The Basics: Parthood
See your problem's connections to other ones and decide what they mean for you
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 sixth dynamic is PARTHOOD. A problem’s parthood is the way it fits in with other problems and efforts to solve them.
Social problems don't exist in isolation. Every problem is part of a larger ecosystem that affects it and is affected by it. When we use the parthood dynamic, we search that ecosystem for clues about the behaviors underlying our problem and how we might be able to change them.
I always get asked about this dynamic’s name. Why not go with something more intuitive like “context” or “connections”? The main reason is that I want people using this system to ask “What is my problem a part of?” It’s not just what happens to be in your problem’s neighborhood — all the dynamics help explain that. You’re really looking for other problems and behaviors from which your problem is inseparable.
There are a number of ways to do this. Start with the obvious. If you spend all of your time thinking about a social problem, chances are you already have a familiar group of people and organizations you see all the time who work on issues that are similar, but not quite the same. Your problems might have similar names or can be found in the same section of the library. Sometimes the connections between these problems are well-understood and don’t require further explanation. But other times, the connection is spurious, based on some arbitrary factor or misperception by outsiders. Whatever the relationship is, it forms part of the dynamics of your problem that you may want to change.
I think the more exciting part of this dynamic, though, is discovering connections between problems that weren’t already obvious. This leads to satisfying insights about behaviors and social norms that can be explained in no other way. These behaviors can seem like “intruders” in your problem because they don’t fit your conception of how it is “supposed” to work. Understanding parthood will help you drop the judgment and work with or against those behaviors as just another part of your problem.
There are three main main ways I encourage people to seek out these mysterious behaviors. The first is to look at shared actors. What are the people and organizations who work on your problem also worried about? If everyone is preoccupied by an upcoming election or an economic downturn, that behavior is likely to seep into your problem and how they behave.
Second, look at shared resources. This comes up a lot in relation to funding; everybody in the nonprofit world has had to do the dance of connecting the problems they most care about to the flavor of the month that suddenly interests funders. But instead of treating that as an annoyance, one can look at it with a more critical mind. Why are these two problems suddenly being linked? Are the connections between them real?
Finally, you can discover parthood by looking at shared settings. If there is a natural disaster in the city where you are trying to solve your problem, the hurricane or earthquake or pandemic is suddenly your problem. Nature doesn’t stop to ask if you have any expertise in it. The same can be said about any other problem that occurs in the same setting as yours. These settings aren’t just permanent physical ones, but also social ones like conventions or media channels. If every news story on crime is followed by a story on homelessness, people will start to link the two, even if the facts don’t bear that out.
Looking at all of the six innovation dynamics helps you to better understand the behavior around your problem as well as change it. Changing parthood can feel difficult because it is all around you and usually includes elements you can’t control. But start by just developing an informed opinion about the connections between your problem and others. In some cases, it really is possible to break an unfortunate connection or create a new and beneficial one. But more often it’s about smaller modifications, like using the shared actors and resources more effectively.
Here are some questions to get you started:
With what other problems is your problem closely associated? Do these connections make sense or are they based on false assumptions?
With what other problems does your problem share actors, resources, and settings? How does this affected the relationship?
Are there behaviors in the world of your problem that feel like they come from somewhere else? Might they have “migrated” from efforts to solve another problem?
How do your problem’s connections to other problems help or hinder efforts to solve it? What about those connections might you want to change?
Finally, imagine that some new connection between your problem and another problem is essential to solving it. What might that new link be?
Here are some of the exercises I’ve featured in the newsletter that use the parthood dynamic:
Ticket to ride - What are some of the other attractions in your problem’s neighborhood?
Cutting ties - What if your problem didn't have to be associated with another one?
Multiball - Could you win faster if you take on more problems?
Dual citizens - What are some other worlds where your stakeholders feel they belong?
Get in line - What other problems are ranked above or below yours in importance?