How to Make Better Decisions Using Problem Validation

Introduction

Are you too agreeable? Are there so many opinions around you that you find it challenging to make up your mind? Humans make hundreds of decisions daily. Some are practically mindless, more akin to habits than intentional decisions. Still, other decisions have the potential for big impacts. This is where problem validation can help you become a much more effective decision-maker.

Imagine looking online to find that your business has received a poor review. First, you might feel defensive. You might choose to ignore it and write it off as a fluke. You have tons of great reviews no one has ever had an issue like this with your product. But the criticism pulls at you and eventually, you may start to think about what went wrong. Then a second review comes along with the same harsh sentiment. Now you are thinking about what needs to change.

What do you do now? Should you try to get the customers to change their minds? Perhaps you can go on the hunt for a bunch of great reviews to bury those? Are sweeping changes necessary? You don’t need to do any of that because there is a better way to arrive at your best next step. It’s called problem validation.

What is Problem Validation?

Problem validation is a way to remove the guesswork from challenges you face and to help you have a deeper understanding of the situation. In the scenario above, it can help you determine whether or not the issues your customers encountered are outliers or one-offs, or if it’s an issue you need to address. Further, it’s a way to help you gain more context of the issue so you have a good starting point to identify the best solution.

Why Does Problem Validation Improve Decision-Making?

Why is it important to validate a problem? Let me give you an example. Have you ever found yourself struggling during your job search because you couldn’t get interviews? In your frustration, you may have decided to try applying for lower-level positions. Then you discovered applicant tracking software (ATS) and realized that your resume simply needed a reformat to be more ATS friendly.

The problem wasn’t that you were applying for the wrong positions. The problem was that you were getting rejections for positions you applied to. Solving that properly required you to first break down the problem to its most basic form before you could begin to understand why. If you were mostly qualified for the roles you were applying to, applying to lower-level roles was not the best solution to your problem. However, you saw the rejections and immediately went into solution mode, reacting in whatever way you could think of first. Maybe you changed your resume wording, or maybe you continued to use the same one. Either way, you wouldn’t have had much success without ATS-friendly formatting, depending on how you were applying, of course.

Ideas for solving problems can be endless. Tell anyone about the challenges you face, and they may provide many solutions because so many of us live in the solution space. We are making decisions all day long, and it’s only natural to jump to solutions. However good solutions require a strong understanding of the problem. This is where most people go wrong. You take what a customer says at face value rather than understanding the why and the full context behind the feedback you’ve received.

Steps to Validate Problems

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” 

Albert Einstein

I think Einstein was onto something. Before you make any solutions, stay in the problem space a little longer. Below are the steps I recommend to validate your problem before you begin identifying ways to solve it.

1. Identify where there is a decision to be made.
2. Define the problem as you understand it now.
3. Gather everything you know about the problem, including relevant data.
   • In the example above, it would be the negative reviews, but it would also be any counter-reviews. 
4. Analyze all the data, quantifying what you can, and gaining as many insights as you can.
5. Identify assumptions that you believe to be true regarding the problem.
   • You may need to validate some of these assumptions, depending on their nature, to grasp the magnitude of the problem.
6. Seek out perspective. Review the market. This is where you look at your problem through the lens of others.
7. Review the problem and adjust your problem definition based on your findings.

At this point, you can try coming up with one or more solutions to test out because you have a better understanding of the problem.

Problem Validation Example

1. My job search isn’t going well. I need to do something else to get a new job as soon as possible because applying to positions has not yielded any results.
2. I am applying for open roles, but I’m not getting interviews. How can I increase the number of interviews I am getting?
3. This would include any available job application data and job qualification data.
   • I applied to 40 jobs on LinkedIn, and I received 20 rejections. I received no response to the other 20. Based on the job descriptions, I met all the minimum qualifications for every single position. For desired qualifications, I met some and not others. Considering all the qualifications and skills expressed in the postings, I felt 100% qualified for 10 of the roles. I felt around 75% qualified for 25 of the roles. For the other 5 open positions, I felt about 50% qualified, though I did meet all minimum requirements.
4. Based on the information above, I am mostly qualified for what I am applying to. However, I know I have gotten rejections for at least 50% of the positions.
5. Assumptions: All 40 positions were open and not yet filled. All 40 applications were received.
   • These are reasonable assumptions but attempts to verify them can be made by contacting the company. Given that 20 rejections were received, at least 50% of the time the applications were received – the evidence is pretty strong that this assumption is true.
6. In reading about applying to jobs and receiving no response, additional opinions on the issue have been uncovered. For example, there is an article about applicant tracking software (ATS).
   • You recently had your resume updated to make it “stand out,” and in doing so, made the header, footer, and other information likely unreadable with your unique colors, font styles, and graphics. This is stronger evidence than your original belief that you were unqualified for the roles you applied to.
     • This might be a good time to go back to step 5 and reconsider assumptions.
7. You recreate your resume to be ATS-friendly and apply to more roles. You may even contact companies that haven’t rejected your previous application and ask if you can provide your new resume.

Conclusion

Problem validation is key to helping you make better decisions. The deeper you understand the problem, the more specific your solutions can be as you work toward resolution. The supporting data makes it easier to listen to yourself, rather than all the opinions around you. If you seek out ideas from others, you can spend more time helping them understand the problem so that hopefully the solutions offered are truly useful.