Define first, solve second

Dwayne Spradlin, writing for Harvard Business Review:

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.

Those were wise words, but from what I have observed, most organizations don’t heed them when tackling innovation projects. Indeed, when developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

Different fields have their own way of framing this problem. Medicine, strategy, data, design, advertising and innovation all circle the same point: the hardest part is often not finding a solution. It is understanding the problem well enough to know what a solution would even mean.

There is broad agreement that deeper understanding leads to better, stronger, more elegant solutions that are easier to implement. There is also broad evidence, usually found in meeting rooms, that people prefer to start solving before they have properly defined what needs solving.

The solution feels like progress. The question is where the progress begins.