Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Problems’

Problems get a bad rap. We’re all clear on the negativity around problems, but we don’t appreciate their positive character. It’s time we use their powers for good.

One of the least popular characteristics of problems is their selfishness. Like the friend who shows up for dinner unannounced, problems, left to their own, care only about their calendar. But to overcome this shortcoming and harness their energy, we can create them to fit our time table.

An important strong suit of problems is their ability to create focus. When the VP has a problem, everybody has a problem. And it’s this persuasive power of problems that focuses the organization on a solution – resources, alignment, and creativity on demand.

I propose we bring problems to life on our own terms to create new thinking; to creatively fabricate problems to generate laser-focused thinking in the direction of our choice; to imagine what could be and create the right problems to get us there. Creativity on demand.

The most provocative and productive problems to manufacture are those that remove inherent goodness of your products or that outlaw their physical fundamentals. Like putting your thumb over a hose, these problems spray high velocity thinking in unpredictable directions. Here are some examples:

1. Big coffee pot can make only one cup – single-cup brewer industry.
2. Speedboats cannot carry multiple passengers – personal water craft industry.
3. Lights must illuminate only a small area – LED proliferation.
4. Sturdy running shoes must be floppy – bare foot running shoe movement.
5. Desktop computers must be mobile – laptop industry.
6. Stiff, wear-like-iron dungarees must be worn out – faded/distressed jean movement.
7. Eye glasses cannot rest on the nose – contact lenses.
8. Pencils cannot be sharpened – mechanical pencils.
9. Laser printers must be slow – home printer industry.

Sure, these examples were reverse engineered. But take a minute to walk back in time and sit in those industries. What if back then you created those problems for yourself? What if you create them tomorrow?

The thinking in the post is strongly shaped by Jeffrey Paul Baumgartner’s Anti Conventional Thinking (ACT).

In the last post on innovation I said I’d provide data on number of hits for a post with innovation in the title.  Well, apparently the word recession is more relevant than the word innovation as there were 50% more hits with recession.  Next time I should use both recession and innovation in the title and see what happens.

In the last post on innovation I left off with the notion of an operational definition as a way to assign meaning to the word innovation.  I ended with a question — can you put your hand over your mouth and point to innovation?  In other words, what can we observe to bring innovation into the range of our experience?  Starting with the state of things before innovation – what does it look like?  And what about the state of things after innovation – what does that look like?  And what does it look like to transition between the states?

Starting simply, the state before innovation is defined by a symptom statement, an ill-defined, un-actionable statement of something undesirable.  It has not yet risen to the level of an actionable problem statement, but clearly there is a realization of an undesirable situation.  Here are several examples of symptom statements. Read the rest of this entry »