Identifying and Refining High Leverage Problems

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Title: Identifying and Refining High Leverage Problems
Abstract/Description: Perhaps the most important part of a network’s work is deciding what its work will be –– that is, understanding and refining its problem focus. This task is exceedingly hard. Burgeoning networks often fail to appreciate how critical and difficult it is to truly seek to understand the targeted problem that should properly be at the core of a collective action effort. Too often, a network’s best work is stymied by “solutionitis,” our term for precipitous focus on solutions. Rather than digging into unpacking the problem, it is human nature to just get on with it and settle on a solution. We suspect that the work that could derail many INCLUDES teams will be the siren song of a premature focus on solutions. This webinar will help to mitigate the solutionitis tendency. In the webinar we will address techniques that (1) demonstrate how improvers can come to understand the problems that locals see and feel, (2) explore the systems that give rise to those problems, and (3) begin to see how to map, and identify, the significant work processes that constitute those systems. Taken together, these activities will help participants recognize and analyze high leverage problems.
Author/creator: Gomez, Louis M.
Date: December 16, 2016
Series: INCLUDES Center Webinar Series
Institution: See all items with this value INCLUDES Center
Resource type: en Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form: en Film/Audiovisual Recording
Scholarship genre: en Theoretical; en Methodological
IRE Approach/Concept: Problem Framing; High Leverage Problems; Networked Improvement Community (NIC); Solutionitis; Causal System Analysis; Wicked Problems
URL: Webinar Webpage; YouTube Webpage
Grant funding: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Grant number: National Science Foundation Grant #1650508
Other related resources/entities: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; SRI International
Citation: Gomez, L. M. (2016). Identifying and Refining High Leverage Problems [Webinar]. https://includescenter.org/webinars/identifying-and-refining-high-leverage-problems/