Make problem-solving a creative act.
How to break out of assumptions and biases when tackling a new project.
Make problem-solving a creative act.
I am here to solve a problem.
I am here to create.
Each of these statements reveals a mindset.
The first carries a negative connotation–something is wrong and needs to be fixed. You impose artificial constraints on your possible outcomes. Problem-solving frameworks call this convergence.
The second implies positivity–my task is to make something from nothing. You break constraints because you are open to more possibilities and create diverse paths to your outcomes. Problem-solving frameworks call this divergence.
Product management deals with both, but we often focus on the problem-solving bits. We talk about understanding our customers' problems and creating solutions to those problems. One surefire way to spot a product manager is when she stands up in the middle of a planning meeting, crosses her arms, and says, “OK, but what’s the problem we are trying to solve?”
It’s not wrong to think in terms of problem-solving, per se. The word ‘solution’ is abused and misused, but it does describe what you have to deliver. I have a hard time thinking about building products in terms other than producing solutions. But the language kind of boxes us in.
So, we come to think of the best product managers among us as creative problem solvers. The focus on acts of problem-solving is, well, a problem.
What would it look like if we instead focused on the creative act?
The creative act
The prolifically creative producer Rick Rubin released a book about creativity earlier this year.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being is a bit of a mess, and I think that’s kind of the point. I found it doesn’t matter if you read the chapters sequentially. Nuggets of wisdom are everywhere; for example, two-thirds into the book, he takes on the tension between anxiety and expectation.
“In facing the void, there is a tension of opposites. There is an excitement for the possibility something great may be realized and a dread it might not.”
Every problem presents this conundrum. Discovery, experimentation, and iteration push us toward an outcome but don’t guarantee it. If deep in our hearts, we have an outcome in mind at the outset of our project, we’ll likely follow our assumptions rather than seek out creativity. Our assumptions and biases push us to decide differently.
There is a certain mindset that Rubin proposes to help with this problem.
“Living in discovery is at all times preferable to living through assumptions.”
He’s right, of course. Rubin helped some of my favorite bands create groundbreaking music with unique sounds, bands like the Beastie Boys, the Cult, and Rage Against the Machine. There’s no way to set out with the outcome in mind of turning a skate-punk band into hip hop superstars. You can easily assume that punk and hip hop are so disparate they’ll never meet.
But it’s equally legit to wonder how it would sound if you merged these two urban cultural movements to mesh the angry skate-punk ethos with the poetic expression of existing in blighted inner-city neighborhoods. Everyone wanted to party, even if the style of the party differed. The undeniable results produced generation-defining albums that resisted classification into any one genre.
When you start with a problem, you have to bring certain assumptions. Assumptions are a focusing mental state–they force you to pay attention to an ever-narrower set of things. In the tech industry, we tend to focus on how we will build things and how they will work. And this is partly the result of this problem-solving mindset.
An excellent example is the Five Whys exercise, which is a useful tool for diagnosing a problem’s root cause. I’ve found Five Whys to have a clear break point where you go from the root cause exercise into a creative mode–ok, now that we know what went wrong, let’s turn on our creative brains and see if we can ‘fix’ it. Of course, some problems must be approached retrospectively, and the purely creative blank canvas approach may not suit the task at hand.
But what if it could?
Applying the creative act
Consider a project where your product has issues because of a hastily implemented architecture. Integrations with 3rd party systems are hard to achieve and fragile to maintain. Loading data into the system is fraught with inconsistencies or outright data loss. The API is hard to version, and updates disrupt functionality and product stability.
These problems tempt product managers into thinking immediately about solutions. “How can we make it easier to add to the API and version it without breaking customers?” “What can we do to eliminate data loss?” “We should refactor the integration framework to make connecting to 3rd party systems easier.”
Notice how narrow the focus becomes?
Let’s use language to break us out of this conundrum.
The creative act expands the focus to–dare I say–a blank canvas. “What if we could give our customers deep insights about their business data and make those insights actionable?”
Notice how the “what if we could” question shifts the focus and mindset? You give the team permission to think about creating value, leaving behind the bias of focused problem-solving and opening more paths to your desired outcome. The problems with the data, integration framework, and API don’t go away, but the approach to solving them might be more innovative, simpler, and faster to implement when you take a purely creative approach.
You’ll inevitably reach a point in your project where team members wonder, “Why are we doing this?”
Focusing on the creative act captures the why. No master painter sets out to create a painting with thick brush strokes or unique color mixtures. Techniques are about the how and execution of the vision. He starts with a grander creative statement, “What if I could make a painting that represents what I see when twilight reaches a far-off mountain range.” The statement expresses why he started the painting in the first place. How he paints it is a yet-to-be-solved problem.
Discovery versus assumptions
Performing creative acts requires a mindset focused on intent, discovery, experimentation, and imagination. Problem-solving involves a mindset of deep exploration, validating assumptions about a cause, and uncovering the fastest path to a resolution.
Employing either approach creates value for a user or a customer. However, it is crucial to recognize that when you start with assumptions, you may miss out on possible, even more valuable, outcomes for your customer. There’s nothing wrong with this. It might make sense to optimize for a timely, focused solution to a known problem.
Starting with a known problem and a set of assumptions is safe. Good teams converge quickly on the root cause and an appropriate solution. Doing creative acts generates uncertainty, but good teams manage through that uncertainty to create innovative and differentiated products.
Take the time to decide the approach at the outset of a project deliberately. Again, go back to “what if we could” statements to guide your decision.
Know before you go.
I encourage teams to watch closely for defaulting to a problem-solving approach. Creativity makes people uncomfortable because, as Rubin points out, there’s always a chance what you create isn’t great, doesn’t work, or no one cares about it. Despite business leaders talking about tolerance for failure, I’ve found that this tolerance extends only so far in business.
Look back on your last five to ten projects and analyze the approach you used. Did you rely on problem-solving? Did you take a purely creative approach? Did you have a healthy mix of the two? Do you know how to measure the efficacy of each approach?