I’m trying to come up with a template for questions of the form “How should we improve X?” I assume most such questions will involve answering many subquestions. Sometimes the answers to those subquestions will be implied in the context, or the questions may not all be relevant. But my guess is that the larger and more complicated the system is that would be improved, the more you’d want to explicitly answer these subquestions.
There are many ways you may be able to help me. This question is a bit meta, in the sense that I’m trying to improve something (the template). Here are the questions from the template that seem relevant here. Feel free to contribute to any of these:
What is the status quo?
Here’s the template so far:
What is the status quo?
What are the strengths of the status quo (that we want to try and keep)?
What are the problems?
Given these problems, why are people still tolerating the status quo (if they are)?
What are the goals we are aiming for?
Possibly ordered by easiest to most difficult to achieve.
What are the goals we shouldn’t aim for?
Often times setting up non-goals is important to guard against scope creep.
What resources might help in making progress in X?
What information might be relevant?
Is there scientific research relevant to the question?
Are there relevant arguments presented in articles or online discussions?
Who may be able/willing to help?
What are the possible improvements to X?
What actions are currently in progress that attempt to improve X?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each option?
How likely is it that the proposed improvement would make things worse?
When will each proposal be ready to be acted on?
Are there stakeholders that should sign off on the proposal?
What has been tried already?
Why did it succeed/fail?
What outcomes are/should we measure in determining the success of this action?
What are the goals we are aiming for?
I’d like to have a template that could be used to start new question pages that have the form “How should we improve X?”
The template should be applicable across a wide range of progress type questions.
The template should feel useful to people asking these sorts of questions.
What are the goals we shouldn’t aim for?
We shouldn’t aim to cover every single possible question that could be relevant to the top level question. That would be too overwhelming.
What are the possible improvements to the template?
What outcomes are/should we measure in determining success?
I guess anyone who wants to test the thing can try to use the template and give feedback on if it was helpful or not.
What are the possible difficulties in making improvements in this area?
It will be a tough balance to strike to have a template that’s sufficiently general such that it applies to many situations, but at the same time has enough detail to have some marginal value over just asking the question without the template.
Are there any analogous systems that we might look to for inspiration?
RFC’s seem to have a similar structure to “how do we improve X” type questions.
Process Improvement theory may be close enough to be relevant.
[from nim]: “Science of decision-making may be interesting, as it tends to be predicated on the assumption that decisions need to pick or create the “best” option, aka an improvement.”
[Question] What questions should we ask ourselves when trying to improve something?
I’m trying to come up with a template for questions of the form “How should we improve X?” I assume most such questions will involve answering many subquestions. Sometimes the answers to those subquestions will be implied in the context, or the questions may not all be relevant. But my guess is that the larger and more complicated the system is that would be improved, the more you’d want to explicitly answer these subquestions.
There are many ways you may be able to help me. This question is a bit meta, in the sense that I’m trying to improve something (the template). Here are the questions from the template that seem relevant here. Feel free to contribute to any of these:
What is the status quo?
Here’s the template so far:
What is the status quo?
What are the strengths of the status quo (that we want to try and keep)?
What are the problems?
Given these problems, why are people still tolerating the status quo (if they are)?
What are the goals we are aiming for?
Possibly ordered by easiest to most difficult to achieve.
What are the goals we shouldn’t aim for?
Often times setting up non-goals is important to guard against scope creep.
What resources might help in making progress in X?
What information might be relevant?
Is there scientific research relevant to the question?
Are there relevant arguments presented in articles or online discussions?
Who may be able/willing to help?
What are the possible improvements to X?
What actions are currently in progress that attempt to improve X?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each option?
How likely is it that the proposed improvement would make things worse?
When will each proposal be ready to be acted on?
Are there stakeholders that should sign off on the proposal?
What has been tried already?
Why did it succeed/fail?
What outcomes are/should we measure in determining the success of this action?
What are the goals we are aiming for?
I’d like to have a template that could be used to start new question pages that have the form “How should we improve X?”
The template should be applicable across a wide range of progress type questions.
The template should feel useful to people asking these sorts of questions.
What are the goals we shouldn’t aim for?
We shouldn’t aim to cover every single possible question that could be relevant to the top level question. That would be too overwhelming.
What resources might help in making progress?
What information might be relevant?
Process Improvement Theory and Application (maybe this is relevant?)
Who may be able/willing to help?
reddit? what subreddits might be able to help?
What are the possible improvements to the template?
What outcomes are/should we measure in determining success?
I guess anyone who wants to test the thing can try to use the template and give feedback on if it was helpful or not.
What are the possible difficulties in making improvements in this area?
It will be a tough balance to strike to have a template that’s sufficiently general such that it applies to many situations, but at the same time has enough detail to have some marginal value over just asking the question without the template.
Are there any analogous systems that we might look to for inspiration?
RFC’s seem to have a similar structure to “how do we improve X” type questions.
Process Improvement theory may be close enough to be relevant.
[from nim]: “Science of decision-making may be interesting, as it tends to be predicated on the assumption that decisions need to pick or create the “best” option, aka an improvement.”