Giving Compass' Take:

• Shamik Trehan explains how Dr. Reddy’s Foundation uses Collective Problem Inquiry to fully understand an issue so that they can create an effective intervention.

• Why do development projects fail? How can organizations shift their intervention models to spend more time fully understanding problems? 

• Find out how design thinking can impact development aid. 

In the social sector, we tend to focus on just one aspect and fail to look at the larger picture. Most of the time we do not identify or define the real problem. This could be because of the urgency to find solutions, but often this hurry muddies the real problem and in doing so, limits the impact.

The magnitude and complexity of problems in our country are continuing to grow, almost exponentially. To resolve these problems, we need to work better and perhaps some of us need to re-look at our approach to finding solutions. We at Dr. Reddy’s Foundation have come across passionate, committed and visionary people who have brought about change and impact at scale, in part because they defined the problem sharply before searching for solutions.

Collective Problem Inquiry, or CPI, is an approach that aids with just that: it evolves from the ground up and attempts to bring synergy behind co-defined and sharply articulated problems. It enhances insights generated by others and builds on their latent knowledge. CPI can help us leverage the collective intelligence around us to converge on the core of the problem, and we can benefit jointly as well as individually.

CPI entails creating alignment on a sharp problem definition, agreeing on what success looks like and establishing mechanisms for sharing progress, regularly. This results in a shared understanding and ownership of the problem and success measures, and provides an opportunity to learn from multiple solutions.

Read the full article about Collective Problem Inquiry by Shamik Trehan at India Development Review.