Thoroughly understand the problem to solve

- How do you know a problem is a problem? In this video, I'll teach you how to diagnose the problem to solve. This is the most important step in the innovation process, and it's a step that most people want to bypass or rush through. Albert Einstein is famously known for this quote, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." In other words, Albert said he'd spend 92% of his time on the problem to solve and only 8% on solutions. Is this the ratio you are using to solve your problems currently? If not, I hope this inspires you to consider otherwise. Spending the proper amount of time in this stage is critical, so please, please don't bypass it. In the last video, you chose a problem to solve. This was just the pre-step. The first official stage of the innovation process is diagnose. Diagnose is all about understanding the problem to solve. Step one, define the target audience. Who does this problem affect? Sometimes you'll have more than one target audience. In this step, you want to be as specific as possible. Avoid using broad, sweeping categorizations unless it's truly applicable. For example, saying the target audience is all your staff in your company. Is it really? Be as specific as you can. For this course, the target audience will be you, but when you start applying innovation more broadly, this will be important to remember. Step two, uncover the pain. Once you've defined your target audience, you want to uncover their pain points. Pain points are not hard to find because everyone experiences pain. Use the tool of observation to see what's going on with the target audience around you. You're looking for adaptations. Adaptations are people's way of mitigating their pain points with their own solutions. It's a stop gap solution to help address it. Here's an example. My home's garage is south-facing. Every time I try to close my garage on a sunny day, it reverses back up. The sunlight hits the garage eye sensor, and because the garage thinks there's something there, it goes back up. And this was a huge pain for me, because every single time it was sunny outside, it'd be really hard to close the garage. Get out of the car, try to block the sensor with my arms or my body, and sometimes it would work. It would waste a lot of time. So my adaptation to this problem was getting a toilet paper roll, a zip tie, and a pair of scissors, and I created this makeshift solution to help solve my problem. If you were observing me, you would see this adaptation at my home and would be able to discern that this is a huge pain point for me. If you were to solve this problem for me, you'd be innovating. Step three, once you've identified the pain points of your target audience, you want to determine what the root cause of the pain point is. The root cause is the reason why the pain point is happening. If you were to solve the root cause of the pain, the problem would cease to exist. This takes a bit of digging. So in my garage example, after a really long time, I eventually figured out what the root cause was. The sending and receiving sensors needed to be switched, so all I had to do was reverse the position of the sensors in my garage and that fixed it. No more issues on a sunny day. I want you to think about your pain point. What's the root cause of it? Pause the video and brainstorm a list of ideas. Step four, what happens if you solve the problem for your target audience? What's the benefit to the audience? Benefits do not have to be financial only. It can be subjective elements too, like feelings of confidence, peace of mind, or happiness. Let's move on to the final step, step five. In the final step, you'll create a diagnostic statement. The diagnostic statement has four areas for you to fill out. Who does this problem affect? What's their pain? Why is it happening, and what happens if solved? Remember the example that I shared earlier about the Dutch eBike company and their shipping problem? Here's what their diagnostic statement would have been. The Dutch eBike company is experiencing a 25% shipping damage rate to their eBikes. This is happening because carriers are mishandling their eBikes. Solving this problem would result in a reduction of cost, time delays, having to deal with carriers and insurance, and faster shipment to customers. What's your diagnostic statement? Be proud of what you've done. This isn't easy work. You're now ready to move on to the next stage of the innovation process, dream.