The Psychology of Problem-Seeking: Why It’s So Hard to Find a Good Problem

Problem-seeking is the single most important step of innovation. Without a good problem, nothing else matters. 

It’s stupid to waste your time (and money) solving problems that are not important. It is the surest way to go belly up as a company. Yet people do it all the time. Why? Because they’re idiots, of course. But only in the way that we are all idiots. 

As humans, we have certain psychological tendencies that can lead to poor problem-seeking. The more you’re aware of these tendencies, the more you can combat them, so let’s take a look at the two big mistakes people make in problem-seeking.

Jumping to Conclusions

Imagine you spend hours completing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle only to discover that one piece is missing. Or you read a book to find the last page torn out. Or “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little—”

Incompletion drives us crazy. We don’t like unknowns and uncertainties. We want to tie a neat bow onto everything. So we have a tendency to fill in the blanks and jump to conclusions. As soon as we find an explanation that makes sense, we accept it as truth. We hear thunder and don’t understand where it comes from, so we decide that it is the sound of angels bowling in heaven. 

Jumping to conclusions is especially prevalent in innovation. Problems don’t provide value and make money; solutions do. So people jump ahead and focus on the solution instead of giving the problem the time it needs and deserves.

When we jump to conclusions, we fail to distinguish between fact (what we have observed and know to be true) and belief (what we infer or assume to be true). This can lead to misattribution. 

For example, let’s say you have two similar products at your company, one black and one silver. The silver one is selling more, so you decide the color is the problem. Customers just like silver more than black. Is that really what’s causing the behavior? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the silver one is made of a different material, and the customers like how sturdy it feels. Or maybe it’s because of how the products appear in search results. 

Jumping to conclusions is making a guess. Sometimes we get lucky and that guess is right, but other times the guess is wrong and we end up focusing on the wrong problem.  

Confirmation Bias 

The two most beautiful words in the English language are: “You’re right.” We all want to be right, so we work hard to look for confirming evidence of our beliefs while ignoring the alternatives. This is why we have echo chambers and people will only hang out with a certain type of people, because they don’t want anyone to argue with or challenge them.

This is confirmation bias and selective perception in action: the tendency to both search for and interpret information in a way that reinforces our current beliefs.

The term “confirmation bias” was coined in 1977, in a study by Mynatt, Doherty, and Tweney published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In the study, participants were tasked with discovering the rules governing a computer-simulated system involving moving objects. They had ten hours in which they could run experiments in the system to test their hypotheses. The researchers observed that participants were much more likely to run tests that would confirm their hypothesis, as opposed to falsify it. Even when participants were presented with contradictory information, they would often continue running the same tests.

In the end, none of the participants were able to figure out the rules of the system. This is what happens with confirmation bias. We get trapped in what we already believe, and it prevents us from seeing the whole, true picture.

Combating Your Biases: Ask the Right Questions

The biggest problem in problem-seeking is not asking the right questions.

When people engage in problem-seeking, they often start with “What do we know?” That’s a good question, but an even better question is “How do we know what we think we know?” This question forces you to question what is fact and what is assumption. It encourages you to figure out what is really true or not and can prevent you from jumping to conclusions.

The other tendency is to ask leading questions, which imply a certain “right” answer and reinforce our own beliefs (confirmation bias). 

This particularly happens in focus groups. For example, if you’re running a focus group on ironing boards, you might ask, “You don’t like the way that ironing board is tippy, do you?” Almost no one is going to respond, “Actually, yes, I do like how it is tippy.” They’re going to say, “No, I don’t like that.” You will then decide that tippiness is the problem. If you instead asked, “What do you think about this ironing board?” the participant might reply, “I wish it was wider.” Well, that’s a different problem than tippiness!

Asking questions is the key to problem-seeking. However, it’s not enough just to ask questions; you have to ask the right questions in the right way. Ask questions about not just what you know, but how, and prioritize neutral, open-ended lines of questioning. That’s how you achieve not just surface-level knowledge, but deeper understanding of the right problems to focus on.

Good Problems Lead to Good Solutions

Problem-seeking should not be overlooked. Good problem-seeking is part of the essence of how we innovate at PCDworks. Starting with good problems is why we have such a high success rate of solutions. 

To become a better problem-seeker, approach problem-seeking with an open mind, challenge your assumptions, and consider multiple perspectives to avoid jumping to conclusions and falling into confirmation bias.

There’s enough real problems out there in the world that none of us need to be wasting our time working on things without utility. So get seeking!

‍