Ep. 201 - Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, Author of What's Your Problem and Innovation As Usual

Thomas Weddle is the author of Innovation As Usual and his new book What's Your Problem? Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Thomas talk about why starting with a problem is so important in innovation, what it means to solve the right problem, and the framework teams can use to make better decisions in the process. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Thomas Wedell. He's the author of a couple of different books - Innovation As Usual and a new book coming out called, What's Your Problem: To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. Welcome to the show, Thomas. 

Thomas Wedell: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me on. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been in this innovation space for quite some time, working all around the world with major companies. And you've got a framework that you've outlined in this new book that I think is interesting and can give some insight to our audience for how to tackle this problem of innovation. So, my first question is, let's start by telling the audience about your background, and then we can delve into the book a little bit more. 

Thomas Wedell: Background wise, I'm originally from Denmark. I've been abroad for maybe 14 years, try to launch a couple of startups that failed gloriously, and then I somehow got sidelined into this whole academic space that I'm in now. And my innovation work really started 10 years ago when I started working with an old professor of mine. And we started going into companies and looking at what actually worked when it came to making innovation happen in practice. And that led to my first book called Innovation As Usual, which came out think it's like seven years ago now with Harvard Business Press. And that was also what led to my current work on the book now. So, it was all quite accidental and getting sidelined into things and suddenly discovering, wait, there's something wrong about the way we do innovation or there's something wrong by the way, we do problem solving. I can't really claim to have a red thread of any kind in my career.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I like the book and your framework around focusing on the problem because as I've worked a lot with startups and early stage ideas within corporations and that a lot of people start with the solution. They have an idea, they jump immediately to that solution side, and you're taking a different framework and say, okay, that's fine, but what you're doing is probably the wrong way to approach it. So, let's talk about the book and talk about the focus on the problem and why that's so important. 

Thomas Wedell: It came out of the realization that we are missing a tool in the area of problem framing. As many of your listeners, I'm sure you're familiar with, there's very often a need to go in for instance, if a client approaches you to go in and say, wait, does the client actually understand the problem they're trying to solve, before we go in and just build the solution we have in mind for them? That goes for startups as well of course, understanding their customer's problem.  And I realized that while this is like a thing that a lot of people, they have a feel for, and if you go to some design agencies or whatever, I mean, they have some remnants of a process. But I was kind of interested in seeing that there's just this, we lacked a general tool and a general framework for understanding and reframing problems.

There wasn't really anything out there that I felt was both...did a good job. And also, crucially was capable of being widespread. Because I think some of the methods, we have already around this, they're very complicated.  They kind of require you to be an expert in the topic and you have to host a weeklong workshop to do it and so on. I wanted to fill the gap of creating a tool around this that could really be used by everybody. That's really what led me to write the new book, which is now called, What's Your Problem? We focus of course, on the art of solving the right problems. 

Brian Ardinger: So, let's give an example. I've seen some of your speeches and read some of your work and one of the examples that you talk about to give the audience an understanding of what you mean by reframing the problem. You talk about the slow elevator problems. Walk us through that particular example. 

Thomas Wedell: Imagine you are the owner of an office building that people are complaining about the speed of the elevator. Now you have a framed problem in front of you there that the elevator is too slow. And what most people do there is jump straight ahead and say, how do we make it faster? What people with reframing are good at is to go in and say, wait, is there a different way of looking at the problem? Is there another problem to solve? Which might the better for us rather than going out and buying a new elevator. The classic example here of course, is that building managers, what do they do when they hear of elevator complaints? They tend to try something else, namely to put up a mirror in the hallway and just a beautiful and quite memorable example of what reframing is and why it's sometimes important to go in and say, is there a different problem to solve for here than the one that's necessarily, you know, put in front of us to solve.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I've heard a similar example in the airline industry where people were complaining about baggage claim and how long it took for the baggage to get there. And the airline changed it in such a way so it reframed the problem of how you got the bags and when you got them, the amount of time it took you to walk to get to the bag, so that you weren't standing there waiting as long.

Thomas Wedell: Yeah. Beautiful. I saw one of my colleagues in this space, Stephen Shapiro. He has spoken a good deal about that example. That's a beautiful instance of it.  He's, by the way, he's out with a new book as well, called Invisible Solutions, which also looks at reframing, which I can strongly recommend. It's such a big issue, and I'm curious to hear, I mean, you have a ton of experience both with your own work, with innovation and with your client work and so on. What's your observation in this? Am I right? Is there a missing tool around this, or what's your experience through your work? 

Brian Ardinger: I think we see the same things. A lot of times the first thing I do when I start talking to clients or startups is around that idea of what are we really trying to solve for here? And are there different ways to look at the framework, the mindset almost, and it's almost around trying to figure out is there something more there than what meets the eye? And I find that the ones,  the entrepreneurs or the inside innovators...