I often wonder about how we frame problems (challenges, as I prefer to call them), and more importantly, how that single decision can ripple out for decades, sometimes centuries.
Back in the 1950s, the consumer products industry probably asked themselves: “How do we make products and packaging cheaper and more convenient?” Enter plastics. Lightweight, durable, cheap to produce. Problem solved.
Except no one thought to ask: “What happens when billions of tons of this material end up in our oceans and landfills?”
Today, nearly 80 percent of the nearly 9 billion metric tons of plastic waste we’ve generated since the ’50s sits in landfills, chokes ocean basins, and contaminates our environment. That is a multi-front ecological crisis born from a question we didn’t think to ask.
Consider the early automobile industry. Electric vehicles were conceptualized and prototyped at the turn of the 20th century. But everyone focused on “How do we make cars go faster and farther?” Gasoline won that race, infrastructure got built around it, and electric vehicles were forgotten for a century.
Imagine if we had asked instead: “What propulsion system creates the least medium-to-long-term harm?”
I’ve learned from observing these patterns, that the way we frame our challenge determines not just the solutions we find, but the problems we create. Frame it too narrowly, like “cheaper packaging”, or “faster cars”, and we optimize brilliantly for today while engineering tomorrow’s crises. Frame it too broadly, and we limit our team with countless possibilities and complexity.
The sweet spot requires a version of consequential framing. Not the tricky behavioural kind, where businesses say ‘80% lean meat’ instead of ‘20% fat’ and the customer is relieved. But the absolutely straightforward discussing and considering of a challenge, knowing fully well potential outcomes of each path we might eventually consider choosing, long before we set off on it. Sincere questioning about second and third-order effects.
I am wrestling with this myself right now. I’m working on consumer product concepts under my own brand, and have had to go back to the drawing board multiple times on materials and manufacturing. Wood and bamboo couldn’t handle the durability requirements. ABS plastic while highly recommended by everyone and their cousin, is cost-effective, far easier to work with, but something I’d consider only if I run out of better viable options. Aluminum is better but increases complexity and cost. Each choice creates different downstream consequences, for users, for the environment, for business viability.
The vastness of manufacturing possibilities itself is humbling. Even veterans don’t seem to know all the ways products can be made. But here are questions I keep returning to, which might help if you work in a similar space. Before we commit resources and years of effort to an idea, ask the uncomfortable questions upfront:
- Who might this harm?
- What systems does this disrupt?
- What happens when this scales to millions?
- What are the second and third-order effects?
Obviously we can’t predict everything. But we can try to look a few moves ahead. The quality of our solutions will always be limited by the quality of questions we’re willing to ask. Especially the questions that challenge our assumptions about what “better” really means. Extremely uncomfortable but necessary questions.
Because once we build the infrastructure and convince millions to adopt our solution, reversing course becomes nearly impossible. Ask those trying to clean plastic from our rivers and oceans. So the next time you frame a challenge, don’t just be content with, “How do we solve this?”
Ask, “What are we starting?” One extra question that might save us from creating the next crisis we’ll spend the next century trying to fix.