Gildea Glossary of Learning Terms: Problem definition

 Apolitical's survey of civil servants last month had "Identifying and framing problems" as the top policy skill they wanted to develop. Whether or not this counts as a singular "skill" (ditto 'futures and foresight thinking') is a key question for how we think about learning, and indeed, skills vs knowledge, capacities and capabilities vs critical thinking and applied work in learning in govt (hint: it's not, but we'll get to that 😄).

💡 Problem definition - really getting under the skin of what it is we're trying to do - has been at the centre of the Curiosity Incubator since we founded it, for exactly this reason. 

Why? Partially because it's not usually something that when you speak to senior leadership they identify as a key challenge - one participant of the Curiosity Incubator's CEO said "I don't know why you would want to go to that programme, we already do that", which is an interesting data point for learning in-organisation (and it will not surprise you to hear that learners' experience says the opposite). 

But when you do your discovery work for a learning programme - speaking to and finding out from the potential learners, their stakeholders and teams, what it is they're grappling with in their roles, rather than which 'skills' they want to build - you find out that 'problem definition', and the critical and generative thinking through of what it is they're trying to achieve, is the cornerstone of this work from which all else flows for the people doing the work.

Why does this matter? 

Centrally, it matters to the work of creating effective policy - if we're not really sure that we know the nature, character and parameters of the problem(s) we're trying to solve, how can we know if we are making progress on them? It's also a classic case of behavioural environment: all of us are influenced by the environment, processes, team dynamics, and even physical location of our work, so to see outside of our norms, it's necessary to step out of the day to day and rethink these things in a structured way.

That's what our work in the Curiosity Incubator does - with people from different levels of govt, as well as cross-sectorally. And it literally shifts the entire paradigms of the work that our amazing participants do, in and out of government, For Good.

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments - and onwards!