Why You Should Ask About Emerging Solutions Early in Discovery

Near the end of every internal discovery interview, there is a question that most designers leave out or treat as an afterthought. It is, in practice, one of the most politically valuable questions in the entire journey management process.

"What solutions or projects are you already working on?"

The Political Logic

Teams in complex organizations have a well-founded fear: that someone else is independently developing a similar idea, or that leadership will not recognize the effort they have already invested. Both fears are reasonable. Both create behaviors that fragment the organization: teams work in parallel without coordinating, ideas are protected rather than shared, and duplication is discovered late — when two teams have spent months on overlapping work.

When a discovery interview surfaces emerging solutions and places them on the journey map, this dynamic changes. The work is no longer hidden. It is visible, credited, and connected to the pains and opportunities the organization is trying to address.

"There is a deep political reason for this question: you are giving people visibility and safety. Many teams fear that someone else will independently develop a similar idea, or that leadership will not recognize the effort they've already started."

The team whose emerging solution is on the map knows their work has been seen. They are more willing to share it openly, to describe its limitations honestly, and to discuss how it might combine with other efforts. This openness is the prerequisite for the coordination that happens in the Alignment and Creation phases.

What Emerging Solutions Reveal

Beyond the political benefit, emerging solutions are genuinely informative research material. They reveal three things that standard discovery questions do not surface.

They show where the organization is already moving. Emerging solutions identify the areas of the experience that teams have organically prioritized — the problems they found important enough to start working on without waiting for a formal initiative. This is valuable signal about where energy and commitment already exist.

They expose duplication early. When a designer discovers that two teams are independently developing solutions to the same customer pain — in different tools, with different assumptions, without knowledge of each other — they have found one of the highest-value problems in the organization. Connecting those teams, even just making them aware of each other's work, can save months of parallel effort.

They anchor the later ideation work. In the Creation phase, teams develop Big Solutions — strategic directions that synthesize multiple emerging efforts. That synthesis is impossible without a clear inventory of what is already underway. Discovering emerging solutions during the discovery phase means the Creation phase starts from a complete picture rather than an incomplete one.

How to Ask Without Triggering Defensiveness

The framing matters. If the question sounds like an audit — "tell me about all the projects your team is running" — it will produce guarded, incomplete answers. If it sounds like an invitation — "what are you already working on that connects to what we've been discussing?" — it will produce genuinely useful responses.

Reinforce the purpose explicitly: "I'm asking because I want to make sure your work is visible on the map. If we can see what's already in motion, we can connect efforts rather than duplicating them." This framing is honest and appealing — it offers something (visibility, credit, reduced duplication) rather than simply extracting information.

The goal is not to build a comprehensive list of all organizational projects. It is to identify the initiatives that have a direct relationship to the customer experience being mapped — the work that, if coordinated rather than siloed, could produce significantly better outcomes than it will produce in isolation.