Zooming Out & Zooming In
I love learning and helping people and teams to apply design frameworks that help empower people to improve their health at scale.
Every day our teams at Self Esteem Brands pour blood, sweat, and tears into solving the complex problem of empowering more people to take control of their health. We are evolving Anytime Fitness to be a brand centered on building relationships. Those relationships help our members improve their overall health by helping with Training, Nutrition, and Recovery. It’s a messy process and hard because to help anyone help themselves we must dig deep and get to know them. That’s really hard to do in an authentic way at scale.
A former colleague of mine at IDEO taught me this simple method used in systems design called zooming out and zooming in. In order to make real change we must zoom in to really understand a problem and dig deep. However, the deeper we zoom in the more we lose sight of the overall system and the broader goal we are trying to achieve. So we must zoom out to confirm our change makes sense in the context of the more comprehensive approach. It is this constant back and forth that allows us to get the right solution delivered the right way to drive the right outcomes.
Here is an example at an individual level. Let’s say you would like to make healthy changes to your diet to look and feel better.
Zooming Out helps set the context for the overall system and lets us start to identify some constraints and define success.
- What are your expectations? (more energy)
- How would you define your relationship with food? (complicated, emotional eater)
- How much change to your current habits are you willing to make? (minimal, my partner cooks and enjoys it)
- What is your budget for food? (pretty decent budget)
- What have you tried in the past? Why do you think that it worked or not? (everything, I start a diet white knuckle it for 2 weeks and then stop)
Zooming In — now we can dig deeper to identify potential solutions or experiments that we could run. Knowing whatever solution we come up with must make sense within the context of the broader system we defined by zooming out.
- The solution must match expectations. (we must prove how it can help create more energy)
- The solution must fit within the current relationship that this person has with food. (must account for emotions and be able to also provide comfort)
- The amount of change (must include their partner and likely having the partner cook)
- Budget (the go-to solution of personal chef might be off the table but there seems to be room to experiment here — maybe pre-packaged cook-at-home meal kits?)
- Account for past (solution must account for white-knuckling and will fail if there is a sense of deprivation)
A post for another day is how we turn the solution that works for one person into a solution that scales.
Give it a try — if you are struggling with a problem try zooming out to make sure you have a clear definition for what you are trying to solve or if you are not seeing traction zoom in and make sure you are not missing a key insight or detail.
Cheers,
Jason
