A lot of business school education focuses on solutions. We
teach our students many techniques for solving many types of problems. Outside
of a case study course, we don’t get into the area of identifying what type of
problem we are confronting very often. It is more often the case that the
problem is “given” and we teach students how to solve the problem should they
ever run into it (or one similar to it) in business.
I’d like to suggest that we consider integrating three
questions more deeply into the business school curriculum.
The first question is, “What
problem are you trying to solve?” I have found this to be a very powerful
question to ask and to answer. Asking it usually causes a decision maker to
stop cold and reflect on exactly what she confronts. Once considered, answering
this question usually eliminates a lot of distractions and superfluous options.
When we know what problem we are really trying to solve, we gain a focus that
we did not have.
The second question is, “What will success look like?” In business education, I feel we
should impress upon our students the idea of establishing a metric of some kind
(and it need not be quantitative) so that we will know what success looks like.
Another way of phrasing this question is, “How will you know you have solved
the problem?” but I personally like the idea of framing the question in terms
of success. The answer to this question provides criteria for assessing later
how good the solution really is.
The third question is, “Who
will hate your solution (and why)?” We naturally tend to think of the
“good” aspects of a problem solution and all of the people who will be happy
with our solution. We don’t spend too much time thinking about who is going to
hate our solution and why they will hate it. I believe it is worthwhile to
consider this perspective, because it leads us to being more critical of our
work. Often, when we take a critical perspective of our work we can identify
ways to improve it. We rarely seek to improve a solution that we think is good.
What problem
are you trying to solve?
What will
success look like?
Who will hate your solution (and why)?
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