I minimize my tooth getting grounded in rules of design pondering after I launched a strategic design MBA throughout my college educating years. Design pondering is actually a problem-solving course of that’s 50% qualitative analysis and 50% the applying of design rules resembling visualizing information and prototyping. Within the design pondering world, we’re effectively conscious that 80% of the problem-solving course of is grounded in ensuring you even ask the best query . . . earlier than you go working down the rabbit gap of potential options. All nice problem-solving begins with figuring out the precise drawback to resolve, which is found with actually nice questions.
That’s why a latest dialog with Jim Szafranski, CEO of Prezi, was affirming. He had discovered the identical lesson—twice—by a completely totally different path. First, as an MIT graduate pupil within the late Eighties, making use of early AI methods in metal mill manufacturing. And once more many years later, main a worldwide presentation platform, Prezi, into the age of generative AI. Each instances, the breakthrough got here not from higher know-how, however from asking a greater query.
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“The nearer you might be to what the last word level of what you’re doing is, the higher,” he informed me. On the metal mill, that meant shifting focus from machine effectivity to buyer supply timelines. At Prezi, it meant transferring away from asking prospects the place they acquired caught within the interface and to asking what they had been truly attempting to perform. The reply stunned Szafranski’s colleagues: “I’ve a deadline tomorrow. That’s my drawback.” It had much less to do with how fairly their deck was.
That is what I name the distinction between optimizing and orienting. Most organizations are glorious at optimizing. They’ve dashboards, goals and key outcomes (OKRs), and retrospectives designed to make present processes run sooner and smoother. However orienting—stepping again to ask whether or not you’re climbing the best mountain within the first place—is much rarer and far more invaluable.
Szafranski defined the analysis strategies Prezi used to seek out its reframe. Early on, group members carried out granular person interviews about interface friction. That line of questioning was deeply helpful for optimization however was restricted for transformation. “That may maintain you actually centered on the timber typically, not the forest,” he mirrored. The unlock got here after they zoomed out to broad surveys asking about individuals’s objectives, not their behaviors. Ultimately, they made the query literal: Earlier than customers might even enter the product, they needed to reply when their presentation was due.
This distinction—between enhancing your product and fixing your buyer’s precise drawback—has profound implications for a way leaders deploy synthetic intelligence. The seduction of AI is its capability for automation. However automation utilized to the improper drawback is simply elegant misdirection! Szafranski is candid about this threat: “Your job will be a lot increased degree. Step again. Consider your buyer, consider the result you’re attempting to drive they usually’re attempting to drive.”
In my work as a creativity strategist, I see this sample continuously. The leaders and organizations that thrive aren’t essentially those with essentially the most refined instruments, however slightly those with the clearest view of goal. They’ve carried out the inside-out work of understanding what drawback they’re truly within the enterprise of fixing, so that each software, each hire, each funding turns into purposeful slightly than reactive.
Szafranski presents a sensible heuristic for realizing while you’ve discovered the best drawback: “In case you can clarify it over a dinner desk with somebody in your loved ones who doesn’t actually know what you do, then you definately’ve most likely discovered the best drawback.” I’d add my very own corollary: In case you can doodle it, you truly perceive it.
The query price sitting with this week isn’t whether or not your group is executing effectively. It’s whether or not you’re all pointed on the proper goal within the first place. Essentially the most highly effective transfer a leader could make isn’t at hand their group higher instruments; it’s to assist them ask higher questions.
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