how to solve problems, the scientific method for entrepreneurs

Summary

most of what an entrepreneur actually does is solve problems. all day, every day. you either solve them or your business stalls. the question is whether you have a process or you’re just guessing.

1. step one, ask a question about something you observe. leads are down. close rate is dropping. NPS is sliding. name the thing precisely.

2. step two, do the research. what changed? what did you start? what did you stop? pull the actual data, not your gut feel.

3. step three, build a hypothesis. one variable you can test. “leads are down because I stopped posting on social media.”

4. step four, run the experiment. do the thing for a defined period. one quarter, one month, whatever fits. then stop worrying, because you’re acting on it.

5. step five, analyze. did the metric move? by how much? what does it tell you?

6. step six, communicate the result. write it down even if it’s just for you. keep a business change log. when you made the change, what changed, what happened after. you’ll thank yourself in 18 months.

once the team knows this is the process, you can delegate experiments out. give them the baseline, the variable, the test window. they own the outcome. now you’re scaling problem solving, not just solving problems.

if six steps sounds like too much, try harder.

Transcript

you are the chief problem-solving officer

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. This is Jerred Moon and welcome to the Better Human Business podcast. Today I’m going to be talking about solving problems. A couple of podcasts ago, I mentioned that as entrepreneurs, we are really just chief problem solving officers.

That’s most of what we do. We’re directing either a team to solve problems or you’re solving problems by yourself. But that’s a lot of what we are doing is just solving problems. And when you solve a problem and you are able to release a constraint, you can grow and your business can grow. But until you solve the problem, you’re just going to be stuck or bottlenecked, whatever the problem is.

But how do we actually go about solving the problem? And that’s what I want to ask you today and maybe put a little bit more structure behind it. Because the exact method I use to solve problems is the six step scientific method. Okay, so if you are unfamiliar or it’s been a while, I’m going to go through it real quick.

the six-step scientific method

So step one, ask question about something you observe. Step two, do some background research to learn what is already known about the topic. Step three, construct a hypothesis. Step four, experiment to test the hypothesis. Step five, analyze the data from the experiment and draw conclusions. Step six, communicate the results to others.

So let’s break that down in a business real quick. So say you were, and apply this to any problem that you’re having in your business. It could literally be anything. The scientific method is great and it works for anything. But let’s just say you’re not getting enough leads or specifically you’re getting fewer leads than you were last quarter.

You’re noticing, hey, this quarter I seem to be getting fewer leads. So you’re going to start asking questions about your observation. Am I actually getting less leads? This is step one. Why am I getting less leads? All that kind of stuff. Just asking the general question there. Is it true? Because sometimes we can feel like something’s true, but it’s not actually true.

So you go look at the data. Yep, in fact, I was getting X amount of leads per month over the last quarter and now I’m averaging 20% fewer. So now we have what we’re ultimately trying to solve. Now, step two, we’re going to do some background research to learn what is already known about specifically our process and what we do.

applied to a drop in leads

So if I notice my leads are down, I’m not getting as many leads, I’m going to start looking at, is there anything new I’ve started or anything old I’ve stopped? Those are the first things I’m going to be looking for my background research other than actually pulling the numbers. I’m going to say, hey, did I stop doing something?

Did I start doing something? And then I’ll construct a hypothesis around that and I’ll look and I’ll be like, hey, you know what? The only thing that I can tell that is different is that before, like last quarter, I was trying to be more serious about posting on social media. I didn’t really see any results from it.

So I stopped this quarter. I wasn’t doing it as religiously. This is all fictitious examples, but you could just start constructing hypothesis. That’s the only thing I can think of that I’ve stopped doing that’s changed. And so I construct a hypothesis around, okay, I’m going to start posting on social media the same frequency it was in the previous quarter and I’m going to see if that helps with my lead volume.

So then step four, we set up the experiment to test the hypothesis. So tomorrow I start posting and for the rest of the quarter I post and now it’s just the doing. So after you’ve done all the background research, you know what the problem is, you’ve constructed the hypothesis, you’re doing the experiment, it’s just time to put in the work and you can officially stop worrying about the problem because you’re at least doing something about it.

the change log

Now after the end of that quarter, maybe leads are up, maybe they’re not, maybe they’re the same, whatever that you draw your own conclusions at the end of the quarter after you’re doing the work. And then you can communicate these results with your team and step six is actually really important. Either communicate the results with your team or write it down.

I think having some sort of change log in a business, like this is very common in software to do a change log. So like I changed these things in my business and then write that down. That way you can know, hey, June 2023 or August 2023, I started doing this thing, what happened to the business after I started doing it or I stopped doing it.

Having a change log that is really a great way to communicate even just to yourself as a journal of what’s working and what’s not working. And I would say also you don’t have to just do one thing. So if you changed a lot of different things and your leads are down, be like, yeah, I moved to a new location.

I stopped doing weekly email newsletters because I got busy. I also stopped posting on social media. Well now you can start setting up separate experiments for all these things. Like, okay, I need to, I’m going to start emailing, doing my weekly newsletter again. I’m going to start posting on social media.

delegating experiments

I’m going to make sure people know about my new location. All those kinds of things. You got to put all of those in place. And if you have a team, you can start delegating some of the experiments, if you will, to your teammates and let them own the full process, making sure they know what the baseline is, what the experiment is, the actions that they need to take over the next month or quarter, however long you want to test something.

And then they got to collect data on that and what’s the improvement. And that’s it. You know, that’s how I solve most problems in business. And you probably do knowingly or unknowingly too. You probably use the scientific method. It’s very logical approach to solving problems. But when you become very aware that this is the process that you use to solve problems in your business and your team knows it, then it gets a lot easier to start solving problems.

And again, that’s all we are. As entrepreneurs, we are chief problem-solving officers. Something’s going to come up. We’re not going to get enough leads or sales will be down or sales percentage is, close rates will be down. Something will not be working in our favor and we’re going to have to solve that problem.

Everyone runs into a problem eventually and you’re going to have to learn how to solve it. My recommendation is just use the scientific method. If you’re like, ah, that’s too cumbersome. I don’t want to sit down and do all that stuff. It seems like a lot.