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Our Unstable Artistry: Donald Schön's Counterprofessional Practice

of Problem Setting
Jeremy Cushman
Journal of Business and Technical Communication 2014 28: 327 originally
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DOI: 10.1177/1050651914524778
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Article
Journal of Business and Technical
Communication
2014, Vol. 28(3) 327-351
Our Unstable ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1050651914524778
Donald Schön’s jbtc.sagepub.com
Counterprofessional
Practice of
Problem Setting
Jeremy Cushman1
Abstract
This article considers how technical communication practitioners and
teachers can approach Donald Schön’s notion of problem setting as rheto-
rical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise language for
articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which problems
appear as problems in the first place. The author posits that problem setting,
when foregrounded in our work, adds value to the knowledge we make in
practice rather than the knowledge we gain from stepping back and
abstracting. After briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invi-
sible practice already underlying technical communication, he then describes
a vignette from a digital marketing and design firm to foreground problem
setting as creative, on-the-spot reflective work that we often use to invent,
rather than discern, problems in unstable situations. The larger goal of this
article is to further investigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine
1
Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jeremy Cushman, Western Washington University, 516 High St, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA.
E-mail: jeremy.cushman@wwu.edu

328 Journal of Business and Technical Communication 28(3)
how the practice of problem setting affects our ability to act within the
instability of digital, divergent, and knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds
of settings we regularly face in the workplace and the classroom.
Keywords
problem setting, problem solving, Schön, rhetorical practice, instability,
organizational change
Donald Schön’s (1984, 1987, 1992) work on the reflective practitioner

demonstrates that change, instability, and divergent skills forge the heart
of any professional practice. His workplace studies present professional
situations that are unstable, uncertain, and chock-full of conflicting values.
In fact, Schön’s starting point is that professional practice is characterized
by indeterminate situations that must be transformed into determinate ones
(Cervero, 2001, p. 208). For example, Schön (1984), recounting one of his
early case studies, observed that a master architect frequently talked while
he sketched the lines that would eventually become the location of a kinder-
garten class in an elementary school building. This talking while drawing
worked as a guide for this architect as he arrived at a few stable problems
from which he could begin asking more theoretical and applicable questions
(p. 80). In this example, Schön constructed a professional who worked in an
effort to get to work.
Most of the professionals that Schön (1984) described rarely began their
work from a stable hierarchy in which practice and application are subordi-
nate to more theoretical and disciplinary knowledge. Their practice rarely
moves linearly: learning an underlying discipline, setting goals, and then
solving the problems that arise from those prescribed goals. Instead, profes-
sionals, even those doing their best to adhere to such a hierarchy, practice
problem setting. And for Schön, the practice of problem setting—or of
interactively naming, framing, and constructing temporarily stable ends
from unstable situations—is the artistry of professionals and is therefore
crucial to the work, research, and pedagogies of technical communication.
My central question, then, is how can technical communication practi-
tioners and teachers approach Schön’s (1984) notion of problem setting
as rhetorical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise lan-
guage for articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which
problems appear as problems in the first place? I address this question by
first briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invisible practice

Cushman 329
already underlying technical communication. I then describe a vignette

from a digital marketing and design (DMD) firm to foreground creative,
on-the-spot reflections that we often use to invent, rather than discern, prob-
lems in unstable situations. Such a focus, I argue, can help us grow more
attentive to the generative material composing much of our workplace
situations (technologies, histories, relationships, etc.) that participates in the
invention of problems in surprising ways (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe,
2009, p. 57). My larger goal in addressing this question is to further inves-
tigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine how the practice of
problem setting affects our ability to act in digital, divergent, and
knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds of settings we regularly face in the
workplace and the classroom.
Reflecting on Schön’s Problem Setting

Placed in the context of technical communication, Schön’s (1984) construc-
tion of problem setting arguably continues Flower and Hayes’s (1977,
1981) lasting and influential project of approaching writing as a thinking
problem rather than one of arrangement and style. Writing is an action best
understood as a set of distinctive processes that writers employ, or ‘‘orches-
trate,’’ depending on the particular problems that they are working to over-
come (Flower & Hayes, 1981, p. 366). But approaching problem setting as a
way that professionals articulate and conduct on-the-spot reflections high-
lights technical communication work as an opportunity to artistically
engage with and make change rather than as the implementation of a set
of distinct, flexible, but still mechanical, heuristics and principles
(Sullivan & Porter, 1997). For this reason, I find it useful to think about the
impact that problem setting has on our ability to act in problematic situa-
tions as furthering Suchman’s (1996) notion of artful integration (p. 407).
For Suchman (1996), artful integration is a kind of articulation work,
which, much like problem setting, names the processes required to bring
together scattered professional practices and technologies into working con-
figurations (p. 407). Her goal is to reconceptualize distinct and mundane
workplace technologies as ongoing productions or new ways of work. That
is, for Suchman, our processes for solving problems are not distinct moves
or tools we employ. They are the ways in which we engage in and build our
changing work practices.
Problem setting rearticulates Suchman’s (1996) artful integrations, and
certainly Flower and Hayes’s (1981) assertion that writing is a thinking
problem, in that Schön (1984) was interested in reflective action that, to a

large degree, shuns the common notion of process, which implies that pro-
fessionals learn to select and use optimal (and linear) models, means, or
tools to address a given problem. For example, Schön might contend that
if his master architect, who talked about the designs he drew as he drew
them, had considered this practice a process, he would have known to
always select that action as an early established step. But the architect did
not always do that. Schön approached any linear process of solving given
problems as a kind of inept technical rationality, so he suggested that pro-
fessional work could be more realistically described as an actively reflec-
tive practice rather than a set of distinct processes.
In problem setting, processes are not a given because a process, in gen-
eral, presupposes a means–end analysis in which both the starting position
and the final goal are well defined. Processes require given problems. The
practice of problem setting, however, means attuning ourselves to instabil-
ity and indeterminate situations, acknowledging that processes and prob-
lems are mutually constituted. The problem solver, the problem, and the
problem-setting process cannot be separated out and treated individually.
Problem setting, at least as I describe it here, does remain on the periph-
ery of Schön’s texts (1984, 1987, 1992). Schön, rather unfortunately, often
separated out the subject (the problem solver) from the problematic situa-
tion. The individual, sometimes autonomous, reflective practitioner
remains central to much of his multifaceted work. For Schön, the reflective
practitioner—who each professional becomes at one point or another—is
capable of improvisational responses within unstable situations. Without
interrupting what they are doing, reflective practitioners come to under-
stand a situation (and, to some extent, create it) through the attempt to
change it. But attempting to change a situation also produces unintended
outcomes that give the situation new meanings. The situation, then, talks
back, and as reflective practitioners listen they learn to value what they
hear, so they can once again reframe the situation (1984, pp. 131–132).
So as Rickert (2013), arguing for a more ambient rhetoric, demonstrated,
the emplacement of a professional—here the reflective practitioner—‘‘is
essential to their activity, for context makes all that occurs possible’’
(p. 93). The master architect does not have an already-established process
of problem-solving steps to follow, even if researchers such as Flower and
Hayes (1981) can construct one retroactively. The master architect’s reflec-
tive practice includes dynamic, in-the-moment responses to a particular
project as it changes. Rickert might suggest that the architect works to
attune himself to each novel situation, trusting in a kind of expertise that
makes little use of stable, universal, a priori knowledge.

Cushman 331
But professional practice is such a whirl of attention-switching activity

that there is little time for reflection, even if it does occur in the midst
of action—somehow without interruption (Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009,
p. 1141). What’s more, Schön’s (1984) notion of reflective practice remains
an imprecise and occasionally inconsistent theory that is difficult to concep-
tualize, particularly without reducing it to conventional reflection or think-
ing about what has already occurred (Bulman, 2004, p. 9). So although
problem setting may remain on the periphery of Schön’s interest in reflec-
tion, it may also prove to be a useful, indeed more feasible, way to concep-
tualize the ongoing reflective work in technical communication than to
focus only on a reflective practice. Problem setting is reflective work that
may privilege relevant practices that we employ in the moment of our work
over applied and established research models or processes that we have put
in place outside (and often after) the actual work. As I said, Schön described
the privileging of applied models or tools over relevant practices as techni-
cal rationality. He further described it as a perspective that contends that
problems are given and can be solved by selecting established and well-
suited ends, which is a process that by design ignores the more affective,
attitudinal components of our work.
Technical rationality, to be sure, can ground technical communication
work, and thus our professional identity, in a systematic, fundamental, and
teachable body of knowledge. And such stability does benefit the technical
communication practitioner and teacher. For example, Hart-Davidson
(2001) pointed out that ‘‘when there are no labels, no language, for [technical
communication] concepts, [his] contributions have seemed, at best, myster-
ious to [his] coworkers. They often get characterized as the product of per-
sonal skill or effort, rather than a result of any identifiable body of
knowledge’’ (p. 147). Hart-Davison’s concern suggests that apart from the
opportunity to appeal to a technical rationality that allows us to determine
and, crucially, explain causes of successes and failures, our work can seem
to be little more than a talent or ‘‘knack’’ (Dubinsky, 2002, p. 131). I am sug-
gesting, however, that problem setting can be approached and discussed as
that unacknowledged and invisible work (that knack) underlying the kind
of technical rationality that technical communication practitioners and teach-
ers continue to privilege in the workplace and in the classroom. It is what we
do in the moment rather than what we might communicate after the work is
complete. Foregrounding problem setting can help us articulate technical
communication not as yet another problem-solving process or technical
rationality but rather as work in which instability serves as a continual cata-
lyst for inventive responses that are always only temporarily stabilizing.

Approached this way, problem setting is not so much a nonprofessional

practice that entirely lacks technical rationality (i.e., labels, language, and a
body of knowledge) as it is a counterprofessional and rhetorical practice
(Savage, 2004). Counterprofessional because, as Schön (1984) argued,
unstable situations are central to our practice. That is, rather than working
from a firm position of private knowledge and technical competency, from
the traditional position of the expert, problem-setting practitioners join with
both stockholders and the shifting context to inquire into a situation. They
agree to make public their own questions not only about what might be an
effective response to a situation but also about what counts as effectiveness
(Schön, 1987, p. 297). And problem setting is rhetorical because the
problem-setting practitioner must name and frame the boundaries of attention
to invent situations that are temporally stable and thus solvable. The practice
of problem setting is about production more than analysis and reflection. In
other words, problem setting does not end in asking questions, counterprofes-
sional or otherwise. The practice involves coping with complexity and some-
times overload by attuning to shifting contexts and allowing some elements
of a situation to emerge as more salient than others—even while the practi-
tioners and their rhetorical decisions intertwine with the situations they hope
to affect. Problem setting helps push technical communication practices away
from the bias toward standard processes or procedures left by industrializa-
tion (McCullough, 2013, p. 100) and toward more communicative and tacit
forms of counterprofessional and rhetorical work.
Thus, unlike technical rationality, problem setting is one way of invent-
ing, rather than selecting, established ends and means. And unlike problem-
based learning, which still depends on prior agreement concerning the ends
and available means in order to stimulate instrumental action, the practice
of problem setting assumes that problems do not present themselves as
givens that need solving. For example, when technical communicators con-
sider creating help topics and documentation for a particular piece of soft-
ware, they usually encounter an unstable situation in which issues of
language, access, funding, technology, workplace politics, expertise, and
timelines converge. Further, these professionals bring their own concerns
that also participate in the possible meaning of the situation. To begin gen-
erating useful help topics and documentation, then, the writers first have to
create temporary stability from the situation. Instability and uncertainty get
them nowhere. They need to frame a possible problem, and they may more
than likely do so unknowingly, even accidentally. Once the problem is set,
the writers might discover that they can rely on their field’s established
research or techniques for generating help topics and documentation (if in

Cushman 333
fact any exist). But as their help topics multiply and more people and con-
texts are introduced, unexpected and particular issues regarding, for exam-
ple, organization and findability could surprise them. And again, the writers
are in an unstable situation. They have to invent new problems, and thereby
temporary stability, in order to keep working. Schön (1984) explained that it
is this ‘‘sort of situation professionals are coming increasingly to see as cen-
tral to their practice’’ (p. 19), which is why he continually promotes the
knowledge gained in reflective action, particularly problem setting, over
that of technical rationality (p. 47).
And we engage problem-setting practice even more so as postindustrial
and knowledge-intensive work continues to morph and move. But problem
setting is too often concealed, both in the workplace and in academe. For
example, young employees may retroactively credit established procedures
for the invention work they engaged in while writing and designing a com-
pany’s social media campaign. Or a researcher may justify unorthodox find-
ings by offering a retrospective account of accepted academic methods.
Students too are often conditioned to work only from the problems pre-
sented to them on their assignment prompts. Too often if the problem is not
given, students cannot begin. To be sure, technical communication practi-
tioners, teachers, and students struggle to articulate their work practices
because it is difficult to recall them outside of the occasion for which they
were performed. It is also difficult to capture our work practices because we
often are expected (and expect) to express problems and solutions from a
stabilizing institutional context rather than from instability and our own
improvising actions. I am not saying that technical communication practi-
tioners and teachers in general or the specific practitioners I describe in the
following vignette are uninterested in discerning given problems. Arguably,
the salient theme in this vignette and the overarching job of technical com-
munication is to discern and respond to a situation’s given problem
(Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2013). Still, foregrounding the invisible or at
least unarticulated practice of problem setting in the vignette, and conse-
quently in our own work, research, and teaching, can positively affect our
approach to divergent situations in at least two ways:
1. by helping us approach technical communication as counterprofes-

sional work that requires rhetorical training beyond mere analysis
of given problems. Eberly (2002) argued that rhetoric is not a stable
entity or a collection of particular traits that can be outlined in a col-
lege textbook (a set of distinct processes). Unlike technical rational-
ity, rhetoric is an art and so a powerful architectonic practice

(p. 293). Technical communication practitioners and teachers need

to understand rhetorical training not simply as analytical, but as art-
ful and generative if they hope to garner ‘‘sufficient authority in the
workplace and society to be able to participate in making substan-
tive decisions about social meanings, purposes, and functions of
their work’’ (Savage, 2004, p. 174). The work in the following vign-
ette demonstrates the commitment professionals have to the inven-
tion of meaningful problems as well as the ways in which those
problems are generated.
2. by acknowledging the research underlying Kahneman’s (2011)
assertion that we (rather unconsciously) experience pleasure from
the ease of too quickly identifying coherence. The associative func-
tions of our mind tend to suppress both doubt and ambiguity, so
without being completely conscious of it, we ignore the probability
that we will always be lacking evidence that is critical to our judg-
ment, including the contexts and the built environment surrounding
us (pp. 88–89), and that our means for arriving at judgments com-
prise those same judgments. That is, we tend to seek out and affirm
problems that confirm what we already know and feel, or at least
have been trained to know and feel. As Callon, Lascoumes, and
Barthe (2009) demonstrated, what people ‘‘can say and write, what
they can assert and object to, cannot be dissociated from the obscure
work of the instruments and disciplined bodies that cooperate and
participate in their own right in the elaboration of knowledge’’
(p. 57). Foregrounding the practice of problem setting can help us
attune ourselves to the pleasure we get from quickly recognizing
coherence and thereby challenge us to question the more stabilizing
and automatic moves we make in solving given problems.
A Problem-Setting Vignette: Framing Needs With the

Best Story
In a successful DMD firm based in the Northwest, work is rarely routine.1
Each project, and indeed most decisions concerning each project, generates
a good deal of productive pause and uncertainty. In one instance, Marcie, a
user-experience expert, and Charles, a creative director, get together with
their laptops in a meeting room called Pinky, which I assume (probably
safely) refers to the color of the door. The room is small, minimalist really.
It contains nothing but a table, four chairs, a whiteboard hanging on one
wall, and the three of us. Marcie and Charles are meeting here in Pinky

Cushman 335
to discuss their latest project. DMD has charged them with generating an
initial response to a large software developer’s request for proposal (RFP),
and despite Marcie’s and Charles’s lengthy experience with this design
firm, the situation poses significant challenges for both of them.
The RFP is, to say the least, vague. Marcie and Charles can glean only
three concrete details from it:
1. The software developer wants to streamline its online help docu-

mentation and services into one Web site.
2. The developer is attracted, seemingly committed, to online dating
Web sites as a model for how users will interact with both the help
documentation and help agents.
3. The Web site, in whatever form it takes, must conform to the devel-
oper’s dramatically new (and exacting) design principles. A Web
site’s design principles dictate its organization, typography, lan-
guage, color scheme, visualizations, and so to a large extent, as
Charles and Marcie are quick to point out, the whole user
experience.
Charles starts things off with an admission that he is struggling through

an anomaly related to these design principles. Without looking up from his
laptop, he tells Marcie that a memo about this project circulated earlier that
morning, and he finds the memo contradictory. When Marcie wants to
know in what sense, he explains that the memo sounds as if it is from
‘‘someone [in the software developer’s] marketing department, and basi-
cally says, ‘Hey everybody, we’re not going to implement the [new design
principles] and aesthetics until this [project] receives some sort of approval
from somewhere else.’ Who knows from where. It doesn’t say.’’ Charles
grows more unhappy as he talks. He goes on to lament that this is all ‘‘fine
and dandy for products not already meant to be branded with these new
design principles,’’ but this particular Web site has been tied to these new
principles from the outset. He looks up at Marcie and shrugs his shoulders
as if to say, ‘‘What gives?’’
Marcie and Charles quickly agree that these new design principles play a
crucial role in their initial response to the RFP. Charles makes it clear that
not ‘‘worrying about them until approval magically happens’’ is just not
possible. A large part of their job is to consider what kind of affordances
and limitations these principles offer a would-be user of this Web site. So
yes, Marcie agrees, it is problematic that the developer appears uncon-
cerned about the implementation of the principles. Then she asks a still

visibly unhappy Charles, ‘‘Okay, so what are the possible outcomes for us
here, right now, anyway?’’ Her question surprises me in that she doesn’t
treat the RFP’s ambiguity concerning the meaning of ‘‘streamlined help
documentation,’’ the developer’s unexplained interest in online dating sites,
or the design principles as issues that must first be overcome (i.e., immedi-
ately analyzed and addressed). Unlike me, however, Charles seems to
expect her question. He nods and looks back at his laptop.
Marcie looks at me and explains, ‘‘These clients just don’t know what
they want to do. These guys never do. They want us to tell them what
they need. And the things they need really don’t exist until we make them
up, pretty much.’’ She says that her and Charles’s apprehension about this
project is that the client’s needs are not only unclear, they have yet to be
articulated. She tells me that what she can do now ‘‘is figure out how to
tell the best story of that need.’’ In fact, Marcie suggests that her work as
a user-experience expert is really about ‘‘telling a good story.’’ She frames
needs by telling the best story she can, and she is aware that the best story
she can tell is always contingent. Or as Charles explains to us both, ‘‘we
don’t need to waste our time with any gap analysis here.’’ That is, neither
Marcie nor Charles thinks that the more common practice in responding
to RFPs of asking questions about where the client is now and where they
hope to be in the future is helpful here. Charles says, ‘‘That’s just not
what [the software developer] needs, is it?’’ Marcie shakes her head,
slides closer to Charles, and opens her laptop for the first time. They both
reread the RFP while looking over what of the developer’s help services
they can find online and occasionally looking up at the ceiling or staring
at the wall.
After nearly 10 minutes of quiet, without much of any discussion about
the vague RFP and with far less discussion regarding the impact of the new
design principles, which is what I expect to happen, Charles stands up and
goes to the whiteboard. He says to Marcie, ‘‘Right, so what are our out-
comes here? What do they want in the end?’’ But they do not directly
answer this question either. Instead they quickly agree to build their own
‘‘entry points’’ into the project, and in less than 45 minutes, they write ques-
tions on the whiteboard that capture what Marcie calls the ‘‘themes of the
project,’’ or ‘‘their best way into this request’’:
1. How will users be affected by the way in which they gain access to
this new consolidated help information (from nonaffiliated Web
sites, software help menus, search engines, etc.)? How will help
agents be positioned on the site?

Cushman 337
2. What does a dating-service model really offer? (Or as Charles asks,

‘‘Why do we need to feel all intimately connected to someone fixing
our computer problems? I don’t care if my help agent likes long
walks on the beach and red wine.’’)
3. How will the (software developer’s) notion of ‘‘premium service’’ be
expressed to the user as valuable? (Marcie claims, ‘‘[The software
developer] cannot simply say it’s a premium service. That’s just lame.
We have to tell a better story about this whole premium thing.’’)
At the close of their initial meeting, Marcie and Charles decide that what
these three questions, or entry points, clarify is that they have yet to figure
out how to build a relationship between the developer’s new design princi-
ples, users, and the actual purpose of this project. Marcie says to me, ‘‘The
purpose is something we’re going to have to figure out first.’’ Their job now
is to create a document that they can present to the prospective client that
captures what kind of story this Web site will best tell about the new help
documentation and services and how that story can best account for these
entry points that they have just invented. Charles volunteers to work on the
first entry point, promising to build a few different wire frames that will, he
says, ‘‘at least let [them both] get to see some possibility in this mess.’’ Mar-
cie is happy to take on the other two points for now. They plan to get back
together at the end of the day and share what they have accomplished.
Foregrounding the Practice of Problem Setting

Clearly the situation in this vignette is vague and relatively unstable. It is
difficult if not impossible to locate a problem to which Marcie and Charles
can easily attune themselves and begin directly proposing solutions.
Nowhere does the software developer simply state, ‘‘We have a pressing
problem with X, and we are just unsure how to solve it. Please propose pos-
sible solutions to this specific problem that your firm would be willing and
able to execute.’’ As this example demonstrates, professional practice is far
more indeterminate (Engeström, 2004; Schön, 1987). All Marcie and
Charles can safely assume here is that the software developer understands
that its current online help services are insufficient, even defective. But this
assumption does not mean that Marcie and Charles have discerned a given
problem that they can start considering. Moreover, Charles might have
entered the room frustrated with a contradictory and clearly confusing
memo (Indeed, how can this perspective client ignore unapproved design
principles that will be approved only when the project is approved?), but

that situation is also not a given problem to which he and Marcie can
directly respond. The lack of clarity surrounding the design principles is
only another destabilizing element in a situation that is scattered and so dif-
ficult to control. What, Charles seems to say with his shoulder shrug, are
they to understand and do about this RFP?
At first, rather than trying to discern exactly what the developer wants,
Charles and Marcie try to generate a possible understanding. Orr (1996)
learned from his own workplace research that ‘‘understanding is not only
fragile but also variable, and [professional practitioners] work hard at dis-
covering and shaping the users’ understanding’’ so that all involved will
perceive the same situation as constituting a problem (p. 3). Software devel-
opers, as Marcie points out, rarely understand what they want; that is more
often than not her job. And Charles’s frustration with what he sees as the
developer’s disregard for the new design principles also highlights the ten-
uous understanding underlying this RFP. If the given problem is that the
developer understands it lacks a good Web site that consolidates help doc-
umentation and services, but the developer is also somewhat unconcerned
(for now) with what will be the impact of these new design principles and
has yet to specify what the problem with the help documentation is, then
Marcie and Charles lack a starting place––a problem that both parties are
attuned to and understand as a problem.
Marcie and Charles have to attune themselves to the situation in order to
shape the problem to be solved, so they must first ask about the available
ends (‘‘What are the possible outcomes for us here’’) and consequently
invent the means (entry points) that they will use to help them finally get
to work—or at least a more recognizable and communicable form of work
that technical communicators such as Hart-Davidson (2001) have suggested
is necessary to identify and articulate to others. What is important, though, is
that Marcie and Charles begin with activity––with an experience of the sit-
uation––and seem to trust that a productive awareness of the problem situ-
ation will arise from their actions. Here, as in most of our workplace
situations, ‘‘we do not have a simple decision arising from a happy holism.
Attunement is not a given’’ (Rickert, 2013, p. 87). Because the situation is
disjointed, lacking understanding, Marcie and Charles work to grow more
attuned to the situation rather than merely believe or trust in any prior under-
standings or established body of knowledge. Charles captures this notion
nicely, believing that once he gets to work on some wire frames, they will
finally start ‘‘to see some possibility in this mess.’’ Charles is working to dis-
cover and shape the situation itself as he works rather than relying solely on
his individualized expertise that exists independently of this particular RFP.

Cushman 339
Of course, Marcie and Charles’s work practices did not have to begin
the way they do. As I admit in the vignette, their initial approach takes
me by surprise. What I expect is a more traditional problem-solving
approach in which they first search out a given problem that must exist
in the RFP, work to diagnose the forces possibly causing that problem, and
then recommend a solution. Undergoing this more common process means
that the proposed work would flow from the implemented solution, more
than likely suppressing other possible problems––other possible entry
points. Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2013) argued that such a process is an
important characteristic for problem-solving technical communicators:
‘‘Technical communication, like many complex forms of communication
[including Marcie and Charles’s work], relies heavily on the ability to ana-
lyze a situation before responding to it’’ (p. 4). Marcie and Charles might
have started by taking a step back and analyzing, thinking first of audience
expectations, of only what the software developer really needed solved,
rather than of possible outcomes and different entry points. Had they done
so, we might have seen them begin researching and analyzing the software
developer’s current online help services in an effort to discover a recogniz-
able problem. This kind of analysis would demand that Marcie and Charles
work from what they already know, understand, and believe about good
online help documentation and services. So they would analyze the situa-
tion from an established body of knowledge before responding. Such ana-
lytic work is beneficial, and it might indeed help them arrive at similar
entry points into the project. But such a linear process (sensing, diagnosing,
and only then responding) does not accurately characterize Marcie and
Charles’s action in this situation.
Characterizing the kind of knowledge and experience required of Mar-
cie and Charles to arrive at their three entry points is difficult at best.
Such a description runs the risk of reducing the sophistication of their
tasks and strategies to a kind of reproducible process, the technical ration-
ality that Schön (1984) opposed. Still, we can see in the early moments of
this project that Marcie and Charles display a remarkable expertise, know-
ing how to engage the situation without first relying on or consulting an
established protocol, process, or body of knowledge ––what might be
called knowing that rather than knowing how. For example, Charles is not
frustrated with a problem posed in the RFP that he cannot solve, only with
the ambiguity that the developer communicates about these design princi-
ples. Marcie appears unconcerned by either the RFP or the developer’s
contradictory take on the design principles and first posits questions
designed to surface the best story for this specific project. Further, neither

Charles nor Marcie opens up the powerful software available to them on

their laptops in order to draft possible copy or create possible wire frames
for a Web site, which they do know that the software developer will even-
tually want. The idea of building a wire frame comes only in response to
their questions on the whiteboard, to their invented entry points. That is,
Marcie and Charles’s initial response to the RFP is counterprofessional in
that they choose not to begin work from a firm position of private knowl-
edge and technical competency.
Marcie and Charles, like many technical communication practitioners
and teachers, not only begin with uncertainty and by raising questions,
which is a well-established writing pedagogy (Hart-Davidson & Peeples,
2004, p. 276); they also began by building temporary stability into the sit-
uation, inventing for themselves problems that can be solved, at least for the
moment. They rhetorically frame a position from which to work, and by
working to attune themselves to the situation—which includes everything
from the vague RFP, the history they have with this client, their own work-
ing relationship, and professional notions of online help services to the
availability and affordances of a whiteboard—Marcie and Charles defer the
comfort of an easy, distinct, and coherent conclusion. They leave Pinky
only with entry points into a situation that will eventually, if all goes well,
shape a temporarily stable problem.
Their work, then, when characterized as problem setting, offers us as
technical communication practitioners and teachers a way to productively
approach our own work as counterprofessional and rhetorical. It also helps
us recognize that unstable situations are not voids, needing us to give them
meaning or value. The practice of problem setting is useful because our
unstable situations already mean too much. So despite Schön’s (1984,
1987) commitment to a professional’s cognitive orientation––the reflective
practitioner––the meanings we necessarily shape from unstable situations
are embedded in our workplace environments and practices. Again, prob-
lem setting, as exemplified by Marcie and Charles’s actions, helps us to pro-
ductively characterize our own approach to the work we do as a
counterprofessional practice that puts us in a better position to attune our-
selves to unstable workplace situations.
Approaching Problem Setting as a Counterprofessional Practice

Marcie and Charles do not immediately turn to an already-established body
of knowledge for direction, nor do they approach the RFP from their profes-
sional titles, as I had expected them to do. For instance, Marcie is primarily

Cushman 341
unconcerned with her role as a user-experience expert, and Charles does not
suggest that he should begin creating any visual designs (wire frames) until
the end of the meeting. Marcie and Charles first respond to the situation
itself—to the instability and uncertainty of the RFP—settling on a workable
problem constructed from the materials of the problematic situation rather
than from the professional roles they are, arguably, paid to play. Instead of
looking at the needs of the software developer’s customers, which is what I
am expecting a professional with the title user-experience expert to do,
Marcie explains to me (and so also to Charles) that what they really need
to do (what they seemingly always need to do with such clients) is create
a narrative that will help the software developer understand what it needs.
They have to first build a problem out of this puzzling and uncertain situ-
ation (Schön, 1984, p. 39). And building a temporary problem is difficult
work to articulate, but it is what allows them, and many other professional
practitioners, to get to work––to make their contributions appear less mys-
terious and less like a knack.
Marcie and Charles, of course, bring specific, communicable knowl-
edge and experience to this situation. Their professional roles entail a spe-
cific repertoire, and Marcie and Charles no doubt work from these
professional roles as they engage the RFP. For example, Marcie’s notion
of entry points is an idea grounded in usability. Each entry point highlights
a concern for a user’s experience. We can also see that Charles, a creative
director, is frustrated with the possible limitations of the new design prin-
ciples. In the end, he needs to see how the design might look to make any
meaning of the situation. But again, these specific concerns are not posited
prior to encountering the instability of the situation. Marcie and Charles
first work more generally from the uncertainty to articulate concerns that
will frame a workable situation. Although they do not express, or see-
mingly even recognize, their initial actions, Marcie and Charles first
engage the reality of the situation. They problem set, creating possible and
solvable situations before turning to their own knowledge and experience.
They work counterprofessionally.
According to Schön (1987), professionals are overly attracted to the
view that their knowledge is a product and that the more general and the-
oretical their knowledge is, the higher it is (p. 26). This is a view, he inti-
mated, that we encounter in school where a molecular idea of knowledge
is privileged. It is the business of students to get it and of teachers to see
that they get it. Worsham (2010) warned that rhetorical practice itself is
often framed as a process that expresses or converts the difficulty of real-
ity—of unstable situations—into an intellectual difficulty ‘‘through the

distancing practices of conceptual categorization, representation, analysis,

and argumentation’’ (p. 412). But foregrounding the problem-setting prac-
tices underlying our work makes such a view difficult for professional
practitioners, particularly for technical communication practitioners, to
hold. As Marcie and Charles make clear, unique and uncertain situations
come to be understood through our attempt to change them. Furthermore,
Schön (1984) argued that the practitioners’ moves also produce unin-
tended changes that give the situation new meanings (pp. 131–132). Our
problem-setting practices require that we value relevance as much, if not
more, than applied research or rigor.
For Schön (1992), professionals construct the situation within which
they set the dimensions of their problem space and invent the moves by
which they attempt to find solutions (p. 11). Marcie and Charles first attune
themselves to the situation, working with it to invent the available means
with which they can shape their problem, and, in doing so, they temporarily
stabilize an uncertain workplace situation. Without their entry points, for
example, they could not have made the problematic relationship between
the software developer’s new design principles and the project’s ambiguous
purpose a stable and thus solvable situation. Without the invention of entry
points, Marcie and Charles are left with exactly nothing to do. The stability
they are able to work from emerges from a reflective practice that presup-
poses that the situation itself can serve as a guide for navigating a way in, an
entry point (Rickert, 2013, p. 81).
Still, Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) argued, Schön’s claims about reflec-
tive practice in the workplace—and by extension, problem setting—cling
‘‘to the notion that actors come to know the world primarily through
thinking about it, converting experiences into mental maps of an outside
world’’ (p. 1343). But we can see that the action involved in problem set-
ting, at least in this case, begins not with Marcie and Charles thinking but
with the uncertainty that they encounter. I call such an action, as do Sul-
livan and Porter (1997), an art (p. 22). Marcie and Charles are working
for what will become relevant, even learning with the situation, before
reaching for what might be seen as more traditionally professional and
rigorous research. They step in to act rather than step back to abstract.
Problem setting, then, is a rhetorical practice that we use to approach
persistent change, and it can begin to serve as a means for communicat-
ing our work as a responsive and teachable art rather than a mysterious
knack. It helps us learn to expand our too often limited roles and opens
possible channels of professional communication for which there is little
imagination.

Cushman 343
Approaching Problem Setting as a Situational Embedded Practice

But Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) are hard to ignore. Foregrounding Schön’s
notion of problem setting in Marcie and Charles’s work does emphasize their
cognitive efforts, perhaps ignoring any impact that their work environment
may have on their actions. Yanow and Tsoukas might argue that, for Schön,
it is strictly the ability of such professionals to abstract and think about uncer-
tainty that generates the situation, not the other way around. Approached from
this perspective, problem setting might be easily linked to Vatz’s (1973) long-
standing, and rather settled, argument that the rhetorical situation is con-
structed by the rhetor, if it exists at all. For Vatz, the rhetor, rather than what
the rhetor responds to, is primary, and what the rhetor names is what constitutes
a rhetorical situation in the first place. Or as Perelman (1969) argued, ‘‘by the
very fact of selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience,
their importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied. Indeed such a
choice endows these elements with a presence’’ (pp. 116–117). Marcie and
Charles, arguably, do not respond to or within an unstable situation as much
as they select particular elements to focus on, consequently doing the work
of delineating a situation rather than temporarily stabilizing one.
Both Vatz’s (1973) valorization of the rhetor and Yanow and Tsoukas’s
(2009) worry that Schön’s reflective practice is also a practice of stepping
away from a situation to ponder its meaning advance the (still) dominant,
but increasingly disputed, idea that cognition operates in a linear fashion:
sense!think!act. We can see this same linearity in Johnson-Eilola and
Selber’s (2013) claim that technical communicators solve problems by sen-
sing, diagnosing, and then responding (p. 4). But the practice of problem
setting is the practice of acting in order to act again. It is not a linear prac-
tice. For example, Marcie does not attempt to discern the one true problem
in the RFP; nor does she step away and think about a possible response. She
interacts and allows questions to emerge that create a story—a narrative that
will surface possibilities for her and Charles. Likewise, Charles is almost
unable to work until he can build wire frames that will let him see the sit-
uation. He is frustrated with the limitations of the new design principles, but
he is more eager to learn how they will teach him to see all the possible
problems that the software developer has with its help documentation. Both
Marcie and Charles act first, and as they act, the situation changes, which
changes their actions. In other words, the practice of problem setting keeps
the two from substituting an easy, heuristic question that could be devel-
oped outside the situation for their intense practical involvement with this
instability (Kahneman, 2011, p. 98). Their work is entirely embedded in the

unstable situation. So in much the same way that they shun notions of pro-
cess in this work, we can approach problem setting as a technical commu-
nication practice that shuns the impractical consequences of linearity and
working apart from a situation’s instability.
Technical communication practitioners and teachers recognize their
work, and as Clark (2004) might say, their wants, needs, and indeed their
minds, through embedded practices and tools. That is why Rivers (2011)
argued that technical communication research, given that it addresses
the tools and environments in which people work and the users of those
tools and environments, is in a good position to make arguments about the
endorsements it gives and ought not to give to specific practices (p. 422).
I agree, and I am endorsing the practice of problem setting that I see at
work inside Pinky. But problem setting is not just a practice that we can
step back from and decide whether or not to endorse. Marcie and Charles
do not reflect on whether they should engage the RFP by doing some prob-
lem setting, which Rivers might say is a practice that will then dictate or
extend their thinking and their subsequent actions. This is not the extension
that we find in McLuhan’s (1994) work, in which tools are treated as mere out-
croppings of what is already internal—the workings of body and brain. These
extensions, like the brain, are actually part of what Clark (2004) called our
active mind. Marcie and Charles simply act—they have to practice problem
setting in order to find a way to move forward. And given that they both enjoy
their jobs and want to keep them, the situation requires that they find a way to
move forward.
So to be sure, Rivers (2011), and other technical communication research-
ers who have recently discussed distributed cognition, usefully argued for a
theoretical framework to help us understand many of the noncognitive and
nonbiological elements that are part and parcel of our workplace practices
(p. 412). His work demonstrates that there is not a user on one side and a
cognitive-altering practice on the other. Rather they are constitutive of each
other. But work that endorses one practice, like problem setting, over another
continues to separate the professional from the situation even while it admits
that both are caught up in a reflexive and so interdependent relationship. To
be slightly reductive, it is a theory that lets us have our cake and eat it too.
Schön, as Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) smartly pointed out, may have held this
separation as well. My point in foregrounding the practice of problem setting in
technical communication has not been to argue for its endorsement. Like
Schön (1984, 1992) argued from his case studies, I have been arguing that
problem setting is an embedded practice. It is already included in what can
be approached as a stable and therefore solvable situation. As Barad (2007)

Cushman 345
suggested, ‘‘the point is not merely that knowledge practices have material
consequences but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements
that participate in (re)configuring the world’’ (p. 91).
The practices of knowing in this case include the RFP and its procedures,
the software developer, workplace history, the concept of professional rec-
ommendations, the whiteboard, meeting spaces, help documentation,
design, usability, Charles’s frustration, Marcie’s initiative, role creation,
money, and on and on. So problem setting is not necessarily an endorsable
practice. It is a practice of knowing that already underlies anything that
Rivers (2011) might say we should consider endorsing. Problem-setting occa-
sions arguably make possible the progressive problem-solving work that such
an endorsement model would entail. As I have suggested, rather than concep-
tualizing and so expressing our work performance from stabilizing institu-
tional contexts, even those we have purposely endorsed, problem setting
entails our responding to and thus changing the unstable situation itself.
When technical communication researchers approach workplace (and
research) practices as endorsable problem-solving processes and procedures,
we can easily overlook the productive, temporarily stabilizing, and active
relationships that allow problems to emerge as problems from the beginning.
Conclusion: Beginning to Articulate

a Problem-Setting Practice
Problem setting entails professional competencies that may feel strange,
even vulnerable. Approaching problem setting as crucial rhetorical and
reflective work allows technical communication practitioners and teachers
to articulate our practices as ‘‘confrontable’’ (Schön, 1984, p. 299). Schön
suggested that professionals, both practitioners and teachers, are normally
expected to play the role of traditional experts who are unconfrontable and
keep their knowledge private so as to secure the necessities of market clo-
sure—being autonomous in practice, maintaining a formal body of knowl-
edge that is advanced in an educational setting, establishing formal
organizations that police conduct, and demanding that practitioners be cer-
tified. But when we enter into what Schön called a confrontable reflective
contract with clients or students—and I would add situations themselves—
maintaining established and private knowledge proves difficult (p. 298).
For example, technical writers charged with creating online help topics
and documentation can only get so far on their own, with their prior (and
private) expertise. Creating help documentation intertwines with an organi-
zation’s shifting identities and transformations and with the differing

affordances of available technologies and budget constraints. Technical writ-

ers share control of their task with their client and their client’s changing sit-
uation, expressing uncertainties to make themselves more confrontable. In
other words, to surface and then shape a problem from which to work, tech-
nical writers, much like Marcie and Charles, give up the rewards of relying on
their established body of knowledge and maintaining their unquestioned
authority and relative invulnerability for the chance at inventing a workable
problem and for the possibility—the satisfaction, Schön (1984) would add—
of questioning and altering their own work practices as they work.
Of course too many questions can make work awfully difficult to get
done, and problem setting could be articulated as an endless and tiring prac-
tice that gets in the way of the jobs that we have to accomplish and the skills
we are charged to teach. Engeström (2004) speculated with delightful curi-
osity about how anything at all gets accomplished at workplaces where
‘‘radical transformations’’ are the standard (p. 149). He saw the rapid trans-
formations in technologies and the constantly shifting organizational pat-
terns and workplace roles as generating not just difficult but seemingly
impossible situations. Engeström would no doubt remain unsurprised by the
difficult and shifting situation that Marcie and Charles found themselves in,
nor would he be alarmed to learn that the kind of work they do almost
always begins ambiguously. As Schön (1984) argued 20 years prior, Enges-
tröm argued that each workplace situation surfaces yet another novel situ-
ation, and most individuals would admit that, in one way or another,
situations are usually beyond their direct control. In fact, one of the first
things we see Charles do is shrug his shoulders in a kind of resignation.
There seems to be little in the situation within his direct control.
For Engeström (2004), what is curious about such seemingly unmanage-
able and impossible novelty is that while such instability may be pervasive
in professional settings, ‘‘people at work go beyond their own [workplace
roles] and limitations’’ to get things done (p. 146). Put simply, these increas-
ingly difficult and novel situations get resolved and work continues. Enges-
tröm recognized that when ‘‘massive amounts of experience in no way
guarantee an improved ability to deal with uncertainty and probabilistic rea-
soning tasks,’’ creative problems and solutions still emerge (p. 147).
Schön’s (1984) and Engeström’s (2004) simple observations are accu-
rate enough: Work does get done. Marcie and Charles attuned themselves
to an unstable situation and quickly find their own way in. Their situation
is akin to most professional practice. As many technical communication
practitioners and teachers know, instability and radical transformations at
work have hardly left us with exactly nothing to do (Harlow, 2010; Savage,

Cushman 347
2004). Instead, such contemporary concerns of workplace instability make

more apparent technical communication practitioners’ and teachers’ pro-
ductive problem-setting practices. We require and employ different kinds
of engagement, different kinds of expertise, different approaches that arise
from instability in classrooms and workplaces. We are more often than not
problem setters, working inductively with instability to influence situations
rather than working deductively for control over them. And this articulation
of problem setting, Schön (1984) might say, makes us productively con-
frontable by both clients and students (p. 299). We are challenged to articu-
late our work not as an established body of knowledge but as derived from
particular situations that change as we work to foreground a problem from
which to begin. Our own problem-setting practices emerge as we continue
to make ourselves more confrontable and to attune ourselves to concerns
about workplace instability.
For example, we get the beginning of an articulation of technical commu-
nication as a problem-setting practice in Faber’s (2002) account of his work
with a massage school that is struggling to maintain an effective organiza-
tional culture. Faber represented his expertise as vulnerable, open, and ques-
tioning rather than private and autonomous. He had to do so. The situation
was unique, and reducing the complexity and uncertainty of all that he
encountered to a recognizable problem that could then be solved by an expert
carrying an authoritative body of knowledge would not do (p. 24). To reduce
one problematic situation to one discernable problem is to see the situation as
an effect that is explainable in terms of a more fundamental layer of reality.
But as I have been arguing, our problem-setting practices work differ-
ently. Faber (2002), who was most interested in effecting positive organiza-
tional communication and change, invited his clients to inquire into his
practices and worked from their divergent stories to temporarily stabilize
widely differing experiences and understandings. Like Marcie and Charles,
Faber began from instability. All he knew was that the school’s organiza-
tional culture was deteriorating into an ‘‘us vs. them [instructors vs. stu-
dents]’’ situation (p. 74). Faber took into account the spaces in which
classes are held, he collected stories from differing populations, he asked
questions about the school’s history, he considered the changing nature of
alternative heath fields, he critically reflected on his own presence in the
situation, and he consistently revealed his own surprise and uncertainty to
the administration and to the students. By attuning himself to the situation,
Faber became confrontable. What emerged was an invented and thus stabi-
lizing problem: The school had yet to generate an identifying and unifying
story. Faber, then, decided to help the school create an organizational

handbook. As a technical communicator, he was plenty comfortable generat-

ing this kind of organizational tool. But rather than beginning his account
there, as an easily articulated solution to a set problem, Faber articulated his
role as problem setter, or as playing a purposeful role in constructing a situ-
ation in which a problem was able to be understood as a problem from the
beginning. His account, it seems to me, works to make clear the seemingly
mysterious, knack-like work of technical communication. His account fore-
grounded problem setting and, more important, allowed him to become a per-
sistent researcher into his own practice. As Schön would say (1984), he
engaged in a satisfying and continuing manner of self-education (p. 299).
Contradictory as it may sound, continually engaging in self-education at
work does not mean that Faber must begin completely anew in every situ-
ation he encounters:
When a practitioner [like Faber, Marcie, or Charles] makes sense of a situa-

tion he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his
repertoire. To see this [situation] as that one is not to subsume the first under a
familiar category or rule. (Schön, 1984, p. 138)
To approach problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work, technical

communication practitioners or scholars must approach each situation as
unique, but they draw on fragments of their past in order to engage the proble-
matic situation. In other words, ‘‘seeing this [situation] as that one’’ allows
practitioners to do in this situation as they did in that one. At the same time, the
new situation gives practitioners a unique understanding of their own reper-
toire and thereby new possibilities for action (p. 141). Latour (1993) summar-
ized this point nicely: ‘‘An actant is always an event, and events are always
completely specific: everything happens only once, and at one place’’
(p. 162). Again, that does not mean we cannot reduce one situation to another
in order to comprehend it, but such a move requires a good deal of labor; it
‘‘requires a willingness to modify our approach if reality resists it in any way’’
(Harman, 2009, p.18). Articulating our practices, both in the workplace and the
classroom, as problem setting helps us to attune ourselves to such realities.
As technical communication practitioners and teachers, we can approach
problem setting as a satisfying rhetorical practice that allows us to articulate
our work even as it changes. Problem setting helps to foreground our expertise
as one that is sustained by change. As I have argued, it is a practice in which we
often engage, and when foregrounded, it can help us articulate our own work as
something other than a repetitive execution of learned techniques in response
to recurring and common problems. We rarely encounter given problems, let

Cushman 349
alone common ones. Our work is far too divergent. And Pink (2006) convin-
cingly argued that, just as Schön envisioned, professional work continues to
change. It is moving away from the postindustrial model that prizes ‘‘sequen-
tial, literal, functional, textual, and analytic’’ skills and toward ‘‘simultaneous,
metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic’’ practices (p. 26). We can
continue to anticipate further divergence in our workplaces, research sites, and
classrooms. Through the practice and language of problem setting, we can dis-
tinguish our work and investigate the temporary stability that we invent from
particular problematic situations.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my mentor and teacher Patricia Sullivan for her insightful, inventive
feedback and her commitment to work that betters our experiences in the profes-
sional organizations for which many of us work. I am also grateful to Alex Layne,
who talked me through many of these ideas and who was even kind enough to write
with me in the early stages of this project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.
Note
1. This vignette is taken from a larger project (Cushman, 2013) in which, working
from grounded theory and ethnomethodological principles, I developed ques-
tions similar to the ones guiding this particular exploration of problem setting and
technical communication. I had the approval of my academic institutional review
board for working with human subjects.
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Author Biography
Jeremy Cushman is an assistant professor at Western Washington University. His
research and teaching interests include rhetorical theory as it connects to organiza-
tional and workplace practices, public rhetoric, issues in writing pedagogy, and what
counts as digital humanities.

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Journal of Business and

Our Unstable Artistry: Donald Schön's Counterprofessional Practice

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OnlineFirst Version of Record - Feb 26, 2014

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Donald Schön’s jbtc.sagepub.com

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Donald Schön’s (1984, 1987, 1992) work on the reflective practitioner

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already underlying technical communication. I then describe a vignette

Reflecting on Schön’s Problem Setting

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But professional practice is such a whirl of attention-switching activity

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Approached this way, problem setting is not so much a nonprofessional

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1. by helping us approach technical communication as counterprofes-

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(p. 293). Technical communication practitioners and teachers need

A Problem-Setting Vignette: Framing Needs With the

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1. The software developer wants to streamline its online help docu-

Charles starts things off with an admission that he is struggling through

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2. What does a dating-service model really offer? (Or as Charles asks,

Foregrounding the Practice of Problem Setting

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Charles nor Marcie opens up the powerful software available to them on

Approaching Problem Setting as a Counterprofessional Practice

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distancing practices of conceptual categorization, representation, analysis,

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Approaching Problem Setting as a Situational Embedded Practice

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Conclusion: Beginning to Articulate

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affordances of available technologies and budget constraints. Technical writ-

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2004). Instead, such contemporary concerns of workplace instability make

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handbook. As a technical communicator, he was plenty comfortable generat-

When a practitioner [like Faber, Marcie, or Charles] makes sense of a situa-

To approach problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work, technical

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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Cervero, R. M. (2001). Donald Schon. In P. Jarvis (Ed.), Twentieth century thinkers

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