Chapter 2

Characterizing Your
Challenge

ANGELITA C. SERRANO, PhD-BM

 1 2
Two
Important seeing the seeing the
problem-the issue opportunity-the
Viewpoints you would like to part that you think
change you can change
about it
SEEING THE OPPORTUNITIES
• have a vision of how things could be better
1. first ask yourself why things aren’t like that
already
2. what the challenges that people face today
• Tackling a great challenge is best done when you
have assessed:
1. the landscape,
2. the obstacles,
3. the opportunities, and
4. the resources available to you
 Social and environmental outcomes are
multifaceted and there are no silver bullets

Environmental deterioration, poverty, lack of social

SEEING THE safety nets, and unemployment are all due to
multiple causal pathways that cannot all be solved
CHALLENGES with the same intervention

humanitarian organizations, foundations, private

investors, and other funders often search for a
“silver bullet” that will solve a problem with one
solution
 Data Is Power
• A wealth of information and research has been
collected and conducted on social problems
facing various societies and communities to date
• Researchers from government agencies,
universities, think tanks, private consultancy
firms, and NGOs have spent millions of dollars
and person-years (A combination of time spent
working on something multiplied by the number
of people working on it) characterizing the root
causes, affected populations, and factors
influencing the world’s leading social problems
Data Is Power (continuation)

The more you know about a situation, the higher your likelihood of success in
making changes that result in tangible improvements to the affected population

it is important to understand the nature of the challenge and its underlying

sources

Take the time to familiarize yourself with key statistics and data sources, talk
to people, and keep a record of each step you take and each resource and piece
of information you find
 • Formulating your challenge-have an in-depth
understanding of
Approaching 1. why it exists
Your Topic- 2. who the characters involved are
Formulating 3. what the knowns versus unknowns are
the 4. how the surrounding environment (both
Challenge physical and social) influences the challenge
5. what the back story is
6. what the time trends are, i.e., where this is all
going
Approaching Your Topic-Communication
• need to be able to communicate this effectively
• Characterizing the challenge involves both
1. understanding the challenge for your own purposes and
2. Being able to relay its importance for others to get involved
• Start with a systematic online search (either of the general cyberspace
and/or of a journal database)
Think Like a Child
• Dig out that investigative three-year-old in you that kept asking your
parents “but why?” over and over again, regardless of the answers
they gave you
• You may never understand in black-and-white terms everything there
is to know about this challenge
• you will have at your disposal the facts that have so far been collected
by humankind on it
 • Mohammad Yunus asked, “but why?”
• Others assumed that if you are poor, you will not be
able to pay back a loan
• Yunus and the Grameen Bank showed that in 98%
of cases, microloans are in fact repaid
Question All • He questioned the assumption that only wage-
Assumptions earning middle-class people could open a bank
account.
• He believed that even people living in poverty
should have access to financial services.
• Because he questioned these assumptions, he was
able to break the mold
 means knowing exactly what you are
facing

“Start by
characterizing the narrowing it down to a manageable scope
challenge”?

becoming an expert in the topic you are

working on: both a subject matter expert
and a field expert
In order to characterize the challenge, you need
to be able to answer the following questions:
What Are You Trying to Change?
• Start by writing down what it is you are trying to change
• Describe in one sentence the challenge and how it affects people
 • Try to think of the different groups of people
• Air pollution is one such example: it affects the heart and
lungs of infants and the elderly more than the average adult
• Lack of access to water is one such example: girls and
Who Is women in remote rural settings around the world spend
Affected? hours each day walking to the nearest water source,
collecting water, and walking back
• One such example is climate change, which
disproportionately affects farmers and food producers
• “sociodemographic indicators”-age, gender, income level,
occupation
 • need to define the geographic distribution
• where you might have the opportunity to
change it
1. Global
Where Are
2. regional
These
3. country
People? 4. local level
• tricky aspect you need to think about in
terms of geographic distribution is, are the
causes and the symptoms observed in the
same places
 Understanding the root causes is the number
1 most important
Why Has
This
Challenge keep digging until you find the roots, and
then you can step back and ask yourself how
Arisen, and deep down your solution can go
Why Has It
Persisted? If it is not feasible, then social entrepreneurs
would at least go as far down the causal
pathways as possible, in order to maximize
the resulting impact
 How Do These Root Causes
Affect the Challenge and Its
Outcomes?
• Don’t be satisfied with just listing the root
causes without understanding as much as you
can the mechanisms by which these causes result
in the outcomes you are looking to change
• Tracing the pathway of each root cause to its
associated outcome is one way to do this
 1. depth of impact
a) is this a problem that’s faced by many people, affecting different
people in different ways
b) is there a small number of people who are strongly affected, versus
a large number of people who are impacted to a lesser degree
2. trends over time

Dimensions a) is this problem decreasing, increasing, or staying the same

b) are the trends different in various parts of the world, or in different
of the Social populations
c) what is causing these changes and variations
Challenge 3. uniformity versus variability
a) Is your challenge manifested in more or less the same way
everywhere, or is it highly variable
b) this is critical to designing your solution and to scaling it:
understanding to what extent the challenge differs in various places
and among various peoples, and what factors influence this
variability.
 • Observational data-
1. data can be collected prospectively, such as by
signing up a group of people to participate in a
study
2. data can be collected retrospectively, such as
Dimensions by looking into existing archives like hospital
records, government census data, etc.
of Data • Randomized control trial (RCT)-used by
researchers when they want to control the setting
in which the social outcome in question is
observed, to be sure that the factors they are
studying are indeed the cause of this outcome
(experimental)
Different implications of various study designs,
and the different dimensions of data
• Causality is an important concept to understand because if two factors are
related, that doesn’t mean one causes the other.
• Understanding the directionality of relationships is important in identifying
opportunities. If two factors are related, but the first doesn’t necessarily cause
the second, then changing the first will not necessarily change the second! The
second might affect the first instead—the arrow might go the other way! Or,
they might have a common root cause, which means you have to keep digging.
• Generalizability is another dimension you should be aware of. If a study is
conducted in one town or one country, are the results generalizable to any
setting? Or could they potentially be attributed to the unique qualities of that
setting?
 Different Types of Data

Quantitative data refers to numbers, such

Qualitative information is descriptive and
as statistics. Quantitative information can
results from interviews, surveys, and other
tell you how many people are affected,
field-based methods. It can tell you how
what proportion of the population this is,
people feel about a certain challenge and
and what their outcomes are, such as
how it affects their lives and provides
health or education test results for
examples of personal experiences with
example. Many of the above study types
this challenge.
result in quantitative data.
 • Primary data are that which you collect yourself
• Secondary data are that which have been
reported by someone else
Different
• Raw data means the original information you
Types of initially collected, such as what this person said
Data- or measured or earned.
continuation • Aggregate data means that raw data have been
grouped and summarized over many people; for
example, percentages, averages, sums, and other
statistics are aggregate data.
Prior Attempts to
Conquer the Challenge
• So many prospective social
entrepreneurs have jumped headfirst
into a challenge without doing their
homework
• Following your intuition is not enough
if your intuition is not well informed
with evidence
• Be objective, open up your mind to the
possibilities, and start from fresh like a
true detective would
DATA Analysis-Ishikawa (inverted)
The End