Problem definition
Boundary Examination
Overview
Boundary examination is a simple creativity technique that does exactly what its name suggests – it guides you to explore the boundaries of your original problem and, as needed, change them to support and enable more creative thinking. The technique assumes that, in many projects, the boundaries are artificial and constrain your creative thinking. For example, a boundary often reflects people's biases and concerns about a problem, or is based on a simple assumption about how the solution will be solved, for example with new software or a business re-organisation.
Therefore, at the start of a creative problem solving process, it is important to check whether the defined boundaries are themselves part of the problem, and whether the boundaries need to be challenged and changed. Defining the correct, wider problem is essential for the most creative and useful ideas and solutions to be developed. The technique does that by seeking to understand how the description and wording of a problem can affect our assumptions about the problem's boundaries.
What to do
The Boundary Examination technique can be applied in the following 4 basic steps:
- First of all, write down an initial statement of the current problem that you are seeking to solve;
- Then, read, select and underline the key words in your problem statement;
- Take each underlined keyword in term, and examine it for hidden assumptions. Try replacing each key word with a synonym or near synonym, to explore how the meaning of the statement changes. You can use online lexicons and thesauri to support you in this work;
- Having explored how changing your selected key words affects the meaning of your problem statement, then try to redefine the problem in a better way with fewer restrictive assumptions about your boundaries. If needed, repeat steps 2 and 3 several times.
People
Works best for a smaller number of people, or for larger groups of people if divided into smaller groups.
Problem solving characteristics
The Boundary Examination technique is most useful if you want to explore the boundaries and scope of your problem, to understand more about the nature of the problem and the opportunities that it offers.
Creative phases
Use this technique at the start of a creative process, to get a better understanding of the real underlying problem that you want to solve, before you start other techniques such as idea generation.
Location
You can use this technique anywhere, alone or in groups.
Equipment
Make sure that you have larger pieces of paper to write the description of the problem statement on, and different colour pens to underline keywords and replace them with other words. Also, you might want to have Internet access to enable you to use online lexicons and thesauri tools such as
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
to explore possible synonyms.