The Value of Rethinking Your Problem

We all wish we had more time, more money, and less stress. Unfortunately, focusing on the wrong problems not only means you don’t get to solve better ones, but also means you probably lost time, money, and also made your life harder than it otherwise could have been. No one wants to feel like they’ve wasted their effort, which leads to even worse outcomes as people often double down when they should cut their losses.

Knowing when to reassess is the most important tool to avoid solving the wrong problem. There might initially be so many unknowns that almost anything you could try is worth exploring. By that same token, odds are that whatever you do happen to try first is also a mistake. Or at the very least, you will find once you learn more that you could make much better choices now based on your discoveries.

Taking this a step further, a plan to update your problem as you learn will change the best one to solve. Which means the solution you will implement changes too. Which might lead you to pick a different problem. Iteration is key. As you work on a problem, you can evaluate how the solution is shaping up. Clarity on what you value is vital to be able to recognize when that ROI calculus has changed because of what you learned. What you discover will change both the problem and your alternatives.

And all that gets to the reason behind my writing and why you should care. Any time you are working on solving a problem, you can consider what other things you could be doing with those resources instead. If you can take those same hours or dollars and get something you value more, you should pivot. If you happened to know everything up front, then you wouldn’t expect to change your mind. But even if you did know everything, the world changes every day in ways that could impact your choices.

Which gets back to the goal of saving time, money, or stress. I know the things I value, and the resources I have to help me achieve them. If I am tasked with a problem that I expect will use more resources than I like compared to the value, I consider other problems that I could solve instead. This doesn’t have to be rocket science: just small adjustments to the problem that make it more valuable or easier.

Some examples:

• Real-time data can be very expensive and difficult. Daily, or even hourly data is a fraction of that cost and effort.

• Reducing customer churn by giving them discounts could be expensive. Reducing customer churn by attracting better customers might not cost anything extra at all.

• Buying more solar panels than you need is expensive. Paying a little extra to the energy company to cover your shortage is a fraction of that cost.

• Flying directly to a small city might limit your flight times and be expensive, flying to a nearby big city and driving the rest could save you time and money (though possibly extra stress).

• Building a data warehouse when you just need a dashboard is expensive. Building a dashboard on top of spreadsheets when you need a data warehouse is also expensive.

• Keeping an old fridge running is more expensive over months and cheaper this month, while buying a new fridge will save you money in the long run but cost more today.

And that is the practical way to incorporate the meta-problem. It happens in parallel as you work towards implementing a solution, rather than being a big “thing.” Along the way, you keep your mind open to better versions of the problem you might discover. You make sure to spend a little time along your journey re-assessing based on the new things you have learned along your path.