↩ ExploRational · A Catalogue of Divergent Rationality
explorational · a divergent move
“The app is slow and users are leaving.” Reads as a problem statement; it is raw situation. Before accepting any problem as given, write two or three rival settings of it — then choose one deliberately. The setting decides what gets measured, who owns the work, and which solutions can be said out loud.
Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner opens with an inconvenient observation: “In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain.” The construction step has a name — problem setting — and a definition worth keeping: “Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.” Naming and framing come before solving, and they are choices, usually made by default. A statement that arrives looking objective has had its choosing done out of sight.
Software runs on handed-down problem statements — “the hardest thing about engineering is requirements” is a folk theorem of the field — and Einar Høst, re-reading a paper that assumed users can hand over the problem they want solved, gave the objection its shortest form: “We quickly see that the problem isn’t the solution, the problem is the problem itself!” The working-week version of Schön’s move: when a problem statement lands, neither accept nor reject it — generate two or three rival settings, read what each makes visible and invisible, then choose in writing, rivals kept on record. The instrument below holds one situation still.
the signature instrument
Each tab is a different act of naming and framing — what it attends to, what it abandons, which solutions it admits, whose desk the work lands on. No measurements appear here: a setting decides which measurements would count, so it comes before them. The only counters are structural.
The setting switcher
settings inspected 0/4 · problem unset
the situation, as it arrives
“The app is slow and users are leaving.”
nine words · zero numbers · no problem yet — the problem is what you are about to make of it
The situation is holding still. Open a setting to see what it becomes — and what each becoming costs.
a qualitative instrument · nothing here is measured, and nothing is pretended to be · the counters track only your reading — inspected and chosen
the ladder out of the hole
Ben Balter’s version of the move is a ladder. A customer asks for a 1/4″ drill. The stated problem is a 1/4″ hole. One rung up, the job is hanging a picture — “which could be accomplished several ways - a hammer and nail, 3M Command strips, etc.” Another rung up, “the underlying customer problem may be the desire to remember milestones or essential people in their lives” — served as well by an app or a digital frame as by anything needing a hole. Each rung is a rival setting of one situation, each admitting a different solution family: drill bits, then adhesives, then software. His warning: “You can build the world’s best drill, but it may be the right solution to the wrong problem.”
The ladder is why the move insists on plural settings: from inside any single rung the work looks well defined, and the choosing only becomes visible when a second rung exists. “Slow app” sits on a ladder exactly as the drill does — each tab above is a rung with its own visible field, owner, and Monday morning.
what to try
Read the four invisible panels in a row. Each invisible list is another setting’s visible list — the panels are complements; no fifth tab attends to everything. Attention spent on latency traces is withdrawn from exit interviews. A setting is a budget; the panels show where each refuses to spend.
Add a fifth setting from your own backlog. Take a live complaint — “onboarding is confusing,” “the build is flaky” — and write its rivals on paper: naming sentence, visible, invisible, admitted solutions, owner. The exercise fails usefully when two rivals admit the same solution family: duplicates in disguise, and the pruning is the lesson.
Watch the owner chip as you switch. Nine words route the work to backend, design, product, or research — before any evidence exists. Problem setting is an org-chart act: whoever names the problem staffs it. An unexamined setting is still a decision, made by whoever spoke first.
the question you weren’t handed
Keavy McMinn supplies the field practice. “The best place to start is finding out what the problem is. This sounds obvious, but it often isn’t.” The projects she watched fail did so “typically because it wasn’t addressing the right problem for the context.” Her rival-generator is social: interview customers, colleagues, peers, and close with a question built to break your frame — “What question do you wish I’d asked you?” It hands the problem-setting pen to the person who has spent an hour answering inside your setting; what comes back is often a rung you had not drawn.
The act has a social reading, held jointly with two neighbouring rooms: SocioRhetoric’s frame-set is the utterance that installs one setting in a conversation; CommuniCoupling’s definition of the situation is what a group inhabits once that setting hardens into background. Set the problem alone and you have chosen your frame; say it aloud in a meeting and you have chosen everyone’s.
the move ↔ the instrument
| The instrument | The move |
|---|---|
| the situation card | Schön’s raw material: puzzling, troubling, uncertain — and containing no problem yet. |
| a setting tab | one act of naming and framing: the things that will be attended to, and the context framed around them. |
| the visible panel | what the setting funds — its questions, its evidence, its Monday-morning work. |
| the invisible panel | the complement every naming buys: unattended, unmeasured, unbudgeted. |
| the solution-family panel | the family chosen along with the name — solutions arrive pre-sorted by setting. |
| the two-rivals gate | the move’s minimum: a deliberate choice requires a live alternative. |
| the chosen banner | the signed decision — one owner, an exclusion list, rivals kept on record. |
how this opening fails
risk · duplicates in disguise
The catalogue’s named risk. “Make it faster,” “improve performance,” and “reduce latency” photograph as three settings; same attention, same fixes — one setting written three ways. The test is downstream: rivals must change the visible list, the solution family, or the owner. If every candidate ends in the same Monday-morning work, the frame was chosen by default and then decorated.
risk · a frame chosen forever, or never
Schön’s practitioners set problems in order to act on them. The move ends in a choice; a team that re-sets at every standup never digs anywhere, so re-setting carries a known cost. And a setting smuggles values in as description — “slow” already blames the software — so the choice should carry its author’s name: deciding what the problem is counts as a use of power.
Whoever names the problem has already chosen the family its solution will come from — so write three names, and pick one with your eyes open.
can you use it?
RECOGNITION — Which is setting the problem? A: estimating the stated ticket more carefully. B: before working the ticket, writing three rival namings of the situation behind it and choosing one. C: brainstorming many solutions to the stated problem.
B. The move operates on the problem statement itself, before solving starts. A refines effort inside the given frame; C diverges on solutions while leaving the frame untouched — and the frame was the choice.
THE NEAREST NEIGHBOR — Surfacing the assumptions also digs beneath a statement. What separates setting the problem from it?
Direction and output. Surfacing the assumptions audits the frame in use: it lists what the current position takes for granted. Setting the problem works upstream and produces rivals — whole alternative namings, each with its own visible field, owner, and solution family — and ends in a deliberate choice.
PRODUCTION — Take a request you were handed this week as a solution (“add a filter to the dashboard”). Write two rival settings of the situation behind it.
One version: a findability problem — users cannot locate their rows (admits search, sort, saved views); a volume problem — the dashboard shows rows nobody asked for (admits changing the default query, splitting the page). Yours works if the settings admit different solution families; if both end in “build the filter,” they are duplicates in disguise.