Challenge Assumptions, Question the Question
Better Framing and Challenging Assumptions.
Put yourself in the shoes of T-Mobile, back in 2010.
You’ve slavishly followed your industry's ‘best practices’ for years. You do everything your bigger rivals do, and become a copy of them. But they’ve been around longer than you and persuading consumers out of their lethargy to switch to you without price cutting is hard (and a race to your bottom).
So you languish at 4th in the market. Still declining in share. You’re failing and you need a way out.
Yet the regulators won’t allow your competitors to buy you.
Any big companies from other sectors aren’t interested.
There is no way out. No Plan B, let alone a C.
What Would You Do?
This Is What T-Mobile Did.
They changed the question they were asking themself.
‘How can we salvage the assets before things get even worse?’ wasn’t the question anymore.
Since there was no alternative, the new question became:
‘How can we turn the tables and start beating our competition?’
They had to do something, and that something had to be radical.
And they decided to take everything customers hate about carriers and do the opposite.
No service contracts, free-roaming, flexible data limits, and family bundles.
Simple, yet genius.
They positioned themselves as the good guy against the big and bad (and unlikable) bad guys like Verizon and AT&T.
And became clearly distinctive.
This radical campaign had to have a special name.
They chose a good one: The Uncarrier.
The result?
Consumers loved it.
The Uncarrier changed the trajectory of T-Mobile.
It became a long-term campaign (and their motto).
Thanks to it, T-Mobile took its market share from 10 per cent to around 30 per cent.
And achieved a market cap bigger than both AT&T and Verizon.
It’s amazing how reframing thinking can change everything.
Don’t try to solve the wrong problem
T-Mobile had been trying to solve the wrong problems.
They thought they could beat the competition by being more like them and working harder and better. Sometimes it works, but many times it needs us to unthink.
Unthink to find the right problem.
Question the question
People face a problem and immediately start working on possible solutions.
This is quite common.
One example.
Let’s say the obvious problem is ‘How can we improve customer satisfaction levels to match our competition?’
This may lead you to think about solutions - more call centre agents, more training, more tech, more speed, and more other solutions to get improvements.
All great.
But if you reframe the problem, you may discover better problems to work on:
‘How can we be distinctive?’
‘How can we do things differently for our consumers?’
‘How can we find out our customers’ pain points?’
‘How can we create a connection with our customers beyond faster, optimised, and automated?’
‘How can we lead, not follow?’
See how these different problems can lead to different, often better, results?
So it isn’t about jumping on solutions, it’s about looking for new ways to frame the problem.
There’s an urban legend about how NASA used a lot of money to create a pen that can work in zero gravity. Whilst the Soviet Union spent nothing, and simply used a pencil in space.
This is what problem framing does - it establishes whether you even have a problem to begin with, whether it may or may not be worth solving for your business, and the entire process clears your mind and allows your teams to have important discussions earlier before everybody plods along the wrong path.
There will be moments where you’ll wonder, ‘Why didn’t we ask or consider this before?’. But it will rarely happen if you’re disciplined about problem framing. And sometimes, you’ll realise that the problem you’re facing is a small part of a bigger blunder in the past. Use methods like lateral thinking and this problem framing canvas may help your framing.
Better framing will bring you better answers.
PS:
Remember that Dove campaign (above).
The more biases, sameness and assumptions you can break, the more remarkable results you’ll get.