Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Design thinking became a workshop format with coloured sticky notes on a wall. Underneath the sticky notes there is a real method — and the one step almost everyone quietly skips happens to be the only step that was ever actually difficult.
I used to think I was just teaching a trick. I thought I was handing over a set of tools, like a box of hammers or a specific way to arrange furniture. I was confident. I felt like I had the secret code to creativity.
But when I actually sat down to build a course on design thinking, I hit a wall. I had to look at the things we use every day—a simple pen, a notebook, a phone. I asked myself a question that felt almost ridiculous. If I had to design the world's first pen, as if humans had never seen one before, how would I even start?
It was a hard question. It wasn't about making a pretty pen. It was about understanding what a pen even does for a human being. I realized that if I just taught people how to be "creative," I was giving them something they already thought they knew.
That is a dead end. If you already know what the answer looks like, there is no reason to do the work. My own confidence felt hollow because I realized I hadn't actually done the hard part of the work. I had been looking at the finished product instead of the problem that made the product necessary.
This is the part worth stealing. Most people want to jump straight to the "how." They want the sticky notes, the workshops, and the "aha" moments. But if you skip the part where you define the actual problem, you are just decorating a house with no foundation.
You might end up with a beautiful product that nobody actually needs, or you might waste a year of your life building something that solves a ghost. Today, we are going to look at why the problem statement is the only step that matters, and why we are so afraid to face it.
You want to skip to the part where you actually do the thing. You want the solution, the "aha" moment, or the finished product. But there is a reason why we are so eager to bypass the beginning. It is because the beginning feels like a void.
When you are told to "be creative" or "solve a problem," but you haven't actually defined what that problem is, you are standing in front of a blank wall. It feels like a lack of progress. But here is how things plainly are. We often mistake activity for progress.
We think that because we are moving, we are going somewhere. If you spend all day rearranging sticky notes on a wall, you are moving your hands. You are not necessarily moving your life forward. The reason the problem statement is so hard is that it requires you to stop moving.
It requires you to sit in that discomfort of the unknown. I want you to think about how we actually interact with the world. We see things as "just the way they are." We see a chair and we think, "that is a chair."
We don't see the human need to sit. We don't see the physics of balance. We just see the object. When you try to design something new, your brain wants to keep that same habit.
It wants to give you a "better" chair. But if you don't strip away the chair, you can't see the need. This is why I always tell people that "Design thinking requires us to imagine the world in which any status quo does not existed." I mean that we have to pretend the world we live in is invisible.
We have to imagine a world where the "status quo"—the current way things are—doesn't exist at all. If you are designing a pen, you have to act as if humans have never had a way to leave a mark on paper. It sounds like a joke, but it is the only way to find the truth. If you assume the pen exists, your brain will only give you small, boring improvements.
If you assume the pen does not exist, you have to find the fundamental human desire that the pen eventually satisfies. There was a man named Jean-Paul Sartre who spent a lot of time worrying about how people lie to themselves about their own freedom. He watched a waiter who acted so perfectly like a "waiter" that it bothered him. He felt that the man was hiding from the terrifying reality that he was actually free to be anything else.
Sartre called this bad faith—the act of pretending you are a fixed object, like a rock or a tool, instead of a person who has to make choices. I think we do this with problems, too. We act like the problems in our lives are fixed objects. We say, "I have this problem," as if it were a heavy suitcase we were forced to carry.
We treat it as a fact of nature. But if you look closely, most problems are just the "status quo" we've agreed to live with. We've made them solid so we don't have to do the hard work of imagining a world where they don't exist. When you face a problem statement, you are facing that freedom.
You are realizing that the "problem" isn't a wall; it's a choice you've been making every day. That is why it's scary. It is much easier to move sticky notes than it is to admit that the wall you're hitting is actually something you're holding up yourself.
You might be right to think that I’m making this sound way too mystical. You could say that in a real office, if you don't have a clear problem to solve, you just don't do any work. You might argue that a "problem statement" is just a fancy way of saying "the reason my boss is yelling at me" or "the reason this app is losing money." In those cases, the problem is already defined.
It’s sitting right there on your desk. You don't need to imagine a world where the app doesn't exist to know that the user interface is broken. You just need to fix the interface. From that perspective, my idea of "stripping away the status quo" sounds like a luxury for architects and artists, not for people who have deadlines and budgets.
Perhaps there is some truth to that. If the problem is obvious, then the hard work is just execution. But I want to push back on the idea that the problem is ever truly obvious. Think about the last time you tried to fix something in your life that didn't actually get better.
Maybe you tried to "fix" your productivity by buying a new planner, or you tried to "fix" a strained relationship by having a specific conversation. You acted on a problem you thought you saw. But if the underlying issue didn't change, it’s because you were solving a symptom, not a cause. You were looking at the "chair" again.
This is where the distinction lies. A symptom is a fact. A problem is a choice. If you say "I'm too tired to work," that is a fact of your current state.
But if you ask "Why is my life structured in a way that leaves me exhausted?" you are moving into the realm of the problem statement. You are looking for the hidden architecture. I, too, taught that it's one of those terms that people liked to name-drop because "it sounded cool," without knowing its true meaning.
Only after a few months of a truly deep dive, I realized that this was a gold mine. In fact, I personally had long been doubting my own ability to be an individual in the world. When I say this, I mean that I used to think I was just a "designer" or a "teacher"—labels that felt like fixed identities, like being a waiter in a café. I was using these terms as a shield.
I was hiding behind the "cool" label of design thinking to avoid the terrifying reality of actually having to make choices about what matters. The "gold mine" isn't a secret trick for making better pens. The gold mine is the realization that by defining the problem, you are reclaiming your agency. You are deciding what the world actually is, rather than just accepting what it happens to be.
Think about the time you were asked to do something and you didn't question the requirement. Maybe it was a request from a boss to "make the logo bigger" or a client who wanted a website to "feel more premium." You did it. You spent hours on it.
You moved the pixels, you changed the colors, and you felt that familiar tug of progress because your hands were busy. But deep down, you knew. You knew that by doing exactly what they asked, you were just rearranging the furniture in a house with a cracked foundation. This is the trap of the obvious problem.
It feels like work, but it is actually a form of hiding. When we accept a requirement without asking what fundamental human need it is trying to serve, we are choosing the path of least resistance. It is much easier to be a "good employee" who solves the surface problem than to be a person who has the courage to ask if the problem should exist at all. If you just fix the interface of the app because the boss said it’s "clunky," you are treating the symptom.
You are acting as a tool, not a thinker. I realized this about my own teaching. I used to think I was just handing over a box of tools. But I saw that I was often just giving people permission to stay in their comfort zones.
"If I were to give them that course, I would be giving them exactly 'what they thought creativity was.'" What I mean by that is that if you only teach people to "be creative" within the boundaries of what they already see, you aren't actually teaching them anything new. You are just letting them decorate the status quo. You are letting them stay in bad faith, pretending that the "clunky interface" or the "boring product" is a fixed fact of nature rather than a choice they are making every day. And this is the part worth stealing.
The real work happens in the moment you pause before you start. It is the moment you look at that request and ask: "What is the human desire here?" If you skip that, you are just a very efficient decorator. You might produce something beautiful, but it will be a ghost.
It won't matter. The only way to do work that actually changes your life, or the lives of others, is to have the guts to stop moving. You have to be willing to sit in that void where the problem isn't defined yet. That is the only hard part.
Everything else is just moving sticky notes.
Look at everything around you; a pen, a notebook, computer, mobile phone, etc., and asked yourself, "If you were to design the world's first pen, notebook, computer, mobile phone how would you go about and design them and what will they look like?This was a challenging question that I also asked myself when I was putting together this design thinking course." When I say that, I mean that we have to strip away the layers of what we think we know. If you take away the pen, you are left with the human need to leave a mark.
If you take away the chair, you are left with the human need to rest. It is easy to be a "good" worker by making a better chair. It is much harder to be a human who decides what it means to rest. But here is the thing that keeps me up at night.
If we are so capable of stripping away the status quo to find these hidden needs, why do we choose to live in a world of symptoms instead? If we have the power to redefine the problems we face, why do we so often settle for the easy tasks of decorating the cracks? I can show you how to identify the foundation. But I can't tell you why we are so afraid to stop building the walls of the house we've already agreed to live in.