How can we encourage better personal health choices?
Sometimes people will change their unhealthy choices if they understand the consequences, while other times they need support to change their behaviors. The Meta-Problem can help navigate the challenges and balance the trade-offs of health and healthcare.
Complex problems are often vague and have many possible solutions. The Meta-Problem Method may lead you far away from the dilemma that started your quest. That’s because the method forces you to clarify what you really want and what you are willing to give up. It enables you to compare objectively the possible pathways and their trade offs. It prevents you locking into solutions mode too early and then doubling down on solving a low-yield problem that does not serve your goals as well as the alternatives. At the end of this process, you will have a better understanding of your priorities and how to achieve them.
Steps in the Meta-Problem Method
Dilemma
The high-level issue you are trying to address
Help people make healthy choices.
Goal
The changes you want to make to address the dilemma. There are usually many options.
Supporting Goals
- People have choice in their personal lives.
- People make good decisions.
Other goals could include minimizing costs, keeping trust between doctor and patient, and long-term patient health.
Problem Space
The set of problems you could chose to solve to advance your goals, plus the constraints that hold you back.
Example problems
- How can we ensure people have choice in their personal lives? Maybe the problem to solve is “Which choices should come with consequences for patients?”
- How can we help people make good decisions? Maybe the problem to solve is “Which support services help patients make better personal health decisions?”
There are many other potential problems to solve related to personal health choices. Each goal has many possible problems we could link to it. Are there other problems linked to these first two goals? Which options come to mind for the other goals?
High-Yield Problems
Sometimes solving one problem helps make progress towards several goals. In this step, we identify these “two-for-the-price-of-one” problems.
Which options will advance more than one goal?
- Charging more for patients who make poor personal health choices can make the consequences more concrete. However, incentivizing personal choices may have unintended consequences, and may not work if there are other issues leading to the unhealthy choices.
- Providing a suite of support including doctor check-ins, optional free programs, and information can help patients make better decisions about their personal health choices and can improve long-term health and reduce costs. However, some patients view offers of support as taking away their personal choice.
There are many potential solutions that will have varying effects on the set of goals. Which alternatives improve the most important goals? How might the unknown change the right path forward? What other possible solutions are there to address the dilemma?
Problem Selection
Which of the many possible options in the high-yield problem step is the best set to address the dilemma?
- Which solutions make the most sense to reform health and healthcare?
- Which solutions will best address the dilemma?
- Which solutions will deliver the best outcome for the least amount of time, effort and money?
Implement, Learn and Adapt
Check continuously that you are still solving the best problem, as new information emerges.
Observe and learn as you go. As new information reveals itself, check continuously that you’re still solving the right problem.