There’s this growingly common mindset that failing fast is the best way to learn and, in doing so, become smarter. Read on as I try to explain that failing gets you nowhere unless you really understand what you’re trying to do to become smarter.
Becoming smarter is all about learning and applying what you learn to do different things, things you wouldn’t even imagine if you hadn’t learnt that initial new piece of knowledge. Nowadays, much to blame on Jeff Bezos and this crazy way of just listening to a part of the message, a surprisingly large number of key executives thinks that learning is just making cheap, fast mistakes. To use a buzzword, it’s all about failing fast. True enough, knowledge comes from mistakes, where we learn what doesn’t work so we don’t repeat the same mistake. The problem is, as Jon Fjeld, the executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, puts it, if there are an infinite number of bad ideas, eliminating one gets us no closer to a good idea and thus, being smarter. So, what does get us closer to knowledge and therefore, help us become smarter?
Well, just two simple things: Formulate problems properly and then solve them in a structured way. It’s unbelievable how often knowledge and good ideas are lost, just because the organization doesn’t really know what they are trying to solve and, to make matters worse, don’t apply a structured way to go about solving them.
Extensive research shows that the most common root cause for underperforming change initiatives or unsolved problems is precisely a poor problem definition. If the problem is not well defined, you aren’t able to understand what needs to be done, who needs to participate, how each one contributes to the resolution of the problem and even when you know the problem is solved. In the end, you’re unable to understand what you’re trying to learn and all your effort will be lost, although you reached that quite disappointing stage pretty fast.
Bottom line, if you want your organization to be smarter, you need to know how to formulate problems. What are then the key things you need to do to formulate effective problem statements?
- Focus on important things – Very often, organizations tend to focus on the simpler rather than the harder issues, simply because they feel that value will come from getting a quick win. There is a difference between a quick win and an irrelevant quick win. The organization needs to focus on problems that deserve effort, problems that have a clear impact on the organization mission. This however doesn’t mean that you must address big stuff. For clarity, important problems do not mean that they need to be overwhelming initiatives that take for ever to get nowhere. As Jay Forrester, one of the fathers of digital computing once said, “very often the most important problems are but little more difficult to handle than the unimportant.” Thus, you need to make sure that you do address the important stuff so that your problem statement has a chance of being effective. Unimportant stuff seldom has what it takes to reach the status of a problem and therefore, never produce effective problem statements;
- Don’t confuse diagnostics and solutions with problems – Very often, while trying to establish a problem, people are providing the diagnostic and / or the solution. Something like “The problem is that we’re not investing enough in IT” sounds familiar? Well, that’s how most of the problems are formulated and, in doing so, preventing the adequate clarification of the objectives, the identification of root causes and the definition of an execution plan that actually bridges the gap on the organization overall performance. While formulating a problem, you need to remain neutral and focus on clearly establishing the boundaries of the problem, the impacts on the organization and what would be the desirable scenario to achieve;
- Mind the gap – You must be very clear about what you want to achieve, you must articulate as precisely as possible the gap you want to fill between your current condition and the condition you want your organization to be in. Problem statements that contain stuff like “improve sales” or “reduce complaints” just don’t provide the required clarity for a problem statement to be effective. This is important because if the gap is not clear, you can’t measure progress, people don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve and the problem doesn’t get solved. Additionally, lack of clarification leads people to use broad-approach, one-size-fits-all solutions that just don’t get you anywhere near where you need to go;
- Scope your problem down – Remember that I’ve said that important problems aren’t overwhelming problems? Well, there you go. You need to keep the scope of your problem down to a dimension where you can actually produce a relevant quick win. You need to focus on identifying a manageable manifestation of the larger issue you want to solve. If you’re into strategy, this is known as a divide-and-conquer approach. You must break down larger problems into smaller pieces you can quantify and tackle, so you can produce a clear gap statement, exercise a sound control over the action plan execution and that provide quick feedback on results.
The tricky part is that putting these guidelines into practice is much harder than it seems. Firstly, because as humans, we just have a natural tendency to use our instinct and we love jumping to conclusions. It takes a lot of discipline to curb our instincts and think neutrally about the problem at hand. Another important issue, is that more often than not, it’s very difficult to quantify what you want to achieve or how the problem is affecting the organization. That’s why scoping the problem down is so important. Smaller, more precise problems, that derive from the larger one, have a much better chance of being measured and quantified and, therefore, are much easier to effectively formulate.
Real learning comes from success, not failure. So, to become smarter you need to sort out problems and have rapid learning cycles based on things that are important. To get smarter you need to understand what you’re trying to learn and to do that you really need to start formulating problems properly.
