Never Find Solutions…Find Problems
We all know the popular saying, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” which many managers have preached over the years. But I contend the opposite — we need to teach people to find the problem.
Sure, when someone says something like, “our sales are low,” it’s not helpful — it’s a problem on a very high-level that everyone can see. But determining why sales are low and focusing effort on finding the cause of the problem is far better than simply saying, “Let’s do x to increase sales.”
Why is a problem better than a solution?
A real problem is hard to find — but once you know exactly what is it, I’ve found that it never takes a long time to solve it. People are very creative with solutions to well-defined problems. Even more, it’s what smart people love to do.Give me challenging problems to solve so I’ll feel I really accomplished something.
Well-defined problems are a scarce commodity. In my everyday work, practically everyone has a new feature request or suggested improvement and says, “I have an idea—lets do this.” Their intention is good, but this is approach is almost always unhelpful. A solution is just one option to solve a problem. Instead, you should focus on a problem, and weigh 100 different solutions — then you’ll land on something truly amazing.
The culture of “the problem” is a better one
People have a tendency to find the flaw in other people’s ideas rather than focusing on what’s good or valuable. (This is a topic for another post — how to take the good out of bad ideas). Problems paradoxically makes people happy — if a problem is well-defined and accurate, people love it. It occupies their mind to find a solution and many ideas are born.
With a problem, people feel also feel involved. If I come to you with a solution, it’s my idea. But if I come to you with a problem, it can be your idea, and I’m giving you an opportunity to shine.
Give problems to your team to solve
It’s not easy to give people problems to solve. Why? Finding a well-defined problem is hard work — you need to dig into data, listen to customers, find others with the same problem, check, and recheck. Then to let go of it and give credit for the solution to someone else? That’s hard.
Even harder is resisting the temptation to solve it yourself. The problem, is sitting there, looking at you, it’s a good problem, and you’re driven to solve it. Stop! Give the problem to someone else… give it to your team.
Why “your” solution is not better
I chose the word solution and not idea, because solution is an idea to solve a specific problem. I’ve found over the years that given a well-defined problem, people will “invent” the same exact solution for it — the well-defined problem includes the solution inside. This is why your solution is not better; it’s often the same. It doesn’t make it easier to resist solving it and it doesn’t mean the solution comes easily. In my opinion, the one who finds the problem is less of an innovator than the one solving it.
