The 4U framework: what we learned running it live with 100 facilitators on Miro

How this came together

In late 2024, we ran a webinar with Miro for their consultant community. The goal was simple: walk facilitators and consultants through the 4U framework — what it is, how it works, when to use it — and then actually use it together, live, in a real Miro workshop with the audience as the stakeholders.

Around a hundred consultants and facilitators joined. They picked up posts, scored dimensions, debated, and voted. By the end of the hour, the group had collectively run a real 4U workshop on a real challenge — and seen exactly how the framework produces a decision when it is facilitated well.

This article captures what we taught, the examples we used, and the workshop we ran. It is written for facilitators who want to add the 4U to their toolkit and run it themselves — whether in Miro or in a room with sticky notes and walls.

What is the 4U framework?

The 4U framework is a tool for assessing whether a problem is worth solving. It comes from Harvard Innovation Labs and entrepreneur Michael Skok, who developed it to help startups and venture firms decide whether a problem is real enough, painful enough, and underserved enough to justify investment.

The four dimensions are:

• Unworkable
• Unavoidable
• Urgent
• Underserved

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You look at a problem — or an idea, an opportunity, sometimes even a solution — through each of these four lenses, and decide: is this worth our time and resources, or not?

That is the entire framework. The power comes from how it forces the conversation to happen. Most teams jump from a fuzzy idea straight to a solution. The 4U slows that jump down by ninety minutes and asks four serious questions before anyone starts building.

For facilitators, the 4U is one of the highest-leverage small tools you can add to your practice. It runs in two hours. And it sits naturally as the entry point to deeper engagements — Problem Framing, Design Sprints — when the problem turns out to be worth pursuing.

The four dimensions, with real-world examples

Unworkable: how serious is the problem?

A problem is unworkable when the current way of doing things genuinely does not work — or when whatever solution exists is so expensive, so inaccessible, or so impractical that most people cannot actually use it.

The diagnostic questions are:

• Why are the current solutions not working? What is the root cause?
• If we do nothing about this, what happens?

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If the answer to the second question is nothing really, the problem is not very unworkable. If the answer is something seriously bad happens, you are looking at a genuinely unworkable situation that deserves attention.

The Netflix example. When Netflix started, the unworkable situation was Blockbuster's customers — people hated driving to the store, paying late fees, and finding their movie out of stock. Netflix's first answer was a DVD-by-mail subscription, which worked for a while. Then the situation became unworkable for Netflix itself: shipping costs kept rising, stock was limited by physical inventory, deliveries got slower, and digital streaming was emerging. The unworkable pressure forced Netflix to rebuild the business as the online streaming platform we know today. Without the unworkable pressure, that transformation would not have happened.

Unavoidable: can the problem be ignored?

Some problems can be politely sidestepped. Some cannot. Unavoidable problems are the ones a person or an organization has to address, because regulation, biology, or basic life requires it. Taxes. Aging. Education. Compliance with environmental rules. Things you do not get to opt out of.

The diagnostic questions are:

• Do we absolutely have to address this problem?
• What regulation, requirement, or pressure makes this unavoidable for our customer?
• Can we just ignore it — and what happens if we do?

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The General Motors example. Governments around the world keep tightening environmental regulations. Consumer pressure for eco-friendly transportation keeps building. For traditional car manufacturers built around combustion engines, the problem of moving toward electric vehicles is unavoidable. GM cannot simply ignore the regulatory and consumer pressure. So they are phasing out petrol and diesel ranges and investing heavily in EV models. The problem chose them; they did not choose the problem.

Urgent: how time-sensitive is the problem?

Urgency matters because it is what makes customers seek out a solution, and what makes stakeholders allocate resources. If a problem is real but not urgent, customers postpone solving it and your project never makes it to the top of any priority list.

The diagnostic questions are:

• Is this our customer's top priority right now?
• What makes it urgent — how do we know?
• Does it align with our organization's current priorities?

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Urgency is also relative. Finding a job is not urgent — until you have just been laid off. Getting vaccinated is not urgent — until there is a pandemic.

The Miro example. Before March 2020, remote collaboration tools were useful but not urgent for most organizations. Then COVID-19 forced the entire knowledge economy to shift to remote work overnight, and the problem of how do we run workshops, planning sessions, and creative work when nobody can be in the same room became urgent for millions of teams. Miro's online whiteboard already existed, but the urgency of the pandemic is what turned it from a useful tool into the infrastructure tens of millions of remote teams now rely on.

Underserved: how poorly is the problem being solved today?

A problem can be unworkable, unavoidable, and urgent — and still not be worth solving if there are already plenty of good solutions in the market. Underserved asks whether existing solutions actually meet the need, or whether there are real gaps.

The diagnostic questions are:

• What competitors or alternatives are already serving this need?
• Are the current solutions actually working, or do they have meaningful gaps?
• Is there a niche or an angle that nobody is covering well?

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The WhatsApp example. Before WhatsApp, mobile messaging was dominated by SMS. SMS had real limitations — high costs for international messages, no cross-platform compatibility between operating systems, no group messaging, no media sharing, very limited functionality overall. The market looked saturated on the surface, but it was actually underserved. WhatsApp entered with free, internet-based, cross-platform messaging with full media and group capabilities. The category looked crowded but was deeply underserved. WhatsApp built one of the largest user bases on earth on the back of that insight.

Where to use 4U in your facilitation work

The 4U is most useful at the very beginning of the discovery process, at a strategic level, before the team has committed real resources to building anything. At Design Sprint Academy we use it in three specific scenarios.

Creating new value propositions for products and services. When there is just an idea — let's build this, let's launch that, here's something I think we should do — the 4U is the right tool to run with stakeholders. It surfaces the hypotheses behind the idea, makes them comparable, and produces a clear yes, we will pursue this or no, we will not. From there the team can move into the rest of the go-to-market process: identifying target segments, doing deeper problem definition with Problem Framing, validating solutions with Design Sprints. The 4U is what makes sure the team is not investing weeks of work into the wrong starting point.

Building product roadmaps. When the team is trying to evaluate multiple problems that compete for space on the same roadmap, the 4U is a fast way to compare them on the same dimensions. Which problems are urgent? Which can wait because the market is already well-served? Which absolutely have to be addressed this year because they are unavoidable? The framework turns roadmap conversations from advocacy contests into structured comparisons.

Selecting challenges for innovation programs and hackathons. When organizations run innovation challenges — hackathons, ideation programs, internal Innovation Days — picking the right challenges is what makes the difference between an event that ships something real and one that produces forgettable demos. The 4U is the framework we use with sponsors and innovation leads to decide which challenges are worth opening up to the teams. It ensures the challenges that get into the hackathon are aligned with what the business actually wants and connected to real problems for real users.

In all three scenarios, the pattern is the same: the 4U sits early, with stakeholders, before the team has committed real resources. It is the filter that protects the more expensive work downstream.

The live demo: a hospital in peak tourist season

In the Miro webinar, after walking through the four dimensions, we ran a live 4U workshop with the audience. The scenario was deliberately specific.

Imagine you are a stakeholder at a hospital located in a major tourist destination. As the main healthcare provider in the area, your hospital serves both locals and visitors. When peak tourist season arrives, a huge influx of tourists creates a surge of new patients — disturbing hospital operations and putting heavy pressure on staff.

The challenge: Our hospital needs to manage the increased patient load more efficiently during peak tourist season — avoiding long wait times and maintaining care quality, without compromising the care provided to our local and chronic patients.

We asked the audience to imagine themselves as the hospital's stakeholders — the Chief Medical Officer, the Hospital Manager, the Chief Nursing Officer, someone from HR, someone managing patient experience. Then we walked through all four dimensions in Miro, with the audience scoring the problem live.

Here is what came out.

Unworkable — the live results

The questions: Why are current solutions not working? What is the root cause? If we do nothing, what happens?

The audience filled the canvas with consequences:

• Staff become overburdened and burn out
• Local and chronic patients suffer because of triage pressure
• No capacity for emergencies
• Patients are lost to other providers
• Difficulty distinguishing locals from visitors at intake
• Care is delivered, just much more slowly — but slow can have grave consequences in healthcare

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When the room voted, the consensus came out somewhat to completely unworkable. The hospital is still functioning — but the situation is clearly serious. The slow-care-with-grave-consequences point did most of the persuasive work in the room.

Unavoidable — the live results

The questions: Do we have to address this? Why can't we ignore it? What makes it unavoidable?

The audience surfaced:

• Tourists are always going to come — that flow is structural to the location
• The hospital is bound by the Hippocratic oath — every patient must be treated
• Patients are at risk; some have life-threatening conditions
• Tourism is projected to grow, not shrink — the problem gets worse, not better
• The hospital's reputation depends on how it handles peak season
• The staff will leave if the burnout continues
• Mistakes under pressure can be life-threatening — the hospital cannot afford the legal and ethical exposure

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The vote was decisive: completely unavoidable. The room aligned quickly here. There was no honest way to claim the hospital could simply ignore the problem.

Urgent — the live results

The questions: Is this a top priority right now? What makes it urgent? How do we know?

The audience contributed:

• Patient needs are not being met during peak periods
• Medical opportunities lost during overcrowding cannot be recovered
• Forgotten medication errors increase under pressure
• Even short delays in waiting rooms can lead to serious outcomes for some patients
• The peak season is already in motion — there is no time to plan calmly

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The room voted strongly toward urgent — though with a small caveat, because the urgency is seasonal rather than constant. Peak season is the urgent window. Off-season, the same problem feels much less time-sensitive.

Underserved — the live results

The questions: What competitors and alternatives already exist? Are current solutions working? Where are the gaps?

The audience identified:

• This is the only major hospital in the area — there is no real alternative
• Triage doesn't run efficiently for tourist surges
• Lack of medical care across nearby resorts
• A lot of resorts have no on-site doctor, or only one for too many tourists
• Language barriers between local healthcare staff and international tourists
• No coordinated response between hospital and local accommodations

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The vote: somewhere between somewhat and completely underserved. The structural reality — that it is the only major hospital in the region — made the underserved score high.

What the room walked away with

Looking at all four scores together, the hospital problem profile is strong:

• Unworkable: somewhat to completely
• Unavoidable: completely
• Urgent: strongly urgent (during peak season)
• Underserved: somewhat to completely

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This is a problem worth investing in. The framework did not produce certainty about how to solve it — that comes later, in Problem Framing and then Design Sprint work. What it produced was alignment that yes, this is a real, serious, time-bound, badly-served problem, and the stakeholders in the room now collectively own that decision.

If even one of those dimensions had come back low — if the audience had voted not at all unavoidable, for example — the framework would have surfaced that weakness in time to question the entire investment.

That is what a 4U session does. It catches the weaknesses early.

How the workshop runs in Miro

The Miro setup adds a few things that make 4U facilitation noticeably easier.

The board itself does some of the work. Each of the four dimensions gets its own frame on the canvas. Participants drop sticky notes inside the frame for the dimension they are responding to. The visual structure does what a printed flip-chart would do in a physical room — without the supplies, the wall space, or the fragility of physical post-its in a multi-stakeholder context.

Silent individual voting is built in. Miro's voting and polling features handle the individual-then-collective sequence cleanly. Each participant votes silently — no influence from the loudest voice — and the results reveal at the same time when you end the poll. This is the part of the framework that most facilitators are tempted to skip in the interest of time. Miro makes it almost zero-cost.

AI clustering accelerates synthesis. When the audience filled the underserved frame with dozens of sticky notes, we used Miro's AI clustering feature to group them by theme on the spot. In a physical workshop, this synthesis takes ten to fifteen minutes of moving stickies around the wall. In Miro, it happens in under thirty seconds. That gives back a meaningful chunk of facilitation time for the conversation that follows.

The whole thing is reusable. The board you facilitate the session in becomes the artifact you send back to stakeholders, point to in the next leadership meeting, or use as the starting input for a Problem Framing engagement. There is no need to translate sticky notes into a slide deck afterwards.

Miro published a free 4U Workshop Template we developed with them — pre-structured, with frames for each dimension, the scoring grid, and a comparison view if you are evaluating multiple challenges. It is the same template we used in the live webinar workshop, available for anyone to use in their own practice.

How to run a 4U workshop with your stakeholders

Here is the basic structure, abstracted from how we ran it live with the Miro audience.

Step 1: Identify the right stakeholders

Stakeholders are anyone with an interest or involvement in the project. They are usually internal — but they can also be investors, partners, or suppliers. What makes someone a key stakeholder for a 4U workshop is two things: power (the ability to influence the project outcomes) and interest (genuine enthusiasm or concern about the project).

For most product-development contexts, this means roles like CTO, CPO, VP Product, PMs, POs — plus business stakeholders like Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. The exact composition depends on what you are evaluating, but the principle is constant: bring the people who can both influence and care about the outcome.

Step 2: Frame the workshop and the challenge

A 4U workshop usually runs around two hours, sometimes three if you are evaluating multiple challenges or have a larger group. Frame the session clearly: we are here to evaluate one or more problems through the 4U lens, and decide whether they are worth pursuing or not.

Share the context for the problem you will be evaluating. Make sure every participant has the same starting understanding before you ask them to score anything.

Step 3: Walk through the four dimensions, one at a time

For each dimension — Unworkable, Unavoidable, Urgent, Underserved — give participants three to five minutes to silently generate evidence on sticky notes. Each note is one observation, one argument, one consequence. Encourage participants to think from multiple perspectives — the business, the customer, the users affected.

After each dimension, briefly cluster the inputs and have the group score it. A simple scale works: not at all, somewhat, completely. Or 1 to 5 if you want more resolution. Score individually first, then reveal — this is the part that protects against the loudest voice in the room setting the scores for everyone else.

Step 4: Compare across dimensions and decide

Once all four dimensions are scored, look at the pattern. A strong problem usually scores high across multiple dimensions. A problem that scores strongly on three dimensions but very low on one needs serious discussion before moving forward — a weakness on any single dimension can undermine the entire opportunity, even when the other three look strong.

The output of the workshop is a clear decision: yes, this is worth pursuing, or no, we are not going to invest in this, or sometimes yes — but we have some assumptions to validate first before we commit fully.

What you walk out with

A well-run 4U workshop produces more than a decision. It produces:

• Aligned stakeholders who now have a shared definition of the problem
• A better, sharper understanding of the problem itself, viewed from multiple perspectives
• A list of potential user personas the problem affects
• A clear sense of where to start — whose problem to solve first, which angle to address
• A list of assumptions the team will need to validate next

Most importantly: stakeholders co-owned the decision. They were in the room, they scored the dimensions themselves, they saw the same evidence everyone else saw. That ownership is what makes the decision durable when budget pressure or competing priorities show up three months later.

The honest part: 4U decisions are made with incomplete information

Here is the thing about 4U that surprises some facilitators when they first run it: stakeholders rarely have full data when they score. They are making judgment calls based on what they know, what they have seen, what their experience tells them — not based on rigorous research, customer studies, or financial modeling.

That is uncomfortable, but it is also how decisions actually get made in most organizations. Research consistently shows that senior stakeholders make most strategic decisions based on gut feeling, informed by their experience, without complete data in front of them.

The 4U does not pretend otherwise. It works precisely because it gives stakeholders a structured way to apply their judgment when they cannot wait for perfect data. The framework turns gut feeling into something visible, comparable, and discussable.

That is its real value. Not certainty — clarity.

Where 4U fits with Problem Framing and Design Sprints

The 4U is the front gate. It decides which problems are worth deeper investigation.

What comes after depends on what the workshop concluded:

• If the answer is yes, this is worth pursuing, the next step is usually a Problem Framing workshop — a deeper, one-day session that turns the validated opportunity into a well-defined problem statement with customer research, market context, and stakeholder alignment.
• If the answer is yes, but we need to test some assumptions first, the next step is targeted research or validation experiments before committing to a full Problem Framing engagement.
• If the answer is no, the team has just saved itself weeks of misdirected work, and the stakeholders have a shared, documented rationale for the decision they can refer back to.

After Problem Framing, the work continues with Design Sprints — the four-day workshop that validates solutions with real users before any real development investment.

Where to start

If you already facilitate workshops and want to add 4U to your toolkit, the lowest-risk first move is to run one. Pick a problem you have access to inside your own organization or with a client who trusts your work. Get six to eight stakeholders together for two hours. Run the four dimensions. Watch what the framework produces.

The first session teaches you the agenda. The third and fourth teach you the craft — when to push, when to slow down, when to let the disagreement stay productive instead of forcing premature resolution. By the fifth or sixth, the 4U becomes one of the most reliable small tools in your practice — the session you can pull out of your back pocket when a leadership team is stuck and needs a fast, structured way to make a real decision.