Hang a mirror next to the elevator and the complaints about its speed stop.
An office building gets complaints that the elevators are too slow. The engineering answers are obvious: faster motors, a smarter dispatch algorithm, another shaft. All are expensive and take months. Someone instead installs mirrors next to the elevator doors, and the complaints stop. The elevators are exactly as slow as before. People are now busy looking at themselves.
So what was the problem? Every engineering proposal assumed it was “slow elevators.” It was actually “unpleasant waiting,” and nobody could see the cheap answer until they stopped solving the problem as stated. Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg build their book on that gap. A problem is a difference between things as desired and things as perceived. Not things as they are, because you never have direct access to how things are. You have your perception, and it was shaped by the same framework that defined the problem in the first place.
The first definition that sounds right
School trains people to seize the first statement that looks like a problem and solve it as fast as possible, because speed counts on exams. The habit carries into work, where the first plausible problem definition is adopted without examination, and all the effort that follows goes into a problem that may not be the real one. The will to think describes people stopping once they have an answer that sounds right. Problem-solving has the same trap one level up: people stop once they have a problem that sounds right.
The authors’ test is blunt. If you cannot think of at least three things that might be wrong with your understanding of the problem, you do not understand the problem. The elevator committee could have asked who was complaining, when, and about what exactly, and the mirrors would have come into view. Asking is cheap, because the problem definition is the most valuable and most dangerous artifact in any project — more dangerous than a wrong solution, because a wrong solution to the right problem can be iterated, while the right solution to the wrong problem is a permanent waste.
Why people keep their problems
The book’s darker claim is about motive, not method: Not too many people, in the final analysis, really want their problems solved.
A problem, once accepted, does work for the person who has it. It explains why things are bad, justifies what they are doing now, and gives them a story about who they are. Solving it would take all of that away. The person who complains about their job for years and never leaves is getting something from the complaint. The focusing problem is the purest case: there is always something wrong, and when one thing is fixed the next is already waiting, because the problem’s job was never to be solved.
That changes what helping looks like. Don’t solve other people’s problems when they can solve them perfectly well themselves. And if someone is in a position to fix a problem but doesn’t feel it, the useful move is to make them feel it rather than absorb it yourself.
Doing it over
We never have enough time to do it right, but we always have enough time to do it over.
The team that rushes into the wrong problem spends more total time than one that pays up front for a better definition. McGraw put the software version well: “Without a specification, a system cannot be wrong — it can only be surprising.”
Yet the definition never becomes final, because people seldom know what they want until you give them what they asked for. Each solution reveals the next version of the problem. Which of the problems on your desk would survive being described in different words?
References:
- Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg, Are Your Lights On? How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is