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What is a problem?
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Why can a collaborative process be important?
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What is the problem-solving process?
Imagine that a community coalition has formed to support economic development in a neighborhood that has experienced long-term disinvestment.
After months of outreach, the coalition has brought together residents, local businesses, community organizations, public agencies, young people, and other partners.
At its first major planning session, however, participants discover that they do not agree about the problem.
Some believe affordable commercial space is the highest priority. Others are concerned about housing costs and displacement. Some want immediate investment in public safety and infrastructure. Others argue that residents should have more authority over how development funding is used.
The coalition also has limited money, different organizations have different decision-making authority, and several participants are uncertain whether their input will actually affect the final decisions.
What should the coalition do next?
Community problems are often more complicated than they first appear.
What looks like one problem may involve several interconnected conditions, institutions, policies, incentives, resources, behaviors, and histories.
Changing one part of the system may affect another, sometimes in ways that were not anticipated.
Effective problem solving therefore requires more than identifying a problem and selecting a solution. It requires understanding the situation, deciding who needs to be involved, examining evidence and uncertainty, considering alternatives, selecting an appropriate response, implementing it, monitoring what happens, and adapting when necessary.
What is a problem?
A problem is an observed condition, gap, risk, unmet need, or unwanted outcome that people or organizations believe requires attention.
A useful problem statement describes:
- What is happening
- Who or what is affected
- Where it is occurring
- How large or serious it is
- How it has changed over time
- Why it matters
The standard used to define a problem should also be clear.
For example, a difference between current conditions and a desired condition may be identified through:
- Community priorities
- Program goals
- Health or safety standards
- Law or policy
- Evidence of avoidable harm
- Comparison with an appropriate benchmark
Problems vary in complexity
Some problems are relatively straightforward.
If a required supply is repeatedly unavailable because no one has responsibility for ordering it, the organization may be able to solve the problem by assigning ownership and establishing a reorder process.
Other problems are systems problems.
They may:
- Change over time
- Have several interacting causes
- Involve multiple organizations or sectors
- Affect different groups differently
- Be influenced by policy, infrastructure, economics, history, or institutional practices
- Produce feedback effects
- Respond unpredictably to an intervention
Complex problems may not have one root cause or one permanent solution.
The goal may instead be to reduce harm, improve conditions, manage risk, strengthen protective factors, or change part of the system over time.
Problems are not automatically opportunities
A problem may lead an organization or community to identify an opportunity for improvement.
But problems may also involve real loss, inequity, danger, or hardship.
Avoid treating the existence of a serious problem as inherently positive or character-building.
The useful question is:
What can we understand, improve, prevent, reduce, or change?
Avoid embedding the solution in the problem statement
A problem statement should describe the condition before assuming how it must be solved.
For example:
Less useful: We need to hire more outreach workers.
More useful: Participation in the program has declined by 30% over the past year, with the largest decrease among residents in three neighborhoods.
The second statement leaves room to determine whether staffing, program design, transportation, scheduling, trust, communication, eligibility rules, competing services, or another condition is contributing to the decline.
Why can a collaborative process be important?
Many organizational and community problems involve knowledge that is distributed among different people.
Staff may understand operational barriers. Community members may understand how a policy is experienced in practice. Technical specialists may understand evidence or infrastructure. Leaders may understand funding, legal, or governance constraints. Partners may understand other parts of the system.
Bringing these forms of knowledge together can improve problem definition and reveal options that one person might miss.
Collaboration, however, does not mean that every person needs to participate in every step or that everyone has the same decision authority.
Decide who needs to be involved
Consider who:
- Experiences the problem or its consequences
- Has relevant community or lived knowledge
- Has technical or professional expertise
- Controls resources or authority needed for action
- Will implement the response
- May experience unintended consequences
- Is legally or organizationally responsible for the final decision
Clarify roles in the process
Before beginning, identify:
- Who provides information
- Who is consulted
- Who helps develop options
- Who recommends an approach
- Who decides
- Who implements
- Who remains accountable
These roles may belong to different people.
Be clear when a process is consultative rather than giving participants the impression that they hold decision authority they do not actually have.
Pay attention to power
People do not enter collaborative processes with equal authority or freedom to speak.
Consider differences involving:
- Employment authority
- Funding
- Professional status
- Government authority
- Community influence
- Access to information
When public disagreement may be risky, consider written, anonymous, confidential, small-group, or separate input methods.
Make participation accessible
Depending on the participants, meaningful involvement may require:
- Language access
- Accessible electronic materials
- Captioning
- Interpretation
- Accessible meeting spaces
- Remote participation
- Flexible ways to contribute
Create psychological safety
People need to be able to:
- Ask questions
- Identify uncertainty
- Admit mistakes
- Challenge assumptions
- Raise risks
- Disagree respectfully
Psychological safety does not mean that everyone agrees, that every idea is accepted, or that accountability disappears.
Use group processes where they add value
Not every part of problem solving requires a meeting.
Useful methods may include:
- Data analysis
- Individual interviews
- Community listening sessions
- Surveys
- Observation
- Document review
- Technical analysis
- Workshops
- Facilitated discussions
- Shared digital work
Choose the method according to the question rather than assuming that putting everyone into a meeting will produce a better answer.
What is the problem-solving process?
Problem solving can be organized into a series of related steps.
The steps are useful, but the process is not always linear.
New evidence may require returning to the problem definition. Implementation may reveal a condition that was not visible during planning. Evaluation may show that the selected strategy needs to be changed or stopped.
1. Clarify the problem and the purpose of the process
Ask:
- What condition are we trying to understand or change?
- Why does it matter?
- Who is affected?
- What decision or action may result from this process?
- What is outside the scope?
Write a preliminary problem statement.
Treat it as a starting point that may change as evidence is gathered.
2. Determine who needs to be involved and who decides
Identify relevant participants, affected communities, experts, implementers, partners, and decision-makers.
Clarify decision rights before asking people to invest substantial time in the process.
3. Gather credible information
Depending on the problem, information may include:
- Quantitative data
- Qualitative information
- Research
- Program records
- Community and lived experience
- Professional expertise
- Financial information
- Policy or legal requirements
- Information from comparable communities or organizations
Consider the quality and limitations of the information.
Distinguish:
- What is known
- What is estimated
- What is assumed
- What remains unknown
4. Examine context, causes, and system relationships
Ask what produces or maintains the condition.
Consider:
- Policies and rules
- Resources
- Incentives
- Infrastructure
- Organizational practices
- Access barriers
- Social and economic conditions
- Historical conditions
- Relationships among organizations
- Community assets and protective factors
A complex problem may have several interacting causes rather than one root cause.
Systems maps, causal diagrams, process maps, timelines, or other tools may help when relationships are difficult to see.
5. Refine the problem statement
After analysis, ask whether the original problem was defined correctly.
A useful problem statement should be specific enough to guide action without prematurely prescribing the solution.
6. Generate a range of options
Consider more than the first idea that appears workable.
Options may include:
- Improving an existing approach
- Changing a policy or process
- Creating a new intervention
- Partnering with another organization
- Removing an unnecessary barrier
- Testing a pilot
- Implementing in stages
- Stopping an ineffective activity
- Maintaining the current approach while gathering more information
- Referring the issue to another authority
7. Establish criteria for comparing options
Possible criteria include:
- Expected effectiveness
- Strength of evidence
- Equity
- Safety
- Accessibility
- Legal and ethical requirements
- Community impact
- Cost
- Staff and organizational capacity
- Feasibility
- Sustainability
- Time
- Reversibility
- Potential unintended consequences
Also ask:
- Who is likely to benefit?
- Who may bear costs, burdens, or risks?
- What other work will not be possible if resources are committed here?
8. Compare options and choose an approach
Use the agreed decision process.
There may not be one objectively best solution.
Several options may be reasonable, each with different tradeoffs.
Document:
- What was selected
- Who decided
- What criteria were used
- Important assumptions
- Major risks and tradeoffs
9. Test when appropriate
When uncertainty is substantial and a smaller-scale test is practical, consider a pilot.
Define:
- What the pilot is testing
- Who will participate
- What outcomes will be monitored
- How long the pilot will run
- What would lead to expansion, revision, or stopping
10. Plan implementation
Implementation deserves as much attention as selecting the approach.
Clarify:
- Who is responsible
- What authority they have
- What staffing and resources are needed
- What training is required
- What partners or vendors are involved
- What milestones and deadlines apply
- How progress will be communicated
- What risks require escalation
Do not assume that a well-designed solution will automatically be easy to implement.
11. Monitor implementation
While the approach is being carried out, ask:
- Is implementation occurring as intended?
- Are intended participants being reached?
- Are resources sufficient?
- Are unexpected barriers appearing?
- Are unintended consequences occurring?
- Are some groups experiencing different effects than others?
Monitoring allows the organization to identify problems before waiting for a final evaluation.
12. Evaluate results
Determine whether the approach produced the intended results.
Evaluation questions may include:
- What changed?
- For whom?
- Under what conditions?
- At what cost?
- What unintended effects occurred?
- What evidence supports the conclusion?
- What limitations remain?
Choose evaluation methods appropriate to the question, scale, resources, and maturity of the intervention.
13. Adapt, continue, expand, or stop
Use monitoring and evaluation findings to decide what happens next.
The organization may:
- Continue the approach
- Modify it
- Expand it
- Reduce its scope
- Test another strategy
- Stop it
- Revisit the original problem definition
Changing course when evidence changes is not necessarily failure. It can be part of responsible problem solving.
14. Communicate what was learned
Share appropriate findings with the people who participated in or were affected by the process.
Explain:
- What was decided
- What was implemented
- What happened
- What was learned
- What will happen next
If community members or other participants provided input but did not make the final decision, explain how their input influenced the result.
Related group-process skills
Several skills discussed elsewhere in the Community Tool Box can support problem solving.
- Running effective meetings can help when real-time discussion, coordination, or decision-making is needed. Not every step of problem solving requires a meeting.
- Developing facilitation skills can support fair participation, clarify disagreement, manage time and process, and help participants understand how decisions will be made.
- Developing recorder skills can help preserve decisions, significant findings, action items, and unresolved questions when documentation is useful.
- Defining and analyzing the problem helps distinguish symptoms from underlying conditions and identify the scope and context of the issue.
- Generating and choosing solutions can help groups identify and compare different possible responses.
- Putting your solution into practice addresses the implementation work that begins after an approach has been selected.
In Summary
Community and organizational problems vary greatly in complexity.
Some have relatively direct solutions. Others involve interacting systems, several organizations, unequal power, changing conditions, uncertainty, and competing priorities.
A structured problem-solving process can help people understand these conditions without assuming that every problem has one root cause or one correct solution.
Begin by defining the problem carefully and determining who needs to be involved. Gather credible information, examine context and system relationships, and distinguish what is known from what remains uncertain.
Generate several possible responses and compare them using explicit criteria such as effectiveness, equity, safety, accessibility, evidence, feasibility, cost, sustainability, and unintended consequences.
Then plan implementation deliberately. Assign responsibility, provide necessary resources, monitor what happens, evaluate results, and be willing to modify or stop an approach when evidence shows that conditions or assumptions have changed.
Collaboration can improve problem solving when participants bring relevant knowledge and have meaningful opportunities to influence the process. It should not obscure decision authority or create the impression that everyone has equal power when they do not.
Effective problem solving is therefore not simply finding an answer. It is an ongoing cycle of understanding, deciding, acting, learning, and adapting.