By Raul Delapena Setiawan 
SAN FRANCISCO — In an era dominated by rapid technological disruption, artificial intelligence integration, and relentless corporate restructuring, organizations frequently mistake ambition for direction. According to a growing consensus among design leaders and business strategists, the root cause of corporate misdirection is not a lack of effort or capital, but a fundamental misunderstanding of strategy—and, more specifically, the art of problem framing.
This systemic flaw came to the forefront following recent industry discussions between prominent design thinkers, which have reignited debates surrounding Richard Rumelt’s seminal business text, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Revisiting the book through the lens of modern design leadership reveals that corporate innovation efforts routinely fail because they confuse inspirational goal-setting with genuine operational strategy.
Just as Rumelt famously argued that "bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy," industry experts are now asserting that ineffective design is rarely the result of poor execution. Instead, it stems from a hollow problem-framing process—one that lacks an essential, non-negotiable kernel.
Chronology of an Insight: From Business Strategy to Design Thinking
The intellectual trajectory leading to the current discourse on problem framing developed over decades of shifting corporate paradigms:
- Early 2010s: Richard Rumelt publishes Good Strategy Bad Strategy, introducing the concept of the "kernel" of strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions. At the time, the business world largely isolates the theory to executive suites and macroeconomic planning.
- Mid-2010s to 2020: As "design thinking" sweeps through global enterprises, problem framing becomes a ubiquitous buzzword. Innovation workshops, empathy maps, and extensive strategy decks proliferate. However, the term risks becoming a catch-all phrase for any preliminary brainstorming session.
- Late 2023 – Early 2024: Amid the generative AI boom, organizations race to deploy new technologies without clearly defining the problems they are solving. Design leaders begin noticing a systemic recurrence of solutionism—implementing advanced tools decoupled from foundational user needs.
- Recent Weeks: A renewed dialogue between design leaders—catalyzed by reflections on Rumelt’s core principles—leads to the formalization of the "problem-framing kernel." Practitioners begin advocating for a minimalist, diagnostic framework for design analogous to Rumelt’s strategic kernel.
Supporting Data and Observations: The Anatomy of Modern Innovation Failures
Enterprise innovation surveys consistently highlight a troubling disconnect between executive ambition and market delivery. According to industry metrics:
- Strategy vs. Wishful Thinking: Approximately 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their stated objectives, a failure rate largely attributed by organizational psychologists to a lack of coherent problem definition.
- The Scope Creep Epidemic: Over 60% of product development teams report suffering from poorly scoped briefs, leading to bloated project lifecycles and diluted user value.
- The Proliferation of Scaffolding: While design agencies and internal corporate labs have generated hundreds of proprietary canvases, workshops, and ideation methodologies, foundational problem alignment continues to degrade.
These data points reinforce a timeless maxim attributed to Blaise Pascal: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." In the context of contemporary design, organizations often lack the discipline to reduce complex operational challenges to their bare, essential components, substituting thoroughness with decorative frameworks.
The Core Problem: The Three Elements of the Framing Kernel
To combat the dilution of problem framing, design leadership has proposed a rigorous, three-part diagnostic kernel. Without all three components present, an organization does not possess a true problem frame; it merely holds a collection of unverified assumptions.
[COLLECT] ---> [CONNECT] ---> [COMMIT]
(Raw Data) (Tension/Insights) (Editorial Focus)1. Collect: Disciplined Divergence
The initial phase of problem framing requires the deliberate aggregation of all potentially relevant variables—concepts, technical functions, user needs, regulatory constraints, stakeholder agendas, and underlying unknowns.
Design challenges are inherently ill-defined; a complete picture never exists at inception. Therefore, the work must begin by expanding the canvas.
Importantly, "collecting" is distinct from brainstorming. It is a systematic exercise in increasing both the scope and the resolution of the problem space. Without a comprehensive collection phase, any subsequent analysis operates within artificially constrained boundaries. A narrow canvas invariably produces a narrow frame.
2. Connect: Mapping Tensions and Relationships
Once the raw elements are assembled, the cognitive work transitions to identifying relationships. Connections are where true insights emerge.
While some connections are intuitive, the most valuable insights often stem from unexpected, weak, or contradictory linkages. Elements that oppose one another generate essential friction.
Experienced practitioners note that tidy agreements often signal a superficial frame that has bypassed difficult realities. A robust problem frame relies on the dynamic tensions between interconnected elements rather than isolated, comfortable assumptions.
3. Commit: The Act of Editorial Judgment
The final and most frequently neglected phase is commitment. Having collected elements and mapped their connections, the design leader must decide which variables to foreground and which to deliberately exclude.
This act of editorial judgment is comparable to a film director executing a final cut. It requires the courage to explicitly state: "We are going to focus on this, and consciously set aside that."
What is excluded from a frame is often more critical than what is retained. Two teams can analyze identical datasets, yet arrive at entirely different problem frames based on their distinct judgments of what matters most. This divergence is not a procedural flaw; it is the essence of professional design practice.
Official Responses and Expert Perspectives
Industry leaders have increasingly spoken out regarding the necessity of returning to foundational design principles amidst an environment saturated with automated tools and surface-level methodologies.
"We have confused the accumulation of digital artifacts—strategy decks, Miro boards, research repositories—with actual strategic thought," noted Lucas Mara, a prominent design leader, during a recent industry symposium. "When you introduce AI tools capable of generating thousands of variations in seconds, the cost of not having a clear problem frame multiplies exponentially. You simply generate bad ideas faster."
Corporate innovation directors echo these sentiments. Internal feedback from major technology firms suggests that executive leadership is increasingly demanding accountability in product discovery phases.
"Tools and canvases are merely scaffolding," industry analysts note in recent strategic reviews. "They are useful, sometimes essential, for structural support during the building process. But scaffolding is not the building. If you are executing design initiatives without a validated problem kernel, you are engaging in creative exercises, not operational framing."
Implications for the Future of Business and Design
The institutionalization of the problem-framing kernel carries profound implications for multiple stakeholders across the corporate landscape:
For C-Suite Executives
Organizations must transition away from treating strategy and design as downstream decoration. Executive leadership must demand that every strategic initiative clear the hurdle of a rigorous problem-framing kernel before capital is allocated to execution. Misidentifying ambition as strategy—or listing wishful goals in place of diagnostic rigor—will continue to result in expensive, failed transformations.
For Product and Design Teams
Practitioners must cultivate the discipline of reduction. As automation and generative AI take over the heavy lifting of raw data collection and baseline ideation, the core competitive advantage of human designers will lie in their capacity for connection and commitment. The ability to say "no" to secondary variables and enforce editorial focus will define top-tier design talent.
For Academic and Professional Development
Educational institutions and corporate training programs must recalibrate their curricula. Rather than teaching endless variations of expansive ideation canvases, programs need to emphasize diagnostic problem reduction, tension analysis, and editorial decision-making.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the diagnostic utility of the three-element kernel—collect, connect, commit—provides a reliable stress-test for modern organizations. When a project falters, teams can retrace their steps through the kernel to identify the exact point of failure: Did they collect too narrowly? Did they fail to explore the tensions between elements? Or did they lack the courage to commit to a definitive point of view?
Until organizations embrace this disciplined approach, problem framing will remain little more than corporate theater—a collection of well-intentioned wishes masquerading as strategy.
Nana Muazin 
Suro Senen 