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Anyone in a problem-solving discipline knows it’s sometimes hard to understand the real source of a problem. A friend comes to you with a question: say, “How can I fix a broken heating element?” It takes a lot of effort and questioning to find that the broken heating element is in a kettle, and your friend wants a kettle to boil some water, in order to make a cup of coffee. If only they’d asked you about the coffee in the first place, you could have pointed them straight to the coffee machine, instead of spending ages trying to fix a broken and unnecessary kettle.
As a software developer, I’ve spent my career trying to get people to answer this question: whether they’re colleagues, or consumers of the products I’m making. In software, there are often multiple ways to get the same effect, and it’s usually not obvious up-front which will be easiest. We even have a name for it: it’s called the X-Y problem: they ask you about X, but they’re really trying to do Y.
This can be a bigger problem for a technology consultancy like Cambridge Consultants, especially in innovative consumer product development. Sometimes, our clients have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get their customers to answer that question, eventually coming to the conclusion that they shouldn’t simply do what their users are asking for, but develop an innovative product that will transform the market segment. When they come to us, they might ask for help deciding what that product will be, or they might have already developed some ideas and need help realising the technology. To get the best outcome for the client’s business, the problem of understanding the real goal is doubled: to make sure that the new product will genuinely help the user, and to make sure we can do it in a way that benefits the client.
It’s hard to unravel the hidden, nested goals because users can get very defensive about it. You ask, “No no, what do you really want?” and immediately it sounds as if you’re accusing them of lying. Either they defensively reiterate what they’ve already told you: “The heating element is broken, and I have to fix it,” or you get the story of their whole lives: “I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I got into the office feeling very tired…” Yet I’ve found there’s one special phrasing – I’d go as far as calling it a magic word – which works every time to get users, consumers, clients, or your colleagues to tell you what they really want.
The question is this: “What are you trying to achieve?” It’s non-confrontational. On the face of it, it means exactly the same, but somehow people understand that you’re trying to get to the root of the problem. It helps to focus on the underlying goal (making coffee), without fixating on the method that seemed easiest at first (boiling water in a kettle).
So next time somebody asks you how to get their intended solution working rather than how to solve their real problem, or if you’re trying to understand a consumer need in order to disrupt your market segment, don’t get irritated that nobody will tell you what they really want: trot out your magic words, and find out what they’re trying to achieve.
