Which Hard Problems

In the last edition we talked about the challenge of knowing when to tackle an easy-win and when it may simply be a distraction from the more important, harder problem you need to solve. The dilemma of delivering a juggling monkey on a pedestal beautifully illustrates how easy wins can keep us from seeing what really needs our attention.

My main point in that article was that we must learn to distinguish the difference between a low-hanging piece of fruit that makes sense and one that cannibalizes resources from more important work. Without that, it’s impossible to calibrate where to spend your resources.

The Problem with Hard Problems

But, just as easy-wins lead to dilemmas, so does that question of whether to pursue a long-term, challenging project. Hard problems, like adventures, come in many shapes. Some are worthy of the outsized investment they demand. But knowing which are and which aren’t isn’t always obvious.

During the initial explosion of smart phone technology in the early 2000s, Nokia was the incumbent player with a lion’s share of the market. But, their Symbian operating system couldn’t match the flexibility that IOS and Android were already demonstrating.

At that moment, they could have joined forces and created partnerships with Apple or Google. Instead, they continued developing their own new OS, MeeGo. It had been plagued by developmental delays, but they persisted anyway.

This dragged on until the eventual MeeGo OS release in 2011! But it was too little and too late. The market had shifted and Android and IOS owned it. Nokia made a last ditch attempt to switch to Microsoft’s mobile OS—but Microsoft had also missed the boat.

With hindsight we can see that Nokia should have abandoned the MeeGo project much earlier. There are various approaches that might have signaled that it was time to move on. But there is a lot pulling us to stay the course, even when it’s the wrong one. For Nokia, it was a combination of sunk cost fallacy and the comfort they had as the incumbent. They took their dominant position for granted and that engendered hubris.

Levels of Magnification

How do you pick which problem to invest in solving?

It pays to change temporalities and look at the issues from more than the weedy close-up angle. Zoom out to 30,000 feet. Use all the cognitive tools available to consider the market, your customers and the position your project occupies from that standpoint.

Nokia didn't. They remained firmly in the perspective they had in 1999, when they dominated the mobile phone market. But while they were still viewing the world through the map of that old reality, the greater world had marched on, and with it, their position.

If they had taken 20,000 feet worth of steps back and looked at the landscape through fresh eyes, they might have cottonwood on to the futility of their effort. With that perspective, a partnership with the exploding new players could have seemed attractive. But, as they saying goes, “woulda, coulda, shoulda….”.

Microscopy

Once you have done the work of expanding the view and looking at things from the macro perspective, reverse the process. Get closer. Notice everything that’s informing the current trajectory—the decisions you’ve made without ever examining them. Poke holes in your assumptions by building rough prototypes. Test different framings.

Some hurdles only seem hard because they're unfamiliar. With fresh eyes, what appears an imposing peak is just a modest hill. In the 1950s, Taiichi Ohno was an engineer at Toyota and was tasked with trying to match US auto manufacturers in the marketplace. When he visited the US plants he saw the vast stores of inventory and initially thought that was the obstacle for Toyota and that it explained their struggle. They didn’t have the means to match the US operations in that mountain of inventory.

But, upon reflection, he recognized that US practice as an opportunity. Viewed through his eyes, it wasn’t a cushion—it was wasteful. That insight unlocked a new theme for Toyota: simplicity and efficiency. Ohno initiated “just-in-time” supply chains, which was a major contributor to the “lean” manufacturing process that accounts for much of Toyota’s ultimate domination.

As it turned out, their long-term “hard” problem to match US manufacturing practice and success was the wrong problem. In fact, it became moot with the recognition that they could exceed US economic models by building less expensive cars more quickly and cheaply.

In your own enterprise, there are projects of every duration—short-term easy wins and long-term hard nuts to crack. But they may or may not be the best projects for your current trajectory and capacities. To determine what you and your team should be doing —and NOT doing—right now is important. If you fail to make those distinctions you can burn through both cash and time.

Take advantage of every level of magnification and temporal distance. If you’re working on something that, when you zoom out 2 years won’t have moved the needle, stop. Reorientate your effort around the thing that will either have the biggest ROI in the short term, or make the biggest impact on the highest value long-term initiative.

And notice the very human impulse to stick with what you’re doing. We are not wired to change direction or quit things. Tons of cultural baggage and innate biases argue against it. But the time and resources you’ve already spent are gone. If they aren’t delivering or clearly about to deliver, move on.

If you lead a technology team then you toggle between the foundation you’re building and which next thing to fix. What if you had a brain trust of fellow tech leaders and a professional coach to work through those decisions with you? You can get that and more. Learn about the Leaders Lab mastermind program for technology leaders. Or, schedule a call with me to chat about it.