Why Becoming a Problem-Finder is Crucial For Creativity

THE GROOVE

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If you are interested in being a true original, your motivations can vary widely.

However, as I’ve met hundreds of artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists in my lifetime, I can say that they are looking to solve problems or to contribute something to society that is memorable, valuable, pioneering and even in certain cases, historical.

Before solving an important problem, whether in the arts or in business, there is a crucial phase that you should seriously consider: that of finding and defining the problem that you are trying to solve.

This may sound so simple, but it is not. In fact, if people were really attuned to finding and clearly defining problems, entrepreneurs would spot more opportunities and succeed at mining them for gold, artists would articulate and formulate issues and concerns in ways that would make the world pay attention to them, employees in companies would become indispensable for noticing what others miss.

Studies have revealed that the most creative people and those who succeed over time in their careers are those who are able to spot and formulate the right problem.

This takes me to a turning point in the career of Jesus Soto, a Venezuelan artist I grew up admiring because we were born in the same country. Soto had become a legendary pioneer of kinetics and monumental installations in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when artists around him were focused on painting landscapes on canvases.

For years, after making relief sculptures that moved with the viewer but were confined to walls, Soto decided he wanted to get more out of his work. But what could that be?

After considering questions about the reflection of light, space, matter, and density, and researching for new solutions that translated into his art, Soto eventually found the right problem to solve.

Fascinated by the sensations that music trigger in a person, which metaphorically “envelops” someone who’s immersed in the sounds, Soto began asking himself how to create a piece of art that would embrace a person fully and make them part of the experience.

In an interview he gave art critic Roberto Guevara, Soto said that he started with the following premise: “How do I make people enjoy my work more intimately, how do I make them ask questions about its mechanics?”

He elaborated that “everyone was talking about the fourth dimension, but I didn’t see it anywhere”.

Soto had found his problem, but he needed more than ten years to find the solution.

He created his first penetrable -an interactive metal and plastic structure through which the viewer moves- in 1966. In an interview in 1970, Soto said, “With penetrables, my most recent creations, this participation becomes tactile, even often auditory. Man interacts with his surroundings.”

He hung thousands of strands from either the ceiling or a PVC and steel construction that could live indoors or outdoors. And the penetrables allowed his spectators to enter them and get immersed in the depth of the work. Once you are inside, you become an integral part of the artwork by touching or moving it, or simply walking through.

Not only did Soto and his penetrables make history, but they have been described as “one of the great marvels of contemporary art,” exhibited in and acquired by almost every important contemporary and modern art museum in the world, from The Guggenheim in New York to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

According to researchers, active engagement, aka constantly pondering, inquiring, studying, setting goals, and thinking through the issues that pertain to your industry or your practice (or the one that you’d like to contribute to), is the most important component in the problem-finding phase.

This is clearly what Soto was doing all along, he kept creating the work that he knew how to do, but at the same time he asked the questions that maintained him preoccupied with formulating the right problem, the problem of making the participants truly feel the art and be a part of it.

He explained that “my concept of space is very different from that of the Renaissance, where man was in front of space, he was the viewer, the judge of that space...[With] the penetrables, I reveal that man...is part of space. And this is the sensation of those who enter them, and the feeling of joy and elation that you witness is similar to getting in the water and being completely liberated from gravity.”

Psychologists have also found that the amount of time spent defining the problem matters.

In other words, there’s a correlation between the length of the effort that you put during the information gathering part, the reformulation, the idea evaluation, the reframing of the problem and what you ultimately arrive at as the correct premise of the problem.

While Soto’s formulation of the problem took many years of refinement, it’s not that he sat down waiting for the answer to come. It was in the active inquiry and process of his day-to-day practice where the real problem was found, and the subsequent solution was generated.

The timeline of finding a problem worth solving doesn’t have to take decades, but examples abound where formulating a problem with a consequential solution requires a substantial amount of time.

For example, it took two years from the time Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had their first guests in air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment in 2007 until they finally refined the problem they wanted to solve.

After many failed attempts to find the real problem, thinking they wanted to help conference-attendants find an affordable solution to spend 3 nights while on short trips - they finally understood the real business was in trying to solve a problem for tourists and travelers who were looking for more cost-effective options while planning their trips around the world.

After almost going bankrupt for not formulating the right problem, this shift got them their first $600,000 in seed money after Sequoia Capital understood the upside of this business called Airbnb.

If you are looking for greatness in whatever you do, problem finding should definitely occupy a part of your time, rather than jumping to solve the first problem that crosses your mind.

Like Albert Einstein said in the book he wrote with physicist Leopold Infeld: “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution… To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires imagination and marks real advances…”

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Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?

I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.

Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.

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