Exploring A Challenge

If you want to solve a problem, have to stop and think about the problem first. Logical, right? 

Whether you want to tackle racial inequality, gun violence, climate change, or homelessness in your city you need to explore the challenge. Take notes, ask questions, do some interviews, reflect. This post introduces a couple of techniques you can use to focus on a new (to you) problem. You can use the tools here to help you shift your focus, or reevaluate whether you're focusing on the right thing. 

Say your interest is climate change. Maybe you've decided that getting people to consume less stuff is the key to reducing the effects of climate change in the future. If you don't know much about the problem, here are a few key points:

1. The world is warming up with alarming speed, mainly because of human activity. 

2. We may not be able to prevent some major changes like a 1-meter rise in sea level and permanent drought

3. Some would argue that adapting to those changes is more important than trying to stop AGW at this point. 

4. Many steps have been recommended including renewable energy, end to meat consumption, less consumption of everything, going back..

Responding to Climate Change - The Challenge:

Let's focus on changing behavior in the United States. We want to convince people to eat less meat, travel less, and cut out fossil fuels as much as possible. This is obviously a three-part challenge, and you would want to repeat the following exercise for each of them. So, here is the exercise:

Why do I want people to eat less meat?

- Because it takes lots of resources to produce. 

Why is the resource requirement important?

- Because there are too many people using too much water and land.

Why are water and land so important to fighting climate change?

- Well, water is the basis for everything and land is important for everything. 

Why would you try to focus on both?

- Well, I guess water is really more important than meat. 

Did I just change my focus? Sure, this isn't an awesome example of the "5 Why" technique, but I decided it might be worthwhile to look at water conservation after about 5 minutes of asking "why" about this and that. 

Try this one yourself. But, take a little more than five minutes. When you are done, come back and read about a technique for describing the elements of a social problem. This is a focusing exercise that might generate a real breakthrough. 

Impact, Awareness, Knowledge, Ability:

Slice and dice the problem. Write down the things that contribute to AGW. 

Next, create a table by hand or in a word processor. The left column will be labeled AGW Factors. This is where you write down those contributing factors. Create four more columns and label them Impact, Awareness, Knowledge, and Ability. You'll be rating each of those AGW Factors on each thing. Here is how it works:

Impact - How much impact does this really have on the problem? Can you quantify the impact on global climate? (Ideally, you can quantify the frequency of the behavior and the impact each time the behavior happens - more on that later)

Awareness - Do some research on Google. Find out how much people know about each of these AGW factors. 

Knowledge - How much do we know about changing this kind of behavior, using that kind of technology, the science behind the problem, et cetera?

Ability - How much can we really affect this factor, behavior, attitude with our available resources? The more fundamental the change, the longer it will take and the more resources it will take. For example, imagine a goal of cutting meat consumption in the United States by 50% in five years. Is this even remotely realistic for any organization or network of organizations? Getting half of American adults who currently eat meat to stop over the next five years is going to be tough. Getting twenty percent of American adults to go meatless one or two days a week might be more achievable for a real-world organization. Even so, that is a real stretch. 

Pick a social problem you care about. Spend about five minutes breaking it into pieces as described above. Then rate each piece on each of those dimensions.