Each month Adriana Beal answers questions submitted to her via email or through LinkedIn.
In this first installment, the themes are problems, opportunities, and innovation.
1. You seem to place a big emphasis in problem definition in your business analysis approach. Don’t you think that a “problem-oriented” approach may be too negative and prevent people from searching for ways to resolve the situation?
I’m glad you asked, because from time to time I get a comment saying that’s best to focus on solutions as opposed to problems.
Thomas Edison is often quoted as a prime example of the importance of continuing to search for solutions after facing one failure after another. This is probably where this belief comes from: that we should keep our eyes on the prize rather than concentrating on what’s wrong or not working.
But problem definition is not about dwelling on the negatives of a situation. Instead, it’s about seeking a better understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve so we can avoid a solution to the wrong problem. This is a positive pursuit that prevents us from experiencing failure in our projects by fixing a near-term issue without a rigorous process to understand the true dimensions of the problem.
I leave you with two quotes that summarize my position more eloquently than I could:
A project is a problem scheduled for solution. (Joseph M. Juran)
The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. (Einstein & Infeld, 1938)
2. I’ve read somewhere that a business does not achieve results by solving problems, it does so by exploiting opportunities. Do you agree that solving problems only brings the business back to business as usual, while exploiting opportunities helps take it to the next level?
Some people believe that a focus on problem inhibits innovation, but in reality, it’s all about how you see problems, and how much effort you put into finding the right ones to solve.
“Put a man on the moon, and return him safely” is a vivid, concise, inspiring, and memorable vision delivered by J.F. Kennedy to the U.S. Congress and the nation. And if you accept the dictionary definition above, or agree that a problem is “a difference between things as desired and things as perceived” (as proposed by Don Gause and Jerry Weinberg in Are Your Lights On?), then putting a man on the moon was also a problem, one that had to be decomposed into many other smaller problems to be solved to achieve things like accuracy in navigation and control sufficient to send astronauts to the moon and return them safely home again.
If in your opinion that treating something like “put a man on the moon” as a problem inhibits innovation, I don’t have any issues with you adopting a different terminology. When I talk about problem definition, I’m talking about getting to the essence of the gap to be addressed between what is and what could be–as in, “put a man on the moon and return him safely.” See, most projects in organizations don’t start with a clear “destination postcard” like the man on the moon project. And without a serious effort to achieve a clear statement of the problem to be solved, chances are your project will deliver an elegant solution to the wrong problem, and cause more problems than it solves.
If the word “problem” has a negative connotation for you, you’re welcome to use “opportunity” or “gap” or “question to be addressed” instead. And mentally translate the title of my ecourse from Understanding the Problem to Understanding the Gap Between What Is and What Could Be. As long as you’re invested in getting better at asking the right questions so that your organization can tackle the right problems or pursue the right opportunities rather than rushing to build solutions that fail to address underlying strategic issues, we’re on the same team.
3. How do you see the role of BAs in innovation processes? Are we supposed to resign ourselves to working on tactical projects focused on incremental change, while innovation happens elsewhere in the organization?
It’s true that some companies are better than others in enabling its knowledge workers to participate in innovation. This recent article from HBR described a good example of a company that encourages innovation across the whole organization.
The story is about a large industrial manufacturer that challenged its employees to find ways to serve customers better:
Among the problems that surfaced was the difficulty of inspecting a particular aircraft part overnight. The inspection process typically took eight hours. The company’s customers – airlines – found this frustrating because sometimes planes land late and need to take off early.
As the service techs understood, the problem wasn’t actually the inspection. It was the process of threading the camera inside the aircraft part to inspect it. That took seven hours. The subsequent inspection took one.
An administrative assistant at the company who was familiar with the airlines’ complaints responded to the challenge. She had recently seen the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. She posted an idea, wondering, “Why can’t we send a robotic spider into the part, like the ones in the movie?”
While a lot of people reviewing her suggestion found it silly, the company’s Chief Technology Officer was intrigued. He tried putting a miniature camera on a remote control set of robotic legs and walking it into the part. It worked. He then turned the secretary’s idea into a standard practice. Now the inspections takes 15% as much time as they used to, and the airlines are a lot happier.
This is a great example of someone without role power using creativity to solve an important problem. So the question becomes, will you show up to work with the strength and efficacy required to ask great questions, generate promising ideas, and convince others to consider them? It’s not as if you need “permission” from your organization to “go forth and innovate”. Of course, it’s not enough to have great ideas. Your idea needs to match an important, underserved outcome in order to have a real impact, and you do need to be able to use influential power to get your ideas heard.
Got a question?