Help! I might love my “solution.”

The concept, “fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” is not a new one. Widely embraced by tech companies that love to love the problem, it graces the walls of collaboration spaces all over Silicon Valley.

This aphorism tells us that loving the problem essentially means the entrepreneur’s key to success is solving problems, not creating solutions.

Mahan Khalsa’s Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play, gives this idea a great spin within the context of solving problems for customers: “solutions have no inherent value.”

In other words, a solution is valuable only if it solves a problem worth solving and the client must believe that to be true. This is a cornerstone of the “Five Beliefs” necessary for a client to purchase a solution. They are:

1) There is a clearly defined problem worth solving or opportunity worth capturing.

2) The benefits generated by a solution will be greater than the cost.

3) The cost of doing nothing is materially higher than the investment required.

4) The solution will help the customer succeed in a way they feel good about.

5) The advisor/service provider is the right partner in the quest for a meaningful and effective solution.

Crucially, the solution must help the client be successful in a way they feel good about. My love of the problem must translate into their love of the solution.

Which begs a question. Can’t I love the problem and the solution?

Steve Jobs famously said, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them […] Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.” Henry Ford had a homier and decidedly lower tech version. “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, a faster horse!”

Did Jobs and Ford create solutions that convinced us that we, as a society, had a problem? In sum, yes. But by loving problems we didn’t know we had yet, they expanded our awareness of what is possible and created whole new universes, not to mention made it easier for us to get to the grocery store and keep all our CDs in our pocket.

Sometimes the solutions we consumers now love evolved from related but, importantly, different problems. After all, there has to be a market for the solution.

Take, as an example, our love-to-hate’em punching bag Facebook. The solution we now know as Facebook – a social tool that gives us the ability to keep in touch and up to date with each other and our communities, in real time – is quite valuable (depending on your viewpoint). In its purest form however, it is a software company. The problem that launched a billion faces and forever changed the nature of social, political and business interactions was… one man’s perceived inefficiencies in the dating process. Who would have thought?

Another well-known example is SpaceX. Was the problem well-defined and clearly worth solving when SpaceX was born? Probably not. But Elon Musk had a dream of a characteristically Tesla looking spaceship with the capacity to take people to Mars. Was accessible space travel the problem he was hoping to solve, or was it having a viable contingency plan in the event of some future, unknown catastrophe? Only Elon knows. But if I were a mission Astronaut, I would want you to love the problem passionately, whether it is getting to Mars or elsewhere, because I would need to be really thrilled with the solution.

History’s most influential entrepreneurs share an abiding love for “the problem,” but without our (the consumers’) love of the solution, they wouldn’t have gotten too far. Yes, love the worthy problem but don’t forget to appreciate the impact providing such a solution has on others (and by extension, you, the entrepreneur), even if it doesn’t have “inherent value,” as Khalsa puts it.

I had the pleasure of participating in an economic think tank session not too long ago and had the opportunity to speak with a scientist from Sandia Labs in New Mexico. One of the things I asked him was how their team solves such big and complex problems. Pleased with my question, I settled in, hoping he would reveal to me the secrets of science. His response? Though not what I was expecting, was thoroughly satisfying.

“We love the problem.”

We then wandered off to solve the problem of lunch, which turned out to be delicious.