Are you a lucky problem finder?

Take a look at this picture below and what do you see?

Some see a beautiful yard, some see a lot to mow, some see really great bee food and some see about 15 four-leaf clovers. Do you know one of those people that can spot a four-leaf clover in a sea of green? I’m one of those weirdos and I truly can’t explain it. I usually can’t even find them when I’m trying too hard.

That’s what makes me curious. I can find them, my dad can find them but my brother and mother can not. So it probably isn’t purely genetics.

I have a background as a professional visual designer and have spent a lot of time close to a computer screen. I can tell you if kerning or leading is off by millimeters. You would think that attention to detail is the key to this luck but my brother is a professional photographer and can spot finer details than I can on my best day.

Come to find out the key may not be in the details. For tips on finding four leaf clovers, research recommends taking a wider view and scanning back and forth across larger swathes of the ground. Then when you think you see one, make sure you look at it from more than one angle - single it out. They also recommend that if you find one four leaf clover, there are more than likely at least a few more close by since it is a genetic mutation that can affect more clovers within the same patch.

Aside from being informational tips that you can share at cocktail parties, these recommendations are also helpful when finding problems.

There’s problem solving and then there’s problem finding.

Problem finding is a process in which we articulate the questions that need to be answered or form hypotheses that should be tested.

I currently work with teams to better understand their customers’ problems, ideate solutions and test and validate these ideas. What I have found in this work is that the teams that are more diligent at finding the right problems to solve, are the teams that are more consistently building a solution that actually stands the test(ing) of time.

The process to successful problem finding is very similar to finding those lucky clovers:

• Take in a wide variety of information to give you a good broad understanding of the landscape

• When you think you found a problem, look at it from different angles

• Look for tangential problems. If you solve one, how will it benefit the others that are interrelated?

Problem finding goes hand in hand with problem solving and it shouldn’t be underestimated. If you feel like your problem solving isn’t yielding the results that you’d hoped for, take a look at your problem finding methods.

Here are some great resources to better understand problem finding:

• Greg McKeowan’s Podcast episodes on Problem Finding (part 1, part 2, part 3)

• Article: Do we do enough problem-finding? By June Kang

• Research paper: Problem Finding and Problem Solving by Mark A Runco

Will these tips help you find four-leaf clovers? Possibly. After more research, informal polling and a bit of testing, the jury is still out. You might also need a bit of luck in your clover search. More importantly, will keeping these tips in mind help your problem finding? From my experience, the answer to that question is yes. The Silent Storm meeting format was created to help maximize problem finding, yielding consistently reliable results.

Below are my clover finds for this week. Am I lucky at finding problems? Or just clovers? Reach out if you have any other tips that would help!

Good luck!
Stay curious.