Problem Finding - The Most Important Part of the Innovation Process
My favorite analogy for problem solving is this: you’ve got a gun and you’re trying to hit a target. The target represents the problem you’re trying to solve. The gun represents innovation. You represents YOU. By aiming at the problem with your gun of innovation you hope to hit the bullseye with the right solutions.
In a perfect world the target would be 50 feet tall and you’d be sitting a few feet away with a sniper rifle shooting round after round effortlessly into the big red bullseye in the middle. In the real world, problems aren’t usually that tidy. The target’s really pretty small, sits on the top of a mountain, and is obscured from view by terrain and fog. And you don’t have a sniper rifle - you’ve got a sawed-off shotgun with limited range and a wide dispersal pattern. In creative problem solving, a shotgun is a pretty valid metaphor for the ideation process - you throw a lot of ideas against the problem hoping a few hit the mark.
“Problem finding” is the method we use for getting closer to the target before firing the shotgun. It’s a process that takes a general understanding of a problem and refines it into a series of problem statements that re-focus on what the problem REALLY is. Without problem finding you run the risk of aiming your innovation at the wrong target, or simply shooting in fog hoping an errant shot might hit something. We have to climb the mountain, cross the terrain, clear the fog, get the real target in plain view, and get as close as we can.
Problem finding makes you manipulate the problem from many perspectives:
1. What’s the ideal outcome?
2. What do we know about the current situation? What don’t we know? What are the best practices in this area?
3. How many ways can we restate it?
4. What’s the essence of the problem?
5. What are the opportunities and challenges associated with the problem?
Take, for instance, a very general problem statement like: “How can I increase sales?”
1. The ideal outcome is to increase sales by a certain amount per year, say 20 percent.
2. There may be many unknowns about the current situation. For instance, you might find that best practices in this area dictate you concentrate on customer experience and branding.
3. There are many ways to restate the problem. Try manipulating the salient words “increase sales.” What would constitute an increase in sales? “Attract more customers,” “Multiply repeat customers,” “Target new markets,” “Acquire new customers,” etc.
4. As stated, the essence of the problem is simply ‘increase sales.’ Identifying the essence creates opportunities to think laterally and transfer perspectives from other businesses - how do they do it over there?
5. Opportunities and challenges open opportunities for problem refinement. An opportunity might be to dominate an as-yet unidentified new market. A challenge might be overcoming lack of customer knowledge about the new market.
So starting with the hypothetical “How can I increase sales?” we’ve generated several new potential problem statements upon which to refocus:
- “How can I increase sales by 20% per year?”
- “How do we create a unique customer experience?”
- “How do we establish a brand?”
- “How can we get more repeat customers?”
- “How do we target other markets?”
- “How do we develop totally new markets?”
- “How do we better educate our customers?”
This is the underlying purpose of Open Source Problem Finding. Using this we can bring the target into plain view, load the shotgun, and start blasting.
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