The problem space and the solutions space and why we are all one of the blind men.

Having spent the last ten years trying to figure out how social challenges can be solved in Australia, this article resonates a lot.

Over the years I have looked at this space (social impact ), worked in startups, state government and not-for-profits and now consulting to all of them there is a genuine case to be made for codesign, multi disciplinary thinking and using technology as an enabler and accelerator.

One of the most important mental models for this space comes from the story of the six blind men and the elephant. It’s a 2500 yrs old Indian fable. A king invites six blind men and asks them to touch “The elephant” without telling what it is. One of them touches the tail and thinks of its as a snake, the other thinks the leg is the pillar and so on and so forth. What is happening is that we are looking at the elephant through our own mental models. Mental models are formed through education, experience, empathy and energy in terms of the attention we have spent over the years in terms of job and interests.

The key to working in social change work is to understand that we are one of those blind men. Whether a social worker, engineer, designer, health professional etc. It is important to bring the experts and the user’s and the larger context together. This is where codesign is most powerful.

Another mental model is the understand that there is always the problem space and the solution space. Due to our mental models we start at different solutions. Like Snow, sometimes the solutions don’t solve the real problem.

When you can shape the difference between both the spaces, start to map out the assumptions of the solutions and understand the problem better, we start to get a sense of what’s happening.

Deeper problem space time means dealing with ambiguities, uncertaintity and being comfortable in the uncomfortable. This is hard for most of us.

Once we have a sense of the problem we need to explore multiple solutions. No single solution is the answer to deep rooted problems and at the same time we don’t know which ones work unless we test it. Prototyping, Experimentation and validation is critical here as well as working with the people whose life you want to change in the process.

Some of the key methodologies are business design, design thinking, lean start up, Mindfulness, etc.

Ethan, I think we met many years back in Oh My News conference in South Korea. Great to see what you are doing. Happy to share some of what I am doing and learn from your stuff.