Originally posted on LinkedIn on June 14, 2024
This article is authored by Cam Welsh, who has coached many successful case-solving teams at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary for the past two decades.
In this article, I will discuss problem identification. First, it's crucial to ask specific questions to provide context that helps identify the problem in a case. Answering these questions helps you and the audience understand the problem and its solution. It's important to consider the audience's perspective and thoughts during the process. A good problem statement should be related to the audience's point of view and the organization's business. These answers will also help to establish credibility and context for the solution. Real-life examples follow to illustrate these points.
The first example is from Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chair of Ogilvy UK. He explains that UBER is not in the transportation or taxi business but rather in the business of increasing certainty. With UBER and its app, you get certainty about when the "taxi" is picking you up and dropping you off at your destination, unlike the traditional cab interaction with a phone call or streetside hail. This certainty addresses humans' discomfort with variability and leads to how UBER makes money. The second example is STARS Air Ambulance, an Alberta-based nonprofit that provides a helicopter rescue service. Many students incorrectly identify its business as transportation or health care, but in reality, it makes more sense to think of it as being in the business of "saving lives". About 1/3 of STARS' revenue comes from donations and fundraising. Why do people donate to STARS? The answer is that it may help save my life one day. These questions are crucial for building the context around the problem and addressing some of the "So What?" regarding the problem statement that comes next.
When it comes to the problem statement itself, it needs to address the key challenges identified in the case. When you Google definitions of problem statements, you get something like this:
A problem statement is an overview of a challenge being faced that explains a challenge's cause, impact, and potential solutions.
With case competitions, a better way to reframe the problem statement is to focus on the key challenge and the expected impact. I often have teams think about the problem statement being a challenge statement rather than the problem statement. An example of a good problem or challenge statement would be:
"How does Organization A achieve a 5% reduction in GHG emissions over the next two years with limited impact on its profit margin?"
This problem statement does not suggest the root cause or a solution but informs the audience of the challenge and the expected impacts. It connects the challenge to impacts and leaves out the other elements of most definitions in the analysis. The analysis then explores the root cause, building further context for a well-supported solution. This will be a topic of a future newsletter.
With my teams, I advocate for short, concise, and specific problem statements that only include the challenge and the targeted impact. This helps create problem statements that are easily understood by the audience and can lead to well-formatted analysis.In most cases, there are multiple challenges, and often choices need to be made regarding the challenge being solved due to time constraints. In competitions with limited resolution time, dealing with the most important challenge is encouraged. In competitions with longer resolution time, I recommend using multiple problem statements, one for each challenge identified. The team should also prioritize the challenges and begin with the highest priority challenge. However, it's essential to keep the number of challenges to the "rule of 3," which will be the topic of a future article.
The next article will examine how teams can reach a consensus on the problem statement and the initial thoughts on the solution.