Problems Today, Problems Tomorrow

You won’t have problems in the future if you don’t solve your problems today.

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We all have too many problems. We have problems we face today, like adding new customers and reducing costs. We have problems we will face tomorrow, like new competitors, market shifts and capital requirements. There are so many problems that it’s often overwhelming. 

It’s impossible to tackle all of your problems at once! If you try, you will just do a poor job on all of them and solve none of them. It’s not a question of how many problems you can solve, but which problems to solve first. Prioritization is the key. 

The best prioritization framework I have used is surprisingly simple: 

We need to solve our problems today to earn the right to have problems tomorrow. 

It makes sense! Let’s say we’re launching a new product into a new market. There are a lot of problems we might face, including large companies launching competing products or customer retention issues. However, we won’t have any of those problems if we don’t successfully launch our product! A company with no product only has one problem. 

This does not mean that we don’t think about the future at all. If there are already products in the market from large companies at a competitive price, that’s a problem we have today regardless if we’ve launched our product. If the competition is charging $10 and we want to charge $100, we need to have a really good reason for it. That’s a problem we need to solve right now. 

So the real test is whether problems are real and specific, or potential and vague. We need to solve the real and specific problems to have the luxury of tackling the potential, vague problems. 

Many first time leaders struggle with this, as the potential & vague problems can seem just as real as the specific problems. With experience comes judgment and the ability to tell the difference, but until you have that experience it can be challenging. In these cases, I often ask a simple question: “If we fail to solve this problem, will the company fail?” Any real, specific problem that is a high priority will potentially kill the company. Potential, vague problems can’t because they don’t exist yet. 

The most common objection I get when discussing this is also simple: We can’t just push problems into the future, we have to get started on them today to have a solution tomorrow. That might be true! But you can’t solve potential and vague problems regardless of when you start, it would be like trying to grab smoke.  By the time you have the problem, the problem (and your company) will likely be very different! If you don’t even know what your business will look like you don’t know what options you will have available. 

This framework is surprisingly simple, but amazingly powerful. It can help cut through the noise and endless debates to keep you focused on what is important. 

So, what problems are you going to solve today so you earn the right to have problems tomorrow?

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For more on Strategy, see:

• Don’t Confuse Strategy and Tactics

• Do The Hard Parts First

• Avoiding Imaginary Constraints

• Managing Distractions

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