Step One: Problem Definition

I'm basically lazy. When someone comes to see me with a tangle of problems, it reminds me of pictures of the logjams they used to get when floating logs downstream to a sawmill in the spring. logs become jammed up behind one another and can back up on the river for two miles. It is a tangled mess, and there seems to be no way out of it. The trick is to find the snags at the front of the logjam which started it in the first place, blow them out of the way, let the logs wash down the river and pick up the strays off the bank. If one tries to disentangle the logjam one log at a time, one will never finish. Always go for the snag.

So to with problems and tangled situations in groups, organizations, or communities. It does not take long for situations to resemble logjams. What makes it more difficult, is that the "presenting problem" is not necessarily the "snag" which holds back the entire log-boom. Frequently people ask for help when some significant aspect of their life is affected, not when the original encounter with a snag occurs. There is a reason for this. Most of life is a series of encounters of one little snag or another, and most of hem can be ignored. Other aspects of life are affected by a snag sporadically over time, then when there is a critical mass, things can jam up quite rapidly. By the time things get very entangled, most people have long since forgotten that certain snags were ever encountered, let alone what to do with them.

This step of "problem identification" takes so much time (some estimate up to half the time of the task []) because of this obscurity one finds upon first encountering such problems. The trick here is to take note of the presenting problem but to use it as a starting place for one's investigation and to start following the leads back until one finds the "snag" which is causing the problem. Bear in mind that there may in fact be more than one snag, which may or may not be connected, or that the snag may be a secondary effect of some other factor.

This step is usually carried out by the researcher, is a rather cursory survey, with or without the use of instruments, and frequently based on some level of expertise or objectivity to the situation. As Kuhn pointed out []often a set of eyes from another discipline can spot a snag quickly simply because it is so obvious that nobody who is familiar with the situation can see it for looking at it.