Question the Question

How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? This is one of my favorite riddles, because the snarky reference to a very real benefit of a design-driven approach to problem solving and innovation.

The answer (“Does it have to be a light bulb?”) points to the supreme value of questioning the premise. Design thinking does this for problem solvers in organizations in more than one way.

Firstly, whereas most organizational problem solving boils down to “implement this solution to this problem,” design first says, “Are we sure this is the right solution?” and proceeds to generate options before settling on the best solution to implement. That’s one sense in which design questions the premise: generating alternatives before implementing solutions.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the other thing that makes a design driven approach so special is that design says, “Are we sure this is the right problem?”

In our world, a proper frame on a problem is every bit as meaningful of an output of the process as the solution is. While John Dewey famously quipped, “A problem well-put is half-solved,” it always surprises me how little attention is given to precisely framing problems in business.

After a recent keynote on these dual outputs of the design process, a participant from a large tech company approached the stage. “So let me get this straight: You’re telling me that there are actually two outputs of the design thinking process? Not only the answer, but also the question?"

"Yes," I said.

"… Cool. That’s soooo different from how we approach things at my company. The problem is always given, and it’s only our job to solve it. But we can do all sorts of things with technology that don’t actually solve a meaningful problem, so this is huge.”

We see this all the time in our work with organizations. We get days into an innovation effort only to realize that the problem given isn’t really a problem, after all. As my friend Philipe Barreaud, who runs Michelin’s Customer Innovation Lab, says, “Most of the time, the problem is the problem.”

He’s discovered that it’s often the framing of the given problem to be solved that is itself the problem. But if a team (or often, the leader of a team who’s commissioning exploratory work) is willing to question the premise, and exert effort to define the right problem, much of the hard work is solved.

As Einstein supposedly said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

Which is to say, if you want to be a genius, make sure you’re solving the right problem.

Related: Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution (Guest Post by Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze)

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