Every innovation starts with a challenge to overcome.
Every business has a list of challenges, from the seemingly minor to the towering problems everyone is racing to solve. And there’s the potential for innovation to solve all of them. But which problems are worth your time, and which can you ignore? To answer that, you should take a page from IT departments around the world and engage in problem diagnosis.
What’s The Problem?
Problem diagnosis is important because there are challenges you might be dealing with every day that you don’t even notice, or the problem might simply be there’s a better way of doing things than the one you’re currently used to. If all you have is a wrench, sure, it can pound nails, but wouldn’t you prefer a hammer?
Problem diagnosis takes the form of four steps:
- First, get your information and data together, and organize it in a way that makes sense. Remember that how you organize data is just as important as the data you collect, so if possible, use a flexible solution that, for example, lets you sort data by multiple categories. Also, ensure everyone on your team who can look at the data has access and can change how it’s categorized.
- Second, you need to change how you look at this information. How do your competitors address these challenges? How does somebody who works in a different industry see these challenges? Get a sense of how you, and others, approach these concerns and compare them. That comparison will often highlight the blind spots.
- Third, set realistic expectations for each challenge. Some challenges may be more about the journey to solve them than reaching the goal. Others might be fixed with a simple change that you simply need to propagate through the workplace with a few seminars and a handful of flyers. Either way, knowing your limits, and your opportunities, helps address the problem.
- Fourth, decide what you’re defining as “success.” Energy companies would probably love to invent a limitless renewable energy source, but they’re unlikely ever to reach that goal. However, they can strive to reach it. Your approach to success should take the same route: What’s the most productive goal to strive for in each challenge?
Solving a problem starts with knowing it exists.
Problem Diagnosis And Innovation
If all this sounds familiar, that’s likely because you’ve found yourself naturally using at least some of these steps early on while working on innovation strategy. Problem diagnosis has its roots in IT, but it broke through to the wider world because it’s a fast and simple way to lay the framework for ideas and innovation.
It’s important to remember that problem diagnosis is just the frame, a starting point for your innovation work. There’s much more to innovation than identifying what you want to innovate, after all. But using problem diagnosis will not only give you a place to start, it’ll also encourage your team to set aside the lens they view every problem with and to explore alternative perspectives to understand their own better. Problem diagnosis encourages your team to think first, and then act.
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