Business design is a human-centred approach to innovation and problem-solving that focuses on people’s needs. Whether you want to create or improve a product, service, program or experience to make it more meaningful, effortless and/or more inclusive and equitable, you can employ a business design framework. This entails an end-to-end process.

At Rotman, we use a four-step framework, conceptualized by innovation educator and former Business Design Initiative academic director Dr. Angèle Beausoleil, to navigate an end-to-end innovation process. This framework integrates techniques, frameworks and mindsets to start, find, frame and solve any business problem in a human-centered way.

There are many models or frameworks for business design, but they all have one thing in common: Using human-centred design to develop clear vision of what’s next and how to implement it, with a deep understanding of the people, processes and systems that you’re designing for. Not every situation organizations face demands the entire process. Leaders can also make a habit of embracing various elements of business design to apply its lens to traditional approaches to problem-solving and innovation.

Focusing on problem framing is one way to apply a business-design lens to solving issues with your team. In our view, it is the most important step in any problem-solving process. By embedding a design lens at the beginning of your project, you will be setting yourself up for a more human-centred outcome.

Typically, when we approach innovation or look to make a change in an organization, we ask questions like, “What direction or strategy is financially sound for the business? What is feasible in terms of the technology, processes, systems or platforms we already have in place?”

When you add a problem-framing step and bring in a human-centred lens, you will also ask a slew of additional questions about people. What would be most desirable for our users? What unmet needs might they have? What drives their behaviours? What are the broader contexts that underpin the pain points are they experiencing with our current offerings?

Doing this isn’t just the right thing to do. We have seen again and again that answers to such questions can provide competitive advantage. McKinsey recently ranked companies by the degree to which design is integrated into their corporate strategy and operational processes. The result: Those with top quartile scores outperformed industry benchmarks by as much as two to one. Similar findings came out of the Design Management Institute, which found that design-centric companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 211 per cent. Clearly, understanding your target audience is a powerful source of competitive advantage.

So, what exactly is problem framing? Problem framing begins the moment you identify a business challenge in your organization. It involves translating a ‘business question’ into ‘people questions’ to prompt your team to shift their perspective from a purely business lens to one that considers the humans affected by and influencing the problem. In doing so, you surface your team’s assumptions around what you think the cause of the problem is, identify key stakeholders and set clear objectives for your research. For example, if your business challenge involves addressing a drop in sales of a luxury product, your people questions might be around what that product means to specific sub-groups of people and how these meanings might impact their decisions. Problem framing is powerful tool for creating alignment within your team, as it helps surface orthodoxies, assumptions and surface-level solutions from each team member, encouraging a deeper and more collaborative approach to problem solving.

You can think about the significance of problem framing as the difference between facts and meaning. A typical, traditional approach to innovation or problem-solving focuses more on the quantitative side. To make an analogy, we’re asking, “How do you like your steak cooked?” But when you apply a design lens, you’re more interested in the human context, so you would ask, “Why are you eating in the first place?” In doing so, you can unpack the problem and what it means from a human perspective. This exercise can also prompt you to ask questions like “what could be?” and “what if…” — opening up multiple pathways to solutions.

Take traditional business questions like, “How can we cut costs?” “How can we enter a new market?” Or “How can we make more revenue?” These are standard problems that people encounter every day when doing business. But what are the people questions that we might think about asking? They could include, “How do people interact with our service? Are there any unmet or emerging needs?”

To address the people side of a problem, you need to look into what drives action and identify barriers to action from a people perspective. You need to consider people’s expectations, and when they’re not met, what their pain points are. What challenges are these people facing? We also need to understand the broader context that shapes all of these things, because they don’t exist in a vacuum.

Years ago, one of us [Emma] worked with a well-known global shipping and logistics company at a time when it was having trouble growing its small- and medium-size businesses (SMEs) segment. At the top of the list of issues to address was customs clearance. When you’re sending packages across international borders, if you haven’t done all the paperwork properly, packages often get trapped in clearance. This was really affecting the company’s ability to grow and even to retain this segment. The business question was, “How can we improve customer sentiment in order to retain and grow this segment?”

The client came in with a list of assumptions and a hypothesis about how to solve the problem. Clearance is really complicated, especially when you’re sending things over international borders. The team believed it would help to create customs clearance training modules in the form of online webinars. This would help their customers have better outcomes, they felt.

The business design team said, “Okay, sure, maybe that is true. But first, let’s ask some people questions. What is the experience really like for these SMEs? And what do they expect from the shipping company? Is the experience the same when they work with other companies? And what drives their decisions around who to use for these complicated processes?”

We did some research in nine global markets, and some clear common themes emerged. We found out that these companies actually expected that their packages would get held up in customs. A lot of SMEs send complicated items — everything from blood plasma to gold bullion — so they expected the process to be complicated. Where they were falling down, it turned out, was in troubleshooting and customer service after the expected hold-up took place.

We learned that customers expectations were being set, not by fellow shipping companies, but by companies like Amazon and Uber that had raised the bar very high for customer service and troubleshooting. These learnings completely pivoted the approach to solving this problem. We shifted the solution from “shipping education” to a broader customer experience strategy that focused on proactive problem mitigation using customer analytic data, as well as entirely reimagined their customer service strategy for when things went wrong.

Another time, the client was a large global financial institution and its employee portal. They were experiencing poor engagement with the portal amid a highly global distributed set of teams. The business question was, “How can we get people to use this important communications portal?”

The client’s hypothesis had to do with how information was stored and accessed. They felt like “If we can figure out how to do this better, more people are going to use it.” We said, “Okay, we can work on that, but let’s first understand the experience of working amidst a highly distributed set of teams. What was it like working in such a complex environment? How were people communicating? How was information and communication impacting how people collaborated and the broader experience of work?”

We learned that the biggest problem these folks were facing had to do with collaboration. We shifted from a focus on information management to an experience strategy that had to do with proactive information pushing, as well as collaboration tools for teams. In the end, we were able to shift the direction of the solution to meet their needs.

Another client was a Fortune 500 insurance company, that was struggling to sell life insurance to Millennials. The client team wanted to know what kinds of products and services would attract and retain younger, first-time insurance buyers. Their hypothesis was, “Our products just aren’t relevant to this audience.” Of course, we said, “What are some of the people questions that we could ask?”

We asked a lot of them, including, what does risk mean to younger first-time insurance buyers? How is it experienced by them? What does insurance even mean to this cohort? How much do they know about it? And what are their needs and expectations around product experience?

The biggest thing we learned was that Millennials were having a really hard time with “adulting.” They didn’t view themselves as being ‘ready’ for these kinds of products. It wasn’t that the products weren’t relevant; they just didn’t see themselves as ready to have this kind of financial product in their life yet. This shifted our approach, moving us away from the product to broader services and experience designs for people who don’t really believe that they’re adults yet. It took us in a very different direction.

So, what are the key takeaways? Think about a problem or challenge that your team is working on right now. What is the business question? What is the thing that you’re trying to solve for? What are your assumptions around what is underlying this problem? What is your hypothesis about what is going to solve it? Really interrogate that.

Then, move on to the human questions for this problem: Who would be involved or implicated by the strategy or solution that you are coming up with? Whose voices do you need to hear from in order to better understand and translate this into a “human frame?”

When we’re looking to achieve innovation or try and make some sort of transformation in an organization, applying this kind of lens can be very powerful. It broadens our understanding of what we’re solving for and opens up different pathways to solution design.

Together, we have been working in this space for a combined 20 years now, and we have rarely seen a project that uses any framework — even the business design framework — from end to end. Based on our experience, the root of business design is about seeing things through a human-centred lens to achieve a broader contextual understanding. When you do this, powerful solutions to problems are sure to follow.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Rotman Management magazine. If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to the magazine or to the Rotman Insights Hub bi-weekly newsletter.