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This individual exercise is ideal for understanding or defining a problem so that you address the right issues.
When we tackle a problem we tend to create an imaginary boundary round it, which separates what we believe to be highly relevant features from less relevant ones. Boundary examination is designed to allow you to re-examine these boundaries, and to bring potentially relevant aspects back into view. This technique can be particularly useful when the boundary has already been provided (e.g. a senior colleague has defined the problem for you).
Task
- Write down what your problem is in a sentence.
- Underline the key words in the sentence.
- Examine each key word for hidden assumptions which you, or the person who has identified the problem, may have unwittingly built in. You can do this by replacing key words with similar, but slightly different words.
- Once you have explored how the choice of keywords affects the meaning of your statement, see if you can redefine the problem in a better way. You might find a solution comes out of this.
