Do They Really Want It Solved?

Definition

"NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, REALLY WANT THEIR PROBLEMS SOLVED," and "IN SPITE OF APPEARANCES, PEOPLE SELDOM KNOW WHAT THEY WANT UNTIL YOU GIVE THEM WHAT THEY ASK FOR." Behind an explicit request often sits an unstated constraint or motive — saving face, protecting a colleague, justifying a past decision, keeping a job relevant — that the optimal technical solution will violate. Before investing in solving a stated problem, the book urges asking the blunt question "DO I REALLY WANT A SOLUTION?" of both the client and, sometimes, the solver.

In the Book

Programmer Tom Tireless is handed a shipping-cost optimization problem by Tanglelang Toys' vice-presidents and, after weeks of data-gathering, proves the optimal solution is to close two of the company's three factories — only to be told the company already knew this and can't act on it, because the President lives near the Atlantic plant and the Chairman lives in Kansas City and neither will relocate; the executives wanted the computer's authority to convince their superiors, not a cost calculation. Programmer Patience Prudent spends three months building a tax-assessment program for a state treasurer obsessed with a one-penny rounding discrepancy; realizing he will never accept a computer's answer regardless of correctness, she pays the "missing" penny herself as a "donation" and watches him report to his boss that computers simply can't do the job — the true problem, avoiding an unfamiliar tool, gets solved instead. A code-breaker spends two years cracking a small nation's "priority" diplomatic cipher, JACTITATION, only to decode dozens of messages that turn out to be routine expense-account reports — the solution's very triviality, once achieved, makes him quit intelligence work for teaching.

Why It Matters

A request stated in technical or measurable terms can still be governed by an unstated political, emotional, or career interest that a correct answer will collide with — so verifying the sponsor's real motive, and their tolerance for the answer actually being right, is as important as verifying the requirements themselves. Solvers who skip this check can produce a demonstrably correct solution that gets quietly shelved, or discover too late that being right was never the actual assignment.