One of my professors at HKS shared these two anecdotes in relation to this topic: Albert Einstein, one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time, allegedly said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend fifty-nine minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple, said something similar: “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”
A more personal example took place during my time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, back in 2017. In October of that year, I met with the Vice Chancellor of MIT at the time, Ian Waitz, a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He explained where MIT was currently placed in the Nobel Prize race, as compared to other renowned schools around the world. MIT was at fifth place, while its neighboring school, Harvard University, held first place. But, Waitz said, MIT was expected to rise to fourth place in the following year, and third in the near future; catching up Harvard was therefore only a matter of time. Then he added in a confident tone that caught my attention: “The reason we will ultimately win in this race is in the way we teach and help students to learn. We make students spend the most hours understanding the problem before we even think about the solution.”
After my years of working closely with various institutions and businesses in an effort to help them steer from mediocrity and decline to prosperity and growth, I have come to believe that deploying the right actions hinges on how much we know about the problems we are tackling. What sort of intervention is required to solve them? Who and what lie behind the problems? How long have they been going on? What sort of negative impacts are we seeing?
