Stop Solving The Wrong Problem

How to clarify the problem better

Jan 10, 2025

“My experience is find(ing) the ‘right’ answer is rarely the problem. What keeps us stuck are inferior questions that produce tactical or unattractive choices.”
- Keith J. Cunningham, The Road Less Stupid

You can fritter away your life on the wrong problems, by asking the wrong questions.

Maybe it’s to lose weight. Maybe it’s to build a business. Whatever it is, most of us are good at sitting down and making a plan. Goals. Deadlines. Investing money. Putting in the waning embers of our time. To alchemize our struggle into something greater.

To solve problems.

But good problem solvers don’t just jump into execution. Before finding solutions, you need to think about it. You need to frame it.

Else, you can just run through a fog. Tendrils of ambiguity will hug your heels. As you hack away, nothing changes. You choose bad problems to solve, wasting your work with no direction. Or worse, towards a wrong one.

To avoid this, we want some clarity.

I was an Accidental Engineer. My final year of high school started with my Dad losing his job. This brought confusion about the present, that I couldn’t think much about the future. My grades sank under the weight of pressure.

It was only luck that helped me graduate.

I wrote last-minute college applications in a musty internet café. My mother looming over me from behind. She’d wonder why it took so long to write these essays. Naturally, my college application rejections were plentiful. International aspirations were dashed.

By the time I graduated, I had to scramble to get a seat in a local Dubai college, or else waste a year. On a last-minute bout, my Mom paid the fees to my college. We gave more thought for which movie we should watch at the cinema.

As a consequence, I joined my Mechanical Engineering program in confusion. In the first two years, I chugged along with zero idea what companies were hiring and where I would use my courses in Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics. A vortex of formulae would swirl in my head along with a question:

What’s the most exciting thing I can do when I graduate?

Where would I use all this knowledge? Where was I going? I was grasping for straws in an experential tsunami.

After a foray with different projects, I did a process of elimination. From automotive to renewable energy, these career tracks didn’t appeal to me. Eventually, I arrived at robotics.

It sounded cool and the work looked fun. But I wasn’t sure how to get in. For the remaining two years, my brain was consumed by this new obsession. Now, I just had to get a job.

Problem is, there weren’t many robotic companies in Dubai. That should have been a preliminary red flag. But I had already set my heart on this field.

So, I kept looking. By some luck, I found one near my college campus. I was pumped when I got this job. From designing to building parts from scratch, the job was hands-on and felt interesting. I was following my enthusiasm.

But there were a few problems.

When Good Answers Lead to Messes

For these roles, salaries were low in Dubai. There were a handful of companies hiring for my specific engineering skill set. The few that existed chose offices in remote corners of the city to save on rent. To top it off, the CEO had a fun habit of screaming at his employees.

After I left, I had no idea what I’d do next. In Dubai's job market, my engineering skills like CAD software didn’t matter. To employers there, I might as well have had no skills at all.

Time is a flat circle. I was back to ‘scramble-mode’, interviewing for all kinds of roles trying to find a place for me. From sales, marketing to program management, I became a career chameleon. I’d sell how I’m the ‘perfect fit’ across these roles, with 5-10 different tailored CVs in my back pocket.

In the end, I switched fields from Engineering to Business and did a Masters degree, starting from a clean slate. Things fell into place, thanks to luck. But I wonder if I could have been less like a headless chicken.

To me, poor decision making led to these scramble-modes.

Clarify First, Before Jumping To Problem Solving

When facing a question, our mind can immediately jump to an answer. But what if the question is wrong. Or rather, badly defined.

My original question was vague and broad. Good clarifying questions would give me better context. They would also help understand the problem better. Clarifying first, can help us solve the right problem, before coming up with an answer.

To generalise, clarifying questions serve three purposes:

Define vague words to give context
e.g. What does exciting mean? Is this meant to be a career decision?
Highlight the objective and how you measure a ‘correct’ answer
e.g. Why am I asking this question? What salary am I expecting? What else matters to me apart from salary?
Frame the Question you are asking (and ignore what is it not asking)
e.g. Do I have a career path in mind already? Am I sure about it already? Are there any constraints or preferences that can scope my problem better?

By clarifying your Question with clearer definitions, getting to the point of why you are doing this and framing what your problem is (and isn’t), it can evolve to:

Should I try for a career in robotics after college?

This is useful because it doesn’t assume I am 100% convinced on my preliminary career choice. By asking a vague question like ‘What do I want to do after college?’, I skipped to ‘how to get a job in robotics?’ before understanding whether I should or not in the first place.

Rather than letting our assumptions make decisions for us, we can isolate and look at factors with better clarity. Like a tangled-up ball of USB-C cables, I want to pick the right cable to pull first. The order matters. Else, they’ll twist and get stuck further.

Clarifying what’s your problem should be the first step to solving it.

How to Clarify Your Own Problem?

Let’s assume you are sold. You know there are problems you want to solve. But before jumping into problem solving, you’d like to know exactly what it is.

But how do you go about it? Here’s some steps to prompt you:

Make Time & Space to Think Deeply: You need a clear 5-10 minute slot of time to sit down with your problem. I’d open a blank Google Document with a timer or paper works just as fine. The main thing is treating this like actual work to be done - a meeting with yourself. So no phones and no multi-tasking.
Form your Question: All problems are questions, if you want to solve them. Writing it down is step one, so you know what to focus on.
e.g. My problem can’t be ‘I want to lose weight’ but a question like ‘How do I lose weight?’

Yes, this is vague, but it gives us a starting point.
Define Your Goal: Why this Question? What do you want to gain by solving it? How do you know it is solved? Why do you care?
e.g. Why do I want to lose weight? Is it purely a health reason or do I want to wear my old jeans that got a bit tight?

Getting specific about my ‘why’ can help focus on the right questions.
Point out vague parts of your question: Your Question will have broad words. Ask yourself what do they mean for you.
e.g. What does ‘lose weight’ mean to me? How much weight and what timeline am I giving myself? Are we talking about purely fat or even muscle mass?
Reform your Question with constraints & preferences: Is this the right Question to be asking? How can you reform this question knowing any constraints or timelines affecting you? Do you have an answer in mind already?
e.g. Who am I? Do I have a crazy work schedule? Do I already work out? Do I have any existing health issues? Do I have a health program in mind?
Working through these steps can help me form a Question. This Question will be context specific to me. We aren’t problem solving yet, but this framing helps us clear the fog.

How have you made your decisions? Do you clarify your problems before solution finding?

The Strategy Guild

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