Read this before you start working on your next problem --
or you may work on the wrong thing altogether.
A lot of marriages — a lot of relationships, period! — came undone during the pandemic. Kerry’s nearly did:
“I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong in my marriage. I just knew I was unhappy and my family was suffering too. I realized that my family was the foundation of so much in my life, and I was in real danger of losing it.”
Kerry introduced a radical change in the way she diagnoses and solves problems at home, and I’ll tell you how in this issue. I’ll start with a client story.
Michael is smart, capable, and deeply committed to the operation he leads. But there’s a problem.
“Not enough people know about our work,” Michael says, “so we began to send out news and updates. But people aren’t engaging with it — it’s not leading anywhere. We need to make a change. SuperTool has given our team a great demo and I think we should switch to their platform for email delivery.”
Michael’s team currently uses a platform that’s fairly low cost; the switch he’s considering will increase his cost by an order of magnitude — very worthwhile if it solves his problem. But what if it doesn’t?
Michael’s problem is around an email campaign. He would like people to read and respond to his email messages — he’d like them to take action.
The first task is to identify the source of the problem. If we don't know what’s driving his dead-in-the-water email campaigns, we can’t fix them — if we try to fix something that’s not part of the problem, we might even make Michael’s campaigns less effective and more costly.
In Michael’s case, the problem lay in concept and audience definition — we could diagnose the problem through a rapid review of in-market campaign data. This was great news, because it meant the problem could be addressed without any additional investment or costly disruption of switching platforms — knowing where to look for his problem saved Michael and his business thousands of dollars.
But what about Kerry?
Michael could effectively freeze-frame his problem — it plays out in an email campaign — and then consider his performance data at his leisure, and make the best decision the data led him to.
Kerry couldn’t do that, at least not exactly.
“It felt like interactions with my partner were just hopeless. We had developed this habit of disagreement — I expected him to find flaws in whatever I suggested, and he did. I did the same thing to him. We’d end up arguing over all kinds of things neither of us really cared about. It all seemed to come from nowhere, out of thin air.”
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