Framing the Right Problem

Most discussions of innovation begin at the wrong point.
They begin with solutions.

This is understandable. Solutions are concrete. They can be built, funded, launched, and measured. They allow organizations to demonstrate progress and competence. Problems, by contrast, are ambiguous. They resist neat definitions. They require patience, interpretation, and—most uncomfortably—judgment. In a world that prizes speed and decisiveness, lingering too long on the question itself can feel like hesitation.

And yet, the longer I have observed innovation efforts across industries, the more convinced I’ve become that this inversion—starting with solutions rather than problems—is the single most reliable predictor of failure.

Innovation is commonly framed as the act of solving problems. But that framing quietly assumes that the problem is already known, correctly identified, and worth solving. In practice, those assumptions rarely hold. Organizations are far better at executing solutions than they are at interrogating the relevance of the problems those solutions are meant to address.

The result is a paradox: we live in an era of extraordinary technical capability, yet an equally extraordinary amount of innovation effort produces little lasting impact. Products launch with fanfare and disappear quietly. Internal initiatives consume years of effort without altering competitive position. The issue is not a shortage of ideas or talent. It is a shortage of rigor at the very beginning.

A misdefined problem does more than waste resources. It creates a false sense of progress. Teams build, iterate, and optimize, believing they are moving forward, when in reality they are circling a question that was never decisive to begin with. The danger is not that the solution fails. The danger is that it succeeds—on its own terms—while remaining irrelevant to how customers actually choose.

This is why reframing innovation as “problem-solving” can be misleading. The real work is problem selection. And problem selection is not a creative exercise; it is a strategic one. It requires understanding which frictions shape behavior, which trade-offs customers are actively trying to avoid, and which discomforts they have already accepted as part of the landscape.

Until that work is done, innovation is little more than motion.

The Mistake We Keep Making

There is a recurring pattern I’ve seen in both startups and large organizations, and once you notice it, it becomes difficult to ignore. Innovation efforts tend to emerge not from unresolved customer pain, but from newly available capability.

A new technology becomes accessible. A new team is assembled. A budget is approved. And almost immediately, the question shifts from “What must be solved?” to “What can we build?” The distinction may seem subtle, but its consequences are profound.

Capability-driven innovation feels efficient. It leverages existing strengths. It creates momentum. But it also introduces bias. When we start with what we can do, we unconsciously search for problems that justify doing it. The problem becomes a supporting character in a story already written around the solution.

Amazon’s Fire Phone illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Much has been written about its failure, often focusing on timing, pricing, or competitive intensity. Those factors mattered, but they were not decisive. The deeper issue was that the Fire Phone was built around an impressive answer to a question consumers were not urgently asking.

Smartphones at the time were not frictionless, but they were good enough. The trade-offs—battery life, ecosystem lock-in, incremental feature improvements—were known and accepted. Consumers were not searching for relief; they were optimizing within constraints they had already decided to live with.

The Fire Phone did not meaningfully reduce a dominant friction in the decision to own a smartphone. It introduced novelty where necessity was absent. And novelty, on its own, rarely reshapes behavior.

This is the mistake organizations repeat: they mistake technical possibility for strategic relevance. They confuse differentiation with desirability. They assume that because something can be built—and built well—it deserves a place in the market.

In reality, markets are not neutral testing grounds for ideas. They are crowded spaces shaped by accumulated choices. To dislodge existing behavior, a solution must do more than exist. It must relieve pressure that people already feel.

Absent that pressure, even excellent execution struggles to matter.

Problems, Opportunities, and a Convenient Confusion

Business language has a habit of smoothing over uncomfortable distinctions, and few phrases do more damage than the claim that “there are no problems, only opportunities.” It sounds constructive. It signals optimism. But it also dissolves an essential filter.

If every imperfection is an opportunity, then nothing is. Scarcity disappears. Judgment erodes. Innovation becomes a matter of enthusiasm rather than necessity.

In practice, not all problems deserve to be solved. Some inefficiencies are tolerable. Some frustrations are situational. Some inconveniences are so minor that eliminating them changes nothing about how decisions are made. Treating all of these as equivalent opportunities leads organizations to chase surface-level improvements while missing deeper structural constraints.

The insight that customers “hire” products to get jobs done helped shift attention away from features and toward intent. That was an important correction. But intent alone does not determine choice. Two customers may be trying to accomplish the same job while tolerating radically different levels of friction along the way.

What matters is not just what people are trying to do, but how much discomfort they are willing to endure while doing it.

This is where severity enters the picture. An irritation is not the same as a constraint. A workaround is not the same as a failure. People routinely accept inefficiencies when the cost of switching exceeds the cost of coping. Innovation only becomes compelling when that balance flips.

Organizations often overlook this because inefficiencies look dramatic when mapped. Process diagrams exaggerate pain. Customer journeys highlight friction points. But behavior tells a quieter, more honest story. If people are not changing, the friction may not be decisive.

Innovation requires resisting the urge to declare every imperfection an opportunity. It requires asking a harder question: Is this problem strong enough to force a different choice?

Without that discipline, innovation becomes busywork dressed up as progress.

Why Severity Matters More Than Elegance

One of the most persistent myths in innovation is that better solutions naturally win. We like to believe that if something is more elegant, more efficient, or more thoughtfully designed, adoption will follow. In reality, improvement only matters when it crosses a threshold of significance.

Most markets are filled with “better” options that fail to displace incumbents. Not because they are flawed, but because they are insufficiently different where it counts. They reduce friction incrementally in areas customers had already learned to tolerate.

This is why so many innovation efforts feel puzzling in hindsight. Teams did everything right. Research was conducted. Design was polished. Launches were executed professionally. And yet, nothing moved. The missing ingredient was not quality; it was urgency.

Severity determines urgency. It is the difference between noticing a flaw and seeking escape from it. Minor frictions invite adaptation. Major frictions invite change.

Organizations often misjudge this because they conflate visibility with importance. A friction that is easy to observe is not necessarily painful. A friction that is quietly endured may be far more decisive. Customers rarely complain about the constraints they’ve already accepted. They complain about the ones that surprise them.

This is why innovation based on stated needs so often disappoints. People articulate what annoys them, not what constrains them. The latter requires interpretation.

When innovations succeed, it is usually because they remove or rebalance a trade-off that had become untenable—between cost and quality, speed and reliability, convenience and control. They do not eliminate friction entirely. They change its shape.

Elegance is a luxury. Severity is a necessity.

Starting Where It Actually Begins

If there is a common thread among durable innovations, it is not brilliance of execution but clarity of insight. The teams behind them understood something fundamental about the pressures shaping choice before they built anything at all.

Airbnb did not begin by trying to build a better booking engine. It began by recognizing that a growing segment of travelers experienced traditional accommodation as a compromise. Hotels offered reliability but at the cost of authenticity and flexibility. Staying with friends offered immersion but lacked scalability. Airbnb reduced that trade-off in a way that existing players could not easily match.

The platform followed the insight, not the other way around.

This pattern is consistent across industries. Successful innovations tend to look obvious only after the fact because they align with pressures that were already present. The work was not invention; it was interpretation.

This is why starting with solutions is so dangerous. It anchors thinking prematurely. Once a solution is imagined, evidence is selectively gathered to support it. The problem becomes a justification rather than a discovery.

Starting with the problem requires humility. It requires accepting that some of the most promising ideas will not survive contact with reality. But it also increases the odds that the ideas that do survive will matter.

Innovation begins not with creativity, but with seeing the landscape as it is—crowded, constrained, and shaped by trade-offs people already navigate every day.

Separating Signal from Noise

Distinguishing meaningful problems from background friction is less about tools than about posture. Frameworks help, but only when paired with judgment.

The key is to observe behavior rather than declarations. What alternatives do people actually use? What workarounds persist? Where do they spend time, money, or attention to compensate for limitations? These signals reveal where friction is being actively managed rather than passively endured.

Importantly, many visible inefficiencies do not qualify. Long wait times, extra steps, and imperfect interfaces often look like opportunities on paper. In reality, they may be absorbed with little consequence. People optimize around them.

True signals appear when behavior changes despite inconvenience—when users stitch together multiple solutions, pay premiums, or accept complexity to avoid a particular trade-off. These are indicators of pressure.

Google Glass misread noise as signal. The inconvenience of checking a phone was visible but not severe. Slack recognized signal. Fragmented communication was not merely inefficient; it was corrosive. Teams were already bending their workflows to escape it.

Innovation lives in that difference.

The Discipline Innovation Rarely Practices

The hardest part of innovation is not building. It is deciding what not to build.

Restraint is uncomfortable because it feels like inaction. But it is often the most strategic move available. Walking away from solvable but insignificant problems preserves energy for the ones that reshape choice.

Innovation succeeds not when it moves fastest, but when it moves toward pressure. The discipline to wait for that pressure—to recognize it, measure it, and respect it—is what separates lasting impact from impressive irrelevance.

In the end, innovation does not fail because organizations lack ideas. It fails because they lack judgment at the beginning.

And that is where strategy truly lives.