The Basics: Configuration
Describe the categories that shape your problem in order to reconfigure them
When I started writing this newsletter, I set out to share a series of instantly useful exercises that anyone could deploy to get smarter about the problems they are trying to solve. However, as I’ve shared these exercises with more people, I have also gotten some requests to say a bit about the system behind them. That’s what inspired this new series of posts. Here goes…
All of the exercises I share here are based on one of six innovation dynamics. These are six ways of looking at a social problem to understand human behavior, recognize the social norms behind it, and develop ideas to disrupt them.
The fifth dynamic is CONFIGURATION. A problem’s configuration is all of the mental categories that people use to understand the problem, as well as the various ways they fit together.
Human beings are categorizing machines. In response to any complex situation, we inevitably start sorting information, even if only in a way that makes sense to ourselves. It reminds me of a story where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, had crashed his airplane in the desert. He sad that while he was stranded in one of the sand dunes, he felt he had to make different parts of the dune into different “rooms of a house” just to stay sane. I think that’s all of us all the time, making categories out of anything we have available.
When it comes to social problems, we can find these categories in a number of different ways. The way I normally start is by asking about formal or technical vocabulary that is used to describe the problem. Experts can often list dozens or hundreds of words and phrases used by people in the world of their problem that the general public would not understand. The point in collecting this jargon into to master all of it, but to see the underlying categories the words represent. What do they tell you about what people around the problem value and how they understand the world?
However, just as important as jargon are informal categories that shape the world of the problem. When looking into this, I almost always start with two very broad categories that sometimes make people uncomfortable — “good” and “bad.” It’s always interesting to see folks squirm when you ask them, “What differentiates a good patient from a bad patient?” Or “Are some grantees considered to be better than others, even if no one says so out loud?” In particular, asking people to combine the formal and informal categories can lead to some interesting results, revealing assumptions about the problem that may not have been clear before.
Though they are the easiest ones to find, words are not the only way in which human beings wield categories. You can also discover them in complex processes and the organization of physical space. Next time you are at the grocery store, ask why each of the sections is located where it is. There is almost certainly a reason that has to do with the store’s theory of how to sell the most merchandise.
Looking at these physical configurations makes it easier to see the secret behind this dynamic. We aren’t just concerned with the items in the store — we also want to know if we could arrange the sections in a different way to achieve a different result. If for example, you were trying to encourage vegetarianism, you could remove all meat from the store. But you could also decrease the prominence of the meat section or change the language of the signage. Of course, you would also quickly discover that human beings are quite attached to the configurations they are used to!
In my experience, configuration takes a little bit longer to understand than the preceding dynamics, but once people get it, they play with it obsessively, imagining various outcomes. And that’s what I would encourage you to do with it too — play with the language and categories around you to imagine different results.
You can get started by asking some of these questions:
When people talk about the problem you are trying to solve, do they use words and phrases in a different way from the general public?
What are some of the ways information around your problem is sorted? What do those categories tell you about values and priorities?
What are some of the unstated categories that shape the world of your problem? Are people sorting things into “good” and “bad” or other categories that might not want to speak out loud?
What are some of the non-verbal ways in which the world of your problem is sorted into categories?
Finally, if you changed some of the categories around your problem or how they fit together, how might people’s behavior change? Can you use any of these insights to develop new solutions?
Here are some of the exercises I’ve featured in the newsletter that use the configuration dynamic:
Good egg, bad apple - How can you use the human tendency to sort everything to see your problem in new ways?
Demolished - What new insights are revealed when your problem is torn to pieces?
The third place - What if the categories of your problem weren’t so black and white?
Just two boxes - What is revealed when you radically reduce the categories?
Toddler brain - What can you see about underlying categories when you combine them in silly ways?