The problem with problems.
Today, many companies are taught design thinking through the lens of problem-solving-mindset; which core idea is fairly simple to convey: Identify the users problem, and use this as the foundation in your effort to identify potential solutions.
This helps you to stop viewing the matter from your perspective alone. Instead it invites you over to the consumers viewpoint, to glance at pains and problems you might alleviate them from.
However - although the shift of perspective over to you end-user is highly productive - the problem-solving-mindset might simultaneously hurt your ability to identify innovation potential.
When reducing everything into problems we inhibit our ability to view matters holistically. Opportunities may arrise from more than mere problems; they may also result from ambition, desire, dreams, habit and so on. Translating these things into problems is possible, but also very limiting. For example, is it a problem for anyone that there is still water? Of course not. Even so, many people prefer mineral water.
When we already know that people drink mineral water we can easily backtrack into problem solving mindset, and say that “People find water too boring” and “People want something as healthy as water, but less boring”. But prior to the invention of mineral water, people didn’t walk around thinking that “water is so boring”. Most of us just accept our current situation and its limitations, because our frame of reference haven’t been exposed to opportunities outside these limitations yet; A person who have never experienced chololate will not long for chocolate.
When working with groups of various innovation experience I find that the problem-focus becomes very confusing and abstract. Remarks include: “What is a problem”, “how do we find the problems”, “what is a good way to formulate them”, and “how do we go from there to solutions?”
How many thought that they had a problem because their phone didn’t have a touch screen, prior to apple launched it’s revolutionary device? Did people in the 90’s experience the lack of instant access to news about up-and-coming celebrities as problematic? Possible, sure, but finding the correct problems that guides you towards creating the iPhone or twitter is nearly impossible.
Furthermore, how do you know that the problem you are focusing on is critical for the user? Consider the Laser Disc (1978), invented just two years after the VHS (1976). Watching VHS videos at home included many problems; the video quality was not good, nor was the sound, rewinding the cassette was slow and the film lost quality over time. The Laser Disc was superior to the VHS on all these parameters; still the VHS was dominant all the way until the DVD took over around the turn of the millenia.
As it turned out, people were less concerned with the problems of VHS, and instead more invested in getting their job done; watching a movie at home. Low cost was more important than quality, and since the VHS solved the job good enough, the willingness to pay was low for products of increased quality.
Instead of viewing the world around our users as a collection of pain points and problems, we can look for what people currently want done for/by them — jobs-to-be-done. As Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, creator of the theory of JTBD, the customer “… simply has a job to be done and is seeking to ‘hire’ the best product or service to do it”.
Allowing your team to identify jobs the customers want/need done helps you keep a more holistic view of the customers situation; what is s/he trying to accomplish and what are s/he currently hiring today for this job? Will our product or service solve the job better than current solutions?
Please let me underscore a very important point: Humans are beings of habit. When introducing a new way to solve a job, people have to both fire their current solution, as well as hire your. This has an energy cost to the user, which creates a threshold. Acknowledging this threshold is very important when creating your solution; it not only has to be better, it has to be perceived as so much better that people are willing to invest energy into changing their habits.
Lastly, keep in mind that people often hire a solution that is very difficult to compete with; namely doing nothing. We live in a hectic, stressful world and are bombarded with commercials and opinions. We can’t care about everything we encounter. Thus, millions choose not to vote instead of making a choice, while many choose not to exercise even though it objectively is good for you. At home, my girlfriend is often annoyed at me for hiring this solution to the job of emptying the dishwasher.
Shifting focus from problems and pain points allows us to better understand the whole situation; what is the context, competing solutions, habits, aspirations and so on. We spend less time problematizing an issue, and more on understanding behavior and solution space.
In short, innovation isn’t about problems, it’s about opportunities.
