Innovative Intelligence: The Art and Practice of Leading Sustainable Innovation in Your Organization

CHAPTER SEVEN

STEP 2: ISSUE REDEFINITION

A team developed their project charter with the focus on the question: “How to increase sales of mutual funds to our current individual customers?” They began Step 2: Issue Redefinition, by looking at their current customers and recognized considerable differences within individual customer segments. They realized that no single solution could address the different needs of easy and difficult, young and old, recent and long-time customers. They decided to regroup them into distinct and actionable segments. After working on three different sub-problems, they were able to gain insight into the most complex challenges associated with each segment. Based on this analysis, the team was able to redefine the three issues and identify different solutions that worked well for each customer group.

By the time the team has completed the Step 1: Framework, they should be clear about the overall direction for solving the problem or opportunity. The framework defines the goal (the “How to … ?” question) and the type of solution desired, as well as the boundaries that must be respected. However, even after completing the framework process, the team will find that complex issues can still include many uncertainties and ambiguities and be multi-layered.

Thus, the objective of Step 2: Issue Redefinition is to strip the problem or series of problems down to root causes and make the complexity manageable. The issue redefinition step helps identify sub-problems, ...