Introduction

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                      PROBLEM REDEFINITION

Too many people spend their lives trying to solve the WRONG
problem.  For example: Long, long ago, as the story goes, a company
that had been selling walnuts in the shell decided that it wanted
to be the first company to offer shelled, whole walnuts.  The
company executives gathered a team of its best and its brightest,
and they all thought very hard about how to break into a walnut
shell without scrunching the walnut meat inside.  One day, they
were about to conclude that the problem had no solution at all, but
as the team of inventive people stood in the company cafeteria line
discussing the problem, the cook--who had overheard them--offered
this clue:

     "Well, you know, there are lots of different ways to
     crack eggs: you can crack 'em with a knife, you can crack
     'em on the edge of the bowl, you can even crack one egg
     with another egg.  But the feller who does the neatest
     job cracking eggs is the chick who's trying to get out."

     "Aha!" said one of the best and brightest, "All this time
     we've been trying to crack into the walnut from the
     outside.  If only there was a way to crack a walnut from
     the inside!"

(The solution they came up with was to stick a hypodermic needle
into each walnut and puff it up with air until the shell exploded
away!)  The moral of the story is that you're not likely to get a
new solution if you keep looking at the problem in the same old
way.

Does this apply to your group?  Often, there's an established way
of doing things.  A school assumes that a student who's doing
poorly needs more time with the teacher or the textbooks; a job
training program assumes that an unemployed person may need to
acquire more job skills; a neighborhood group assumes that an
apathetic group needs a block party to increase community-
mindedness.  Each of these groups may be treating the wrong
problem, and if so, they're wasting time and money doing it. 

Any citizen group that wants to make sure its program idea is worth
the bother might think about probing for alternative definitions of
the problem it's trying to solve.  There's more than one way to
redefine a problem; if the first doesn't work, try harder.

• Lois M. Frey, UVM Extension, RR #4, Box 2298, Montpelier, VT 05602, (802) 223-2389, email: lfrey@sover.net
• "Group Development: Creating Group Effectiveness" by Duane Dale, DFD Associates, 99 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-3402 (moving to 764 South East Street, Amherst, MA 01022 after 8/1/98);
• Bob Biagi, 142 Cherry Lane, Amherst, MA 01002 (413) 549-1412;

Comments to: crs@uvm.edu
Reviewed as of 4/20/98