11.
Defíne the Problem
No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.
Charles Schultz
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Picasso
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
Since all problems have solutions, it’s critical that you define your problem correctly.
If you don’t you might solve the wrong problem.
In advertising—the field that I’m familiar with— the statement of the problem is often called a creative work plan or a creative strategy or a mission statement or some such thing. It demands answers to questions like, “What are we trying to say and why are we trying to say it?” “Who are we trying to say it to and why?” “What can we say that our competition can’t?” “What’s our product’s or service’s reason for being?”
These plans are essential, for as Norm Brown, the head of an advertising agency, once said: “If you don’t know where you’re going, every road leads there.”
Every field has its own kind of plan that sets forth objectives and missions and strategies—what the problems are, what the opportunities are, what needs to be done.
And “The formulation of a problem,” wrote Albert Einstein, “is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new problems, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and makes real advances.”
He’s right of course. For even such a simple question as “How can I do all this work on time?” is vastly different from “How can I get all this work done on time?”
The first question will result in all sorts of labor-saving techniques and shortcuts; the second, in dividing the work load up among others.
It is said that Henry Ford invented the assembly line simply by changing the question from “How do we get the people to the work?” to “How do we get the work to the people?”
Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine for smallpox simply by changing the question from “Why do people get smallpox?” to “Why don’t milkmaids get smallpox?”
Grocers used to fetch the groceries for the customer. And they were always trying to improve their service by asking, “How can I get the groceries faster for my customer?” Then somebody invented the supermarket by asking, “How can the customer get the groceries for me?”
“The greatness of the philosophers of the scientific revolution,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “consisted not so much in finding the right answers but in asking the right questions; in seeing a problem where nobody saw one before; in substituting a ‘why’ for a ‘how.’ ”
Jonas Salk agreed: “The answer to any question ‘pre-exists.’ We need to ask the right question to reveal the answer.”
So take care in what questions you ask, in how you define your problem.
If you’re having trouble solving it or if your solutions seem flat somehow, try defining the problem differently and then solve it.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
Assume that you are the manager of a ten-story office building that was built back in the days when everybody had big, spacious offices. Back then two elevators were sufficient to handle the number of people working in the building. But over the years the large offices were converted to smaller offices, and now it’s obvious that the building’s two elevators cannot handle the number of workers.
You’ve installed the fastest, most efficient, and up-to-date computer-operated elevators made, yet every morning and every afternoon crowds of angry employees still gather in the lobbies grousing about having to wait for three minutes or more before they can catch a ride. Complaints rain down upon your head. Tenants are threatening to leave. It’s crisis time.
What do you do?
If you think the problem through logically (or vertically, if you’ll excuse the pun) it seems obvious that you have to figure out a way either (a) to get more people up and down the building faster, or (b) to reduce the number of people going up and down the building at the same time. You could, therefore:
Make the elevator shafts larger and put in larger elevators.
Or bore a hole through the building and install a couple more elevator shafts.
Or attach a couple of elevator shafts to the outside of the building.
Or turn the stairways into escalators.
Or attach escalators to the outside of the building.
Or connect every other floor with escalators, thus reducing by half the number of floors each elevator has to stop at.
Or give monthly prizes to the earliest-arriving and latest-leaving workers, thus reducing the number of workers using the elevators at the busiest times.
Or work with the various employers in the building to stagger their starting and quitting times.
Or assign staggered boarding times for each floor, thus limiting the number of people going up and down at any one time.
Or get the fire department to limit the number of people allowed in the building and/or the lobbies at any one time.
Or sponsor programs that extol the benefits of stair climbing.
All these ideas are good ones of course (albeit some are rather expensive), and all would probably work to one degree or another.
But when the manager of an office building in Chicago was faced with this identical problem, she did none of these things.
Instead, she installed wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors in every elevator lobby. She figured (correctly as it turned out) that people wouldn’t mind waiting so much if they could spend that time looking at themselves.
In other words, she solved a different problem.
Instead of trying to figure out how to add elevators and escalators or how to reduce the number of people riding them, she changed the problem and asked herself, “How do I make waiting less frustrating?”
Or assume you’re the police chief in the 1960s of a town by the ocean. The town is one of those meccas for vacationing college students during spring break.
The businesspeople in town love the money the students bring in, but every year the students (males mostly, for this is before women’s lib) are getting more and more unruly.
Worse, putting them in jail overnight for being drunk and disorderly or for disturbing the peace or for behaving obscenely or for damaging property isn’t helping. Indeed, it only seems to exacerbate the problem, for jail time is becoming a badge of honor, of respect, of machismo. If a student hasn’t been in jail he isn’t part of what’s happening, he isn’t in, he isn’t a man.
So you decide to get tough: You put them on bread and water.
Wrong.
Now guys who don’t even drink start feigning drunkenness just so they can be arrested, just so when they get out of jail the next day they can brag about being in jail on bread and water. Suddenly students who haven’t been in jail are sissies.
You run out of jail space and have to bring in mobile jails from the next county. Your jail staff is working overtime. The problem is getting out of hand.
You’re in a bind. You must enforce the law; that’s your job. But when you enforce it you make the problem worse.
What do you do?
There are a number of things you could do; there always are. But when this actually happened to a police chief in Florida in 1963, this is what he did:
He put the jailed students on baby food.
Instead of treating them like criminals, he treated them like infants. And almost overnight he turned macho students into laughingstocks.
The police chief was a quick learner.
The first time he asked himself, “How do I more severely punish these students for breaking the law?” And he put them on bread and water.
When that didn’t work he asked himself, “How do I embarrass these students for breaking the law?” And bingo.
Many times it’s like that: You simply rephrase the problem and bingo—all sorts of different solutions appear.
Or pretend that you’re in charge of burying the dead during the Black Plague.
You’re under orders to bury each person in a coffin as quickly as possible in order to help slow down the spread of the disease. But in your rush to bury the dead you discover, just in the nick of time, that someone is still alive.
You’re horrified. How can you make sure, you ask yourself, that you’re not burying someone else alive?
You ask doctors for help. They talk about checking for heartbeats and signs of breathing, but the people who are carting the bodies away have neither the energy nor the desire to check every one. Too many people are dying too fast.
What do you do?
Legend has it that when a man in England faced this problem he simply changed the question from “How do I make sure I’m not burying someone alive?” to “How do I make sure that everybody I’m burying is dead?”
Bingo.
Now all he had to do was install three upright stakes in the bottom of every coffin. If the person was not dead before he was placed in the coffin, he surely was after.
Businesspeople ask the wrong questions all the time. Many times these questions are based on assumptions so deep-seated they don’t even know they’re making them.
I once worked for a donut company. It operated hundreds of stores where they made and sold donuts.
Over the years their sales were gradually going down and they asked us to come up with some ideas on how to increase traffic; on how, in other words, to get more customers into the stores.
“Why not try to get your existing customers to buy more donuts?” we asked.
“Because our sales figures show that we’re getting fewer customers every year, not that our customers are buying fewer donuts.”
We discussed a number of ways we could attract more customers, including adding muffins and scones and sweet rolls to the menu, distributing coupons in the neighborhoods surrounding the stores, offering special prices at slow hours, offering free coffee with every order, coming up with new advertising, directing our advertising at teens, at women, at office workers, and so forth.
Then we made a suggestion that startled them: “If you want more customers, you might want to reconsider the question.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well right now you’re asking, ‘How do I get more customers to come to us?’ ”
“Yes?”
“But if you asked, ‘How do I get more customers period?’ or simply, ‘How do I sell more donuts?’ your whole marketing approach might change.”
“If you asked either of those questions, you might eventually stop thinking of your stores as retail outlets and start thinking of them as individual manufacturing plants.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If they were donut manufacturing plants, your stores would sell donuts retail just like they’re doing now; but in addition they’d probably hire salesmen to go out into their marketing areas and drum up more business.”
“From where?”
“From office buildings and schools, from apartment buildings, from convenience stores, from construction sites and factories and malls and condos, from gas stations, from wherever.
“Heck, they could even sell donuts to restaurants and coffee shops—those places have to get the donuts they sell from someone, don’t they? Why not from you? And to bakeries—after all, most bakeries don’t deep-fry dough, they bake it.
“Maybe you could even build some donut trucks, trucks that you could drive around selling hot coffee and donuts in the morning.
“And hire school kids to deliver donuts before school to the places that gave you standing orders.
“And you could even . . .”
But we had lost them. I think all they saw was the work and the risk involved, and so the idea was never tried.
But it shows, I believe, how a simple change in the question can revolutionize your thinking.
So if you’re bogged down, try asking a different question.
If you’ve been asking “How can we make the production line more efficient?” try asking “How can we make the production line less inefficient?” Or “How can we change the production line so that the workers will enjoy their work more?”
If you’ve been asking “Why aren’t people buying my product?” try asking “Why are people buying my product?” Or “Why aren’t people who do buy my product buying it more often?” Or “Why aren’t people who do buy my product buying more of it?” Or “Why are people buying my competitor’s product?” Or “Why aren’t people buying either of our products?” Or “How can I sell more of my product?” Or “What else can I sell that will help the sales of my product?” Or “Where else can I sell my product?” Or “What else can my product be used for?” Or “How else can my product help people?” Or “How can I change my product to make it more desirable?”
If you’ve been asking “How do I save more money?” try asking “How do I spend less money?” Or “How can I get more money?” Or “How can I get more with the money I do spend?” Or “How can I get things for free?” Or “How can I do without money?” Or “How can I do without those things that I spend money on?”
If you’ve been asking “How do I get the salespeople to make more calls?” try asking “How do I get my salespeople to make fewer but more qualified calls?” Or “How do I get my salespeople to convert more of the calls they do make?” Or “How do I get my salespeople to call on more prospects at the same time?” Or “How can I get the prospects to call on my salespeople?” Or “How do I make it unnecessary for my salespeople to call on customers?”
Different questions, different answers, different solutions.
