Introduction

Now that you have worked through projects that ask you to think about how to communicate (using your professional persona) with a particular audience, it’s time to think about what happens when the audience for technical writing broadens. Career documents are intended for a relatively narrow rhetorical situation – usually, you are writing for recruiters and hiring committees in the context of trying to get hired for a job. However, technical communication works with and towards a wide variety of audiences and contexts. Technical writers may write to public audiences (public service announcements, company social media posts), consumers (customer service emails/chats, user manuals), and other experts (grant proposals, memos, white papers). Technical writing might inform, educate, or persuade, and it might do so in contexts ranging from a corporate board room to a public community meeting. Projects in the course now turn towards considerations of broader and more complex audiences, purposes, and contexts.

Chapter 7: Explore Potential Problems sets you up for the two largest projects in the course: Project 3 – Problem Primer, and Project 4 – Collaborative Grant Proposal. First, this chapter discusses how to see technical writing projects as opportunities to problem solve. This section offers two different problem solving models for you to try as you decide on a topic for Projects 3 and 4. In the next section, you will learn how to create a community profile that works ethically with community members to understand who is affected by a problem, and how.

Technical Writing as Problem Solving^[1]

In the workplace, many of the communication tasks you perform are designed to solve a problem, improve a situation, or act on an opportunity. Whether you are working for a client, for your employer, with your team, or for someone else, you will typically use some sort of organized process to tackle and solve the problem, pursue the opportunity, or to transform a challenge into an opportunity. Along the way, your communications reflect the values and policies of the organization, which, in addition to aiding in achieving goals, should also include active promotion of ethically responsible initiatives.

Using a design process can offer a clear, step-by-step plan for finding the best approach for addressing communication situations. Take a moment to search the Internet for the term “design process” and look at “images.” You will find many variations. Have a look at several of them and see if you can find a common pattern.

One commonality you will likely find in examining other people’s design process diagrams is this: The first steps in designing any solution is to clearly define the problem. When defining the problem, you are also determining, in part, a course of action. Figure 7.1 shows NASA’s basic design process. Think about the kind of communication that each step of this process might entail.

This critical first stage of the design process requires that you effectively communicate with the clients, stakeholders, or whoever has the problem that needs solving. Completing a good audience analysis will prepare you for the process. That’s why it’s important to investigate the stakeholders – that is, the people who have a stake in the results of your project. You will write up your findings about stakeholders in the Community Profile assignment that begins Project 3.

Defining the Problem

For our purposes, we will use Barry Hyman’s Problem Formulation model (2002) to clearly define a problem. Hyman’s Problem Formulation model consists of four elements:

1. Needs Statement: recognizes and describes the need for a solution or improvement to an “unsatisfactory situation.”  It answers the questions: What is wrong with the way things are currently? What is unsatisfactory about the situation? What negative effects does it cause? You may need to do research and supply data to quantify the negative effects.
2. Goals Statement: describes what the improved situation would look like once a solution has been implemented. The goal statement defines the scope of your search for a solution. At this point, do not describe your solution, only the goal that any proposed solution should achieve. The broader you make your goal, the more numerous and varied the solutions can be; a narrowly focused goal limits the number and variety of possible solutions.
3. Objectives: define measurable, specific outcomes that any feasible solution should optimize (aspects you can use to “grade” the effectiveness of the solution). Objectives provide you with ways to quantitatively measure how well any solution will solve the problem; ideally, they will allow you to compare multiple solutions and figure out which one is most effective (which one gets the highest score on meeting the objectives?).
4. Constraints:  define the limits that any feasible solution must adhere to in order to be acceptable (pass/fail conditions, range limits, etc.). The keyword here is must – constraints are the “go/no go” conditions that determine whether a solution is acceptable or not.  These often include budget and time limits, as well as legal, safety and other regulatory requirements.

Once you have this information, you can begin thinking about writing a problem statement – which will be an integral part of your Pitch assignment, discussed in Chapter 8. For now, review the short video below to understand what a problem statement contains, and why it’s critical to have one:

(What is a Problem Statement?, 2015)

Communication as a Solution

This model can apply to a communications task as well as more physical design tasks. Imagine your communications task as something that will solve a problem or improve a situation. For example, you may want to think about how to increase severe weather safety in town – specifically, how to get threat warnings to residents in a timely way. This is a communications problem that allows you to further your design thinking (Tham, 2021) skills.

Before you begin drafting your community profile and pitch, define the problem you want to solve with these documents. The questions below will help you to develop a clear understanding of the problem:

• Understand the Needs: Consider what gave rise to the need to communicate.
  • Does someone lack sufficient information to make a decision or take a position on an issue? Who, and how does this lack of information affect them?
  • Did someone request information? Who was it, and why did they request it? What do they plan to use the information to do?
  • Is there some unsatisfactory situation that needs to be remedied by communicating with your audience? What specifically is unsatisfactory about it?
  • What does your audience need from you in this communication? That is, what will they expect to hear from you in response to the problem?
• Establish Goals: Consider your purpose in writing.
  • What do you want your reader to do, think, or know? Do you want your reader to make a decision? Change their opinion or behavior? Follow a course of action?
  • What is your desired outcome? And what form and style of communication will best lead to that outcome?
  • How do the goals you have set relate to your audience’s goals?
• Define Objectives: Consider the specifics of your message and your audience to determine what criteria you should meet.
  • What form should the communication take? What content elements will you need to include? What genre constraints exist for this type of document?
  • What kind of research will be required? How will you conduct it, and how long will you need? How will you make sure your audience’s needs and knowledge are represented in your research?
  • What information does your audience want/need?
  • What do they already know?
• Identify Constraints: Consider your rhetorical situation. What conditions exist that present barriers or challenges to communication? How can you address them? What are the pass/fail conditions of this document? For example,
  • How much time is your audience willing to spend on this? How long can you make your document or presentation? (word length/time limit)
  • What format and style do they require? Is there a Style Guide you must follow? A template you can use?
  • How much time do you have to create it?  Do you have a deadline or due date?
  • Are there requirements for using sources, like academic integrity rules, style guides, or a code of ethics?

In addition to the process above, the following video provides a slightly different problem solving process; however, it incorporates many of the same principles described above. Both processes can lead you to a workable solution.

(How to Solve a Problem in Four Steps, 2015)

Together with a clear understanding of the problem, you need an understanding of the community affected by this problem. Below, we’ll discuss some techniques for learning about your stakeholders, or the people who will be affected by both the problem you’re researching and any solutions you hope to implement.

Creating a Community Profile

As you’ve learned in this class (and prior writing classes), all writing requires you to consider your audience. Thinking about your audience in technical communication is especially important because of the circumstances in which your documents are used – on the side of the road changing a tire, on a factory floor to run a machine, or to put together a computer at home. In other words, technical communication is often present in a person’s life when they need help fixing a problem, as we discussed above. That’s why the first step of Dr. Jason Tham’s (2021) design thinking framework for technical communication is empathize; a technical communicator must understand the users’ needs before it is possible to conceive of a solution.

To produce technical writing that helps audiences fix problems, technical writers must have an understanding of both the problem and the community or communities most affected by it. To start working on Projects 3 and 4, you’ll build a profile of a community affected by a problem you want to research. This will help you to practice ethical technical writing skills for a long-term, complex research-based project.

Ethical Work with Communities

Technical writers should work closely with the people who will use their documents for a variety of reasons. For one thing, companies want to make sure that their products are used by consumers both successfully and safely; one way to do that is to think about the documentation that accompanies the products and services people use. Technical writing genres like grants – let’s say for a new public cooling facility in town – need community insight to offer effective solutions for where and how to build it and how to get information about the facility to people who need it. Working ethically with members of a community takes effort and time, which pay dividends when it comes to solving problems that affect the lives of people.

One avenue to pursue when you search is academic research, which we will discuss in the next chapter. This includes both primary sources (like interviews, surveys, or observations) and secondary sources (like studies, white papers, or experiments). Libraries are a great place to start, since they can give you sources that show you how people have tried to solve problems similar to yours in the past. You can also conduct academic research yourself. For now, it’s sufficient to say that for many projects, a firm grounding in academic research work is important for thinking about how to solve a problem.

Further, you might search for community organizations dedicated to the problem you want to research. If you’d like to renovate a local park, you might check with a town’s Parks and Recreation organizations to learn who uses the park and who is currently responsible for its upkeep. If you’re interested in helping elementary school kids learn more about ecology in their backyards, you might investigate Arkansas Master Naturalists’ programs to understand how another organization did the same type of work. Community organizations do not stand in for working directly with community members, but these groups often have their finger on the pulse of a problem in a specific local area.

Though you have many options for finding information that helps you create a community profile, there is no substitute for communicating directly with the people who are experiencing the effects of the problem you want to solve. You might find community contacts through your personal network, or through a larger group like one of the community organizations discussed above. Regardless of how you find community contacts, you should ask politely for their time and treat it respectfully, should they agree to help you. It’s important to respect all the stakeholders involved in your project, but beyond that, the relationship you cultivate with community members in a professional project has a bearing on how the project turns out. In Chapter 9, we will discuss how to design a pilot study that accounts for community needs and opinions.

Questions a Community Profile Should Answer

Regardless of the form your community profile takes, you should make sure it answers the following questions:

• Who is affected by the problem?
• How are they affected?
• What are the community’s needs and goals?
• How urgent is the problem for this community? Why?
• Why does the community need to solve this problem?
• What, if anything, is already being done? By whom? How successful is this work, and why?

Though you may ultimately decide to include more information as you research your community, these questions serve as a basis for the deep understanding required to understand, plan, create, and complete technical writing solutions that are not only successful, but also helpful and attuned to the needs of the users.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to think about professional and technical communication through a problem-solving lens, you have the skills to understand any technical writing task you face, whether in a professional or personal setting. After completing your community profile, you will also have a clear understanding of the stakes of the problem you will investigate for projects 3 and 4. In the next two chapters, you’ll  learn how to use that understanding to plan and execute research on a technical writing project.

References

100% Effective. (2015). What is a Problem Statement? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCCC2kFJcQ&t=43s

DecisionSkills. (2015). How to solve a problem in four steps [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjTJAFyNrU

Hyman, B. (2002). Ch. 2: Problem formulation. In Fundamentals of engineering design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 40-54.

NASA. (2018, January 30 updated). NASA design process. NASA STEM Engagement.  https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/best/index.html Used for educational and noncommercial purposes.

Tham, Jason. (2021). Design thinking in technical communication: Solving problems through making and collaboration. Routledge.