Picking the Right Problem to Solve is Key
During my graduate school years, I found a common recurring trait
among the best researchers -they all seemed to have developed a keen sense and
intuition for picking good problems -problems that were really worth pursuing
and had the potential, if solved adequately well, to impact the world
positively.
They seemed to have a God-given nearly unshakeable conviction that
the problems they worked on were the problems to focus on.
I have subsequently come to believe that defining and picking the
right problem to solve is perhaps more difficult than finding a solution to a
specific problem.
No matter what the problem is, one can ultimately find an
approximate solution, if not the perfect solution. But the key is to knowing
what problems one must solve.
So what is a good problem to solve? Legendary physicist and
teacher, Richard Feynman in his letter to a former student once wrote, “The
worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones
you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it
lies before us unsolved and we can see some way for us to make a little headway
into it.“
Notwithstanding the reference to science, the same lesson holds
true for entrepreneurs.Entrepreneurs, to me, are no different from researchers
-both of whom see a problem lying before them unsolved and they pursue it with
passion because of a sometimes nearly irrational conviction that drives them to
solve it.
Initially, it may appear that these problems are either far too
grand or too commonplace and have been tried several times before. But great
entrepreneurs and researchers have unique insights that make grand problems
appear more tractable or recast old problems in an entirely new light.
Consider the example of Kurt Godel, the legendary Austrian
logician.
While most of the mathematical community embarked on a programme
of formalisation of mathematics, Godel instead sought to solve a more
fundamental problem: can one really formalise any system at all? The consequent
result was Godel, at the age of 25, redefined the en creasing complexity of
software systems.
The solution to this problem was the global delivery model, an
innovation that emanated from India, which changed the face of software
construction forever.
Of course the features and metrics that define a good problem are
different for business entrepreneurs versus researchers. But in the final
analysis both these pursuits, at their inception, are problem-finding exercises
which require imagination and ingenuity . Solutions to these problems too
require imagination, hard work, sacrifice, and ingenuity . Ultimately , great
entrepreneurs in their quest of problem-finding appear to demonstrate that a
plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility .
(Rohan Murty is a cofounder of Catamaran Ventures) tire landscape
of logic, philosophy , and thought that changed mankind forever.
Or consider the grand problem that Douglas Engelbart tackled in
the 60s: what defines a natural interaction between a human and a machine? The
result was a series of innovations, including the invention of the mouse, to
ultimately the development of a graphical user-interface that lead to the
bedrock of success for Macintosh and Windows in the 1980s.
Or consider the problem of a widely held belief until the late
1970s: that software writing is a monolithic activity that must be done by a
group of people sitting in one room, a severely limiting belief in the face of
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ROHAN MURTY
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ET9JUL15
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