Problem & Question Framing

Name the problem and the decision it feeds, sweep it from every side, then cut the list down to the few questions whose answers would change what you do.

Practice, not research: the who, what, where, when, why and how sweep is a rhetorical checklist with classical roots (Sloan, 2010), not a validated research instrument. Jobs-to-be-done (Christensen et al., 2016) and moments of truth (Carlzon, 1987) are practitioner lenses. The number of focused questions is a rule of thumb.

Use it when:

• Someone asks you to "look into" a problem and nobody has said what decision the answer is for.
• A team keeps debating causes (price, product, process) and no one has framed the question they disagree about.
• You are about to spend real time or money on interviews, a survey or an analysis.

Skip it when:

• The question is already agreed and you need to set limits on the work: go to 2.2 Scope & Constraints Snapshot.
• You need to break a big question into a complete set of parts: use 2.21 Issue Tree and MECE Check.

Most investigations go wrong at the question, not at the analysis, so questioning the problem before collecting anything is the cheapest quality check you have. That is working craft with a long history, not a tested method. The who, what, where, when, why and how sweep is a rhetorical checklist whose roots go back to classical philosophy (Sloan, 2010); nobody has validated it as a research tool, and it earns its place by being thorough. The lenses you may borrow are practitioner ideas too: jobs-to-be-done rests on cases rather than systematic tests (Christensen et al., 2016), and moments of truth comes from a practitioner's memoir (Carlzon, 1987). Use all of them to generate candidate questions, never as findings about your customers.

The value is in the order of the steps. Step 1 ties the problem to a decision, because a question with no decision behind it produces trivia. Step 3 overproduces questions on purpose, and Step 4 prunes them to the few whose answers would change the decision. Step 5 writes down success before fieldwork starts. If any result would satisfy your success criteria, the framing is not finished.

Describe the problem as something you observe, with no solution hidden in it. Then name the decision the answer will feed.

Strong answer: "Small cafes stop ordering from us within six months, while hotels stay for years. We must decide by April whether to keep the small-cafe delivery route." Not: "We need a better onboarding package for cafes."

The problem in one sentence:

Who feels it, and what it costs (money, time, people):

The decision this will feed, who makes it, and by when:

What happens if nothing changes:

What has changed that makes this urgent now:

Illustrative example: the business, the roles and all numbers are made up.

A family bakery in Gothenburg delivers bread to about forty cafes, hotels and schools. The owner notices that small cafes keep dropping off.

Step 1: "Small cafes stop ordering within six months; hotels stay for years." Cost: two delivery routes run half empty. Decision: the owner decides by April whether to keep, change or drop the small-cafe route.

Step 2: Order history shows when cafes stop, not why. The delivery drivers think it is price; the sales lead thinks it is the minimum order size. The owner decides; the drivers and the sales lead advise.

Step 3: The sweep produced fourteen questions. Two were kept: "Who at a small cafe decides what to order?" and "Do they stop after our price change, or after their own staff or menu changes?"

Step 4: Primary question: "Why do small cafes stop ordering within six months, and what would make the route worth keeping?" Focused question 1 asks what the cafes were trying to get done when they first ordered.

Step 5: "We can make the April decision with evidence. A waste of time if we only learn that bread is expensive."