How To Innovate With or Without a Better Horse

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
- Henry Ford

This quote has been variously repeated sometimes with "better horse", sometimes with "faster horse", but almost always accompanied with an assertion: this is proof that you should therefore not listen to your customers ("strong form"), or a reminder: that you should listen to them with more than a grain of salt ("weak form").

Lots of arguments ensue. Steve Jobs's name is invoked as proof that not listening is required for fundamental innovation. "You completely misunderstand Ford," someone else would suggest. Parties agree to disagree, somewhere in the middle.

I don't know what Ford meant when he said it. I also don't know why this has to be so complicated.

Innovation is, fundamentally, Problem Solving. And Problem Solving, for as long as as I can remember (*), starts with the Problem Statement. Asking what people want is not asking for the Problem Statement; it's asking for the Solution. People, busy in their daily lives and experts in their own areas---but with information asymmetry as to areas we are experts in or spend all our waking hours dreaming about---may not be as good as we are at concocting innovative solutions in our space.

But they're great at telling us the Problems they're experiencing with the Solutions we do have. So we must seek that out. Talk. Ask. Observe. Think. Innovate.

Actually, this article has a larger point than just Innovation.

In solving problems, we as teams do repeatedly fail to start with The Problem Statement, large and small. I can't count the countless times I've sat down at a meeting with the participants proposing The Perfect Idea to address whatever situation we were facing, whether it's dealing with work timezone differences between Hong Kong and New York, or what features to ship next, or when and how to do the next round of funding.

The catch was that there were invariably 5 Perfect Ideas, each orthogonal to the other, all solving different problems. And the smarter the participants, the more vociferous the arguments. Tempers flared. Egos bruised. Survival of the Fastest Mouth. Fight or Flight. Reverse Wisdom of Crowd effect. Worst: nothing gets done.

On the other hand, when we just start with the Problem Statement, go away for 15 minutes, then come to the table, we usually converge at the 1 Obvious Idea in less than 30 minutes and get it executed in the following 24 hours.

I do have a theory as to why we find it unnatural to start with The Problem Statement, but instead instinctively launch directly into Solutions. And it has to do with evolution---but that's another topic altogether.

(*) or at least since Mr. Rogoway's high school physics class. He would make us re-organize every problem in the textbook in 4 sections: Data, Question, Solution, Answer. Miss a section, zero credit. Even and especially when we could solve the problem in our heads in 60 seconds, 30 with a calculator. In the intervening years I've terrorized my own students into similarly evolutionarily unnatural problem-solving processes, to their benefit.