Solve something simpler
‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’
LEONARDO DA VINCI
In business we’re always being told to raise our sights. To aim higher. To achieve more. To go further.
But what if – sometimes – we don’t set our sights so high? What if – occasionally – we settle for second best? What if – once in a while – we achieve a bit less? Do ‘just enough’ and no more?
It’s a bit like the Pareto Principle – the 80/20 rule. It may be that solving a simpler problem, with a cheaper, quicker, easier solution (one that requires just 20 per cent of the effort) still gives us 80 per cent of the advantage. And 80 per cent is a pretty good score. At school, 80 per cent is usually an A. At university, it’s a First. And in business, it might be enough to get the job done.
So solving something simpler is about first asking, ‘Do we really have to solve this problem? Let’s not ignore it completely … but let’s look at something a bit easier that might get us near enough to where we want to be.’
Visual
The apocryphal story is that because an ordinary pen wouldn’t work in space, NASA spent 10 years and $10 million developing the Space Pen. But if you state the right issue, ‘We just need something to make notes with in space’, you get what the USSR’s cosmonauts were given instead. A pencil.
Theory
Make the problem simpler and often, of course, the solution will be too.
We’ve all heard the term ‘over-engineered’. Where someone’s gone much further than they needed to in solving a problem or meeting a challenge. Either to the point where it becomes detrimental, or where it’s just needlessly complex or expensive or demanding.
The Contrarotator, for example, Dyson’s purple washing machine. It was brilliantly made. Even the ball bearings were aircraft grade apparently (whatever that means). But all that engineering excellence came at a price: twice the price, in fact, of other washing machines. Three times the price of some.
And it was better than people needed (or were prepared to pay for). So despite being really good, the sales were really bad. And Dyson had to abandon it.
Try being lazy
Solve something simpler is like the opposite of over-engineering: instead of looking for the best possible solution to the problem, you just look for a simpler, lazier version of the problem. And once you’ve got that, you can come up with a ‘cheat’ solution: you’re solving a problem which looks, in many ways, like the original problem, but which is much easier to achieve.
You might think of it as putting a Band-Aid on the problem – but that’s not necessarily a disparaging term, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his bestselling book The Tipping Point: ‘The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.’
The good news is, our brains do this all the time anyway. Because many decisions have more variables than we can hold in our head at any one time, our brains cheat. They fall into habits of substitution: they substitute a difficult problem for an easier one – look up the effort-reduction framework by Anuj Shah and Daniel Oppenheimer (‘Heuristics Made Easy’, Psychological Bulletin 134/2, 1998).
(Although, somewhat worryingly, we often don’t realise our brain has cheated and answered an easier question than the one asked of it.)
So, as long as everyone can accept that solving the simpler problem is OK, then you’re giving yourself an easier starting point – and thus more chance of getting to the finish line.
Action
SOLVE SOMETHING SIMPLER TOOLKIT
- Do you have to solve the problem? What if you didn’t? Perhaps you can just solve the consequences instead (they may be simpler to deal with).
- Or maybe you can even just solve the challenges of living with the consequences.
- Ask the right question to find the ‘next best thing’: is there part of the problem you could solve to get you close to the solution you want – perhaps by looking at the crux of the issue?
- Or ask the right question to say, ‘What could we solve instead, that’s a bit easier, to get the same or a similar result?’
As you can see from the toolkit panel, there are a few ways to look at this approach. But they’re always about not solving the problem you’ve got (or not wholly, anyway).
There are a couple of good commercial reasons for the solve something simpler tool. The first is resource – solving the problem as you’re presented with it may just require an inordinate amount of time and money and effort. Back to the 80/20 rule. If you can get 80 per cent of the benefit for considerably less than 80 per cent of the cost, then that might just be commercially more sensible.
The second benefit of solve something simpler is that it moves the business forward when otherwise nothing may have happened. There may be a business issue or challenge that’s gone unaddressed because everyone knows what the solution is, but they know it’s too expensive or demanding. And so nothing gets done.
This is a way around that: a wake-up call to say, ‘OK, we’re not going to fully tackle the problem right now, but let’s do something that gets us closer to where we want to be’.
You might call solve something simpler the ‘quick fix’ approach.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Research showed people were put off instant cake mix because they didn’t believe you could make a decent cake just from powdered mix. Instead of solving the (difficult) problem of trying to convince people that yes you could, the manufacturers did something simpler. They removed the dried egg from the recipe and told customers that they needed to add their own egg to the cake mix.
Customers liked that they had to add a fresh egg; now it felt like ‘lazy baking’ rather than ‘fake baking’. And sales went up.
The first method
Discuss the problem and examine what will happen if you don’t solve it. Perhaps the consequences of leaving the problem to go unchecked are easier to solve than the problem itself. In effect: what if you treat the symptoms, not the cause?
It can be almost heretical to suggest, ‘Hey, what if we don’t bother solving the problem?’, but a rational, objective analysis might identify that the problem is very difficult and resource-intensive to solve, but the consequences of it aren’t. Fixing a leak might be difficult, for some reason. Sticking a bucket under the leak and emptying it every once in a while probably isn’t.
The second method
Here, you don’t solve the problem and you don’t solve the consequences of the problem. You just solve the way things work when you’re living with the consequences of the problem, so they’re no longer an issue. You negate them as much as you can.
Another simple home example: say your neighbour has a tree with branches that overhang your garden. You don’t mind the branches, but it means that part of your garden is in permanent shade and the grass won’t grow there. You could trim the branches that overhang your side, that’s your legal right. But it’s going to be a fair bit of work and need doing regularly. Or you could ask your neighbour to cut the tree down. Maybe he says yes – as long as you pay for it.
Or perhaps you could just adapt to the consequences: solve the challenges of living with the problem. So you create a neat border around the area where the grass won’t grow and you plant it with bluebells that thrive happily under the shade of a tree.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
With this tool you’ve got to work hard to ‘ask the right question’. A simple, elegant expression of what the biggest issue with this problem is will really help people find simple, ‘good enough’ solutions. So spend time asking different questions of the problem, get different people to be provocative with it and ask awkward questions until you get something that you think you can find a quick fix for. If you can, and you realise that quick fix will make a significant difference relatively easily, then you should seriously consider it.
The third method
Take the problem apart and find the crux of the issue (like with interrogate and extrapolate). Ask, ‘What’s the problem within the problem?’ It may be that you just want to achieve (or remove) an effect related to the crux – which can be much simpler to do. Unlike interrogate and extrapolate, you’re still not going to correct that element fully; we’re still looking for the lazy way out.
For instance, many years ago I had a car where the electric motor of one of the rear windows broke. Not only did it mean the window couldn’t be opened and closed, the motor no longer gripped the window so it was just permanently gaping open. Not great security. I took it to the garage and they gave me a quote to order and fit a new electric motor. It was around £180 I think. Heck, I said – that’s a lot to fix an electric window I don’t really use. All I really want is the window to be secure. Isn’t there anything else you can do?
Well, they said … we could just open up the door panel, jam in a bit of wood to hold the window closed and put the door panel back on. £40.
So that’s what they did. Because I didn’t need the whole problem solving. It was a rear window that was rarely used. I didn’t really need a rear window that opened and closed with the press of a button. I just needed a window that was secure. That was the next best thing. And a simpler, quicker, cheaper problem to solve.
In every case, what you’ll need in your brainstorm session is some commercial awareness and pragmatism.
It’s about achieving a balance: you’re not going to completely address the issue, but neither are you going to ignore it.
But you’ve come to believe that solving the problem as it stands is impossible. Or a cost/benefit analysis has revealed solving it just isn’t commercially viable. But a quick fix might make a really useful difference.
Example
For mobile phone manufacturers like Samsung, performance is an important competitive advantage. If your phone is faster and more powerful than the competition, many people will choose your product over the rival’s.
Of course, always having the latest technology (preferably without charging customers more) is a constant battle and very resource-hungry. It’s a significant, ongoing challenge.
But what if we can solve something simpler, by examining the problem and asking the right question?
So … people want the fastest phone. Well … how do they know what the fastest phone is?
One answer: benchmarking tests. Although most people won’t know the numbers or specific results, they may hear that ‘in benchmarking tests’ (speed and performance tests run by independent third parties), phone A outperformed phone B.
Well, OK then. Now we’ve got a simpler challenge to solve. The best solution is to have a phone that’s simply faster and more powerful in every way, all of the time. But the next best thing is to have a phone that’s faster at a critical time: when it’s being benchmarked. That’s the crux of the problem.
And by ‘lowering our sights’ and being less ambitious, we’ve got something more achievable.
So what’s a simple way for Samsung to ensure its phones get the best possible benchmarking score? By (allegedly) adding a bit of code to their phone’s OS that recognises when a benchmark is being run. And when it does, it raises the thermal limits (allowing the phone to get hotter than normal), as well as the GPU frequency and CPU voltage/frequency, to get the highest benchmarking score.
In other words, the phone goes into a short-term, unsustainable ‘turbo’ mode when it knows it’s being benchmarked, to get an artificially high score.
Because adding that bit of code to your OS is a much simpler problem to solve than always having a faster, more advanced CPU than your competitor’s.
But it still gives you an answer that’s close to the one you want.
Summary
Solve something simpler is about finding the ‘sticking plaster’ answer; agreeing that it’s OK not to solve the whole problem, but just do enough to reduce its effect. Generally it’s a tool for problem solving not opportunity seizing, but it can be handy at simplifying the opportunity too, to give you something easier to reach for and attain.
To use solve something simpler successfully, ask:
- Can we agree that solving the problem in its entirety is going to require too many resources or is simply impractical?
- What if we just solve the symptoms, not the cause?
- Or what if we don’t solve even the symptoms, but find a way to live with them/negate them?
- Or, what’s a simpler, more modest version of the problem? If we solved this easier problem, would we get a reasonable result?
- What’s ‘the right question’ we need to ask – what’s the problem within the problem that might be enough to solve. Like with my broken electric window, instead of solving the cause (difficult/expensive), can we just solve the effect (easy/cheap)?