“The hard part is getting to precisely the right question; the answer is the easy part. At the point at which you can properly form the question, the answer is comparatively easy.” — Elon Musk
One of my favorite weeks of every year is a leadership offsite — the whole executive team in one room, working on strategy, on leadership, and on how to collaborate better as one company.
A group of us once kicked off the week with an exercise called “Color Blind” (originally built to train air traffic controllers in communication). We were blindfolded and handed an envelope of strange shapes in supposedly different colors — blindfolded, we had to take the moderator’s word for it. The goal: identify the two pieces missing from the full set distributed across the group. We couldn’t exchange or share pieces. And the only question the moderator would answer was, “what color is this piece?”
We noticed a few things quickly.
We were a very polite group. At least until we were nearly out of time.
Many of us were over-jet-lagged and undercaffeinated, and did not take kindly to showing up to an important meeting and being immediately blindfolded.
And, assuming we’d even heard the instructions correctly, we had no idea what was happening.
A polite chaos set in. People shouted questions the moderator wouldn’t answer. People described the shapes in their hands, loudly — have you noticed everyone speaks several decibels louder with a blindfold on? Everyone was proposing some flavor of solution that made perfect sense inside their own small, blindfolded world. The clock was running. This is a group that likes to win. The anxiety climbed.
“Hey — what on earth are we actually doing here?” one of us finally blurted out. That was the break we needed. For a second we got out of our own heads and realized that if we were going to get anywhere, we first had to agree on what we were even trying to do — what problem we were solving. We weren’t aligned on that, and so every individual solution was dead on arrival.
Without a shared understanding of the problem, there was no way to tap the collective wisdom of the group toward a solution none of us could reach alone. And in this case, it was literally impossible to solve alone.
We’re trained to be solution-oriented. We praise it — if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. “Problems” get all the negative framing the word carries. But that exercise reminded us of what most modern best-practice frameworks have landed on independently: you have to be problem-oriented first. If we don’t all see the same problem, we can’t get anywhere together.
I see it constantly. A piece of feedback comes in from a customer, or we notice what a competitor is doing, and the room starts frantically brainstorming — a collection of individuals racing to “keep up.” We jump to solutions. But what if we slowed down and made sure everyone in the room, ourselves included, understood the problem deeply and in the same way? Looked at the why behind the why. Asked whether the problem is temporary or structural, and how it connects to our strategy and our position in the industry.
Design thinking starts here — with empathizing, understanding, sitting in the problem first. Agile starts here too — clarifying the requirements, making sure everyone understands the problem, before cycling into planning and design. It’s been said a hundred ways. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
School trains the opposite reflex. When a professor asks a question, you give the answer — the solution. You don’t get to push back and tell the professor the question is wrong or incomplete. But the real world has far more degrees of freedom than a classroom. The first questions worth asking are: what problem are we actually trying to solve? What about the question might be misleading or wrong? What constraints are we assuming that don’t really exist? Do we even need to solve this — and if we did, what would we actually be accomplishing?
It isn’t easy. Try it in your next meeting. Before offering a solution, offer another angle on the problem. Work together to make sure you share the same understanding of it. Make sure it’s the right problem, and a solvable one — or one that even needs solving.
Here’s a real one. A team I worked with was trying to “increase adoption of our e-commerce platform.” They built genuinely great communications — sharp metrics on the benefits of running on the platform. Internally, everyone loved them. The sales team loved them. Based on open rates, customers seemed to love them too. Beautiful work. And nothing happened. No new accounts. No revenue lift. None of the goals hit. Back to the drawing board.
But where do you start at that drawing board? Jump straight to more creative solutions? Or ask whether we were solving the wrong problem in the first place? Maybe the battle to get those customers onto a platform was already lost, and we’d identified the wrong problem entirely — something we probably could have seen just by looking at the data we already had. How you frame and understand the problem is the single biggest factor in any solution that follows.
These are some of the hardest lessons in business. How often do we fall in love with solutions that never pan out? How many solutions have we built for problems that didn’t need solving — problems that then carry an ongoing maintenance tax, so we keep pouring energy into a dead end? (See the next piece, on the sunk cost fallacy.) We’d find a lot more success if we spent more of our time understanding and falling in love with the problem, and ran small tests to make sure the problem was worth the effort and the solution actually fit it.
On a personal note: this is the one I most often get wrong. I love ideating, and I fall in love at first sight with solutions long before I understand the problem — intuition running wild, assumptions stacking up, dots connected that may not be there. Finding the right problem and learning to love it is far more work than falling for the next clever solution. It takes time, introspection, the willingness to challenge your own assumptions and biases, openness, and a deep well of empathy. Most of all it takes the courage to change your mind, and to admit you were wrong.
I’ll hold you to being problem-oriented instead of solution-oriented if you’ll do the same for me.
(See also the most interesting three minutes of an Elon Musk interview, 3:25–6:25: https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg — and this from HBR: https://hbr.org/2012/09/are-you-solving-the-right-problem)
— Brent
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