Understand the problem. Truly.
Christoph Jahn
CEO & Founder | Tools & Consulting for webMethods? | ????????????????.??????
It is highly relevant to truly understand a given problem before you determine a solution. This sounds totally obvious if not even a bit silly. How would anyone be able to work on a problem that is not understood? But it becomes less silly if we re-phrase things a little bit.
So far the wording implied a somewhat binary view: Either the problem is understood or not. But in reality very little is truly binary. So instead we could say that the level of understanding of a problem is the primary driver for the outcome of the attempt to solve it. That still sounds pretty obvious (better than silly, though).
The next stage in dissecting would be to say that a problem needs to be understood well enough to find a sufficient solution. And here it starts getting interesting, since we basically have an equation with two variables.
The first is about being “sufficient”. Because of resource constraints most problems will be approached with the aim to apply only a “just good enough” solution. In my profession (software engineering) this usually means a quick fix rather than a clean approach with refactoring and all the other good stuff.
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What I personally consider more impactful, though, is the “well enough”. Many people I have met so far, do happily go for the first explanation of a problem and consider it a sufficient basis for determining how it should be approached. But in most cases this means only that the symptom has been identified correctly. Neither has the direct cause for the symptom been found, nor the root cause. I see several reasons why people jump onto the “obvious” reason so eagerly rather than to dig in.
When you follow the line of argument, you will have the fundamental reason why larger organizations so often struggle to solve simple challenges in a proper way. Instead you will mostly see a myriad of changes that are applied, at best, with local optimization in mind. The latter, unfortunately, means that you are almost always moving further away from a global optimum. What good is it for a company if one department improves the financial bottom line of the current quarter at the expense of disgruntled customers that spread the word?
I don't want to advocate that nothing but perfection should be applied. But going for something that is just good enough right now, is a very different game, if you know what the proper solution would be. You have made a conscious decision and can take it from there.
Gartner Analyst - Chief Marketing Officer
1 年I make this point about ensuring a deep understanding of the problem almost every day to clients. Nice post.
Making customers successful and building great teams
3 年Nice work