Clients and internal teams often arrive with requests shaped like solutions: redesign the dashboard, refresh the app, add AI. The design thinking discipline we protect is the refusal to accept the solution shape until the problem shape is validated.
Problem framing rewrites vague requests into precise statements: who is affected, what behaviour must change, what constraints are fixed, what outcomes would prove success. The rewrite is collaborative and uncomfortable because it surfaces disagreements early — where they are cheap.
How we run framing sessions
We gather stakeholders with different incentives — product, operations, support, brand — and force specificity. We ask what would have to be true for the proposed solution to fail. We ask what they would measure in ninety days.
Research inputs anchor the frame: quotes, incident logs, field notes. Without evidence, framing becomes opinion tennis. With evidence, it becomes alignment.
When framing changes the project
Well-framed problems often change scope dramatically. A dashboard redesign becomes an alert prioritisation problem. A brand refresh becomes a trust recovery problem after a operational breakdown.
That is success, not scope creep. Grounded in research, built to last — our mission depends on solving the right problem first. Pixels come after the frame holds.
A beautiful answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer.