The Awesomeness of our Idea or Solution Starts with the Problem
I’m starting to realize that we have a serious problem with problems. Unfortunately, this affects the power and success of the solutions we seek to develop.
Round 2 of my social entrepreneurship refresh with this free Acumen course, has been focused on identifying and understanding the social problem you want to tackle. Woah is that timely to me both personally and in seeking the most effective ways to engage and have an impact right now.
Many driven organizations (non-profit, profit, govt.) and individuals on both sides of the political and progressive spectrum are seeking to tackle issues with certain interventions. Presumably, their interventions are designed to address the problem. But through my experiences in different sectors, I’m starting to realize that for a number of reasons — we are spinning out solutions without getting at the REAL PROBLEM. And that’s a real problem.
As I said in my previous musings about social entrepreneurship, I seek to offer more launching points for conversation than expert truths. From the great readings that we were provided, I’m distilling three key takeaways around the challenge of identifying and understanding problems that I believe can apply to more than one sector:
*Take on a problem that truly moves YOU versus pursuing market opportunity alone.
Many problems by nature of their intersectionality and complexity are not easy to solve. On the other end of the spectrum, there are some simpler problems such as difficulty in opening spaghetti sauce jars in order to cook (my older parents have issues and even I have issues depending on the jar!). There are many things that we might be compelled to take on right now. Consider putting your attention on something that you really care about, that you could spend hours doing without feeling like it’s work. That “thing,” will most likely be what you will be able to best apply your skills, creativity and stamina towards. From an investment/profit perspective, you will probably end up creating a better, more marketable solution or product to test. To figure things out, the readings this past week suggested an exercise of using different colored post-its or index cards to separately identify — problems, passions and skills. Once you have put them down, play around with their arrangements to explore if anything jumps out at you as exciting.
Here’s an example of a bioengineering professor who is inventing solutions in health care and inspiring her students to do the same.
*Spend a little longer on trying to get clear on what problem you are trying to solve and it’s true CAUSE. Dig deeper. Ask questions & listen.
What problem is an immigration ban of people entering the U.S. from specific countries seeking to solve exactly? Will this type of profiling truly deter threats? Is there data or evidence or a deeper understanding available to back this up? Is this response truly addressing the frustration of those who this ban is seeking to appease? Will this really improve THEIR quality of life? I have an obvious bias but I’m using this as an example around seriously asking these questions to get at a more earnest exploration of any problem we are trying to address.
Similarly, one of the biggest insights I gained from my work at the HHS IDEA Lab was that many of the initial ideas of the teams we supported, were not actually speaking directly to the problem they wanted to fix and its cause. For example, a wonderful Indian Health Service team from a hospital in Arizona wanted to jump into solving the issue of extremely long emergency room wait times. Through the exploratory work they did in the three-month Ignite Accelerator program, they discovered the problem wasn’t what they thought it was and designed a solution accordingly. Check out their case study here (scroll to page 13). If you are interested, this video also speaks to their journey to understand the problem. And this team (as in many others) came to realize that a fancy tech solution might not be addressing the core challenge, though it could be a piece of the puzzle.
In this process of trying to define a problem and solve for its cause, we should also keep in mind that people, companies and even non-profit organizations are not always seeking to truly solve a problem and come up with a more effective solution. In this great piece on Wicked Problems, Jon Kolko talks about the fact that many companies (in the examples he shared) are not focused on solving problems because they are more interested in the quick, immediate returns of making small improvements and tweaks that you will pay money for on the regular (ahem Apple). In other words, why create the perfect thing you can buy once, when we can make you buy little fixes frequently? And let’s be equal opportunity here, though theoretically the ultimate goal of any socially-minded/conscious organization should be to put themselves out of business (because they fulfilled their mission), many are not set-up nor do they operate with that mindset. Or it might change over time.
So… if we really care, we should really care to understand the problem.
A good way to do this is trying things like:
- Talking to people about the problem from multiple and unlikely angles (yes, even those who don’t agree with you);
- Developing/Co-creating working solutions with stakeholders or at least getting their feedback early on; and
- Being open to a process that is nonlinear — where you create and explore your ideas as you tweak and improve them.
I’m a big and growing fan of the ability to take a design-thinking approach to creating solutions and developing products (and I think it can work in most sectors). It’s essentially a process that designs solutions with the end-user in mind. Check out kick a — IDEO’s Design Kit to get your feet wet. I’ve bookmarked this page.
*It’s not easy but if it matters enough to you, don’t give up.
Being an entrepreneur (social or otherwise) is not an easy path. It can be a lonely road of periodic struggle. You don’t have a set career track necessarily and when you are growing, it may not be easy to find your tribe of ninjas. In addition, you may find that things don’t work in your first try, people might tell you that your idea is the worst (sometimes because it is and sometimes just because they can), and you might also fail outright. But as cliche as it sounds, we get better as entrepreneurs and people through those setbacks. By failing some, I realized that I shouldn’t have opted everyone into a listserv! (Sorry!) Or that I might want to wait to break even in my book venture before building a “giving back,” component into the business model. Regardless, it will happen to us all whether we choose to admit or not. If it matters enough, keep going and who knows, the world might even thank you for it. Better yet, you might thank yourself.
And since this post feels like it wants to end with a motivational tone for those awesome serial and aspiring entrepreneurs of all types, I will borrow from others and some of my favorites (inspiration is inspiration, why re-invent the wheel?):
An evergreen pep talk:
Full disclosure: part of the online social entrepreneurship class I’m taking w/ Acumen involves sharing about what you learn. So I figured I shared it here in case it resonates with others, and because blog posts are often like talking to yourself digitally anyway. I’m ok with it. :)
