naturally, involving multiple perspectives in the process can lead to conflicts in defining what the problem is. Some may assume that others share their frames of reference, leading to competing interpretations and priorities. To transform these conflicts, the research team should consider and learn about multiple perspectives that can be harnessed to provide novel insight into a problem situation. This can generate productive conflict, which provides a richer understanding of the problem situation and possible interventions.

Involving multiple perspectives also allows for the identification of and elimination of biases or incorrect assumptions from the problem structuring process.