What makes a good goal?

I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thinking for Innovation and Growth “, by Brian Mathews.

In the prologue, the paper tells the origin story of Swiffer — Proctor & Gamble’s billion-dollar hit product line. It all started with a simple question: “ how can we make the floors cleaner? “

When the question was posed to the company’s chemists, they got to work on trying to make a better cleaning solution. After years, they hadn’t made any progress. Then the problem was posed to an outside design firm. The firm chose to start by observing people actually cleaning their floors. What they discovered was that the problem had nothing to do with the cleaning solution — it was the household mop; people were spending more time cleaning their mops then cleaning their floors! And the Swiffer was born.

Our approach to problems is affected by the manner in which they are presented …. It’s vital that we are able to shift perspectives when we need to generate different types of results. If our thinking is too narrow then we may miss breakthroughs. How we formulate problems is just as important as how we solve them.

Leave a Comment