Focus on the Solution, not the Problem

One particular forward of the many forwards I received the other day from my father-in-law - a man of tremendous learning and wisdom - got me thinking... Are we all, in this land of plenty, focusing more heavily on the problem and not enough on the solution?

I present verbatim, his forward:

Case # 1 :

When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens would not work at zero gravity (ink will not flow down to the writing surface).

Solution # 1 : To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.

Solution # 2 : And what did the Russians do...?? They used a pencil.

Case # 2 :

One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soapbox, which happened in one of Japan 's biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soapbox that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty. Management asked its engineers to solve the problem.

Solution # 1 :

Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent a whoopee (sic) amount to do so.

Solution # 2 :

But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, he did not get into complications of X-rays, etc., but instead came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Moral

1. Always look for simple solutions.·


2. Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problems.·


3. Always focus on solutions & not on problems.
   

Contemplation

We in America are generally quick to use anecdotal evidence and sound bytes to jump to sweeping conclusions and universal application to all problems at hand. We tend to be a self-help nation, constantly trying to apply what we read to improve ourselves - our waistline, our facial features, our anatomies, our psychoses, and our homes and gardens. We sometimes become a nation of hammers where every problem looks like a nail.

The two cases described earlier seem to neatly tie up the proposition: "People in large companies are busy kicking the problem around, while people in small companies jump right in and pull a rabbit out of the hat by focusing on a satisfying solution rather than a universal one."

In America, with the availability of plentiful money for research, from NASA to NIH to the Defense Department, we usually have the wherewithal to take the long way home. Our labor rate and hourly time and materials funding for research does not help either - the incentive is always to burn more hours at higher labor rates. In other parts of the world people have to make do with the resources they can eke out to solve the problem at hand. As a result a number of low cost innovations are produced. The solution cycle is quick and generally non-technology intensive.

In graduate school, working with very limited resources, I had to use innovation to come up with rabbits from the hat - especially within the window of the ten week academic quarter. Later, as a student aide in a large information systems company in Minneapolis, this focus on the solution honed at graduate school paid off handsomely as my research spun out solution after solution for complex problems only because I had limited my vision to achieving a working solution instead of dwelling on the problem in all its manifestations.

Which brings me up the proposition: Does a shortage of resources spur solution building and reduce the "dwelling on the problem" phase? Does such an approach produce a short sighted solution that may not scale to other variations of the problem (class of problems)? And when survival is concerned, is this short sighted solution is perfectly acceptable and fulfils the need of the day?

Or, is there a class of problems which require a large "dwell time" before attempting a solution? And is that the reason why large company R&D produces sweeping innovations, larger than the initial problem the company had undertaken - giving the large company many years of sustained competitive advantage?

Is there a inertia in large companies because every solution to a problem has to be retrofitted to a large number of instances for the legacy problem? And the easy way out does not scale back to retrofit all the problem instances lying around?

In short, is focusing on the solution and not the problem the obvious need or is there a more qualified "it depends..."?