I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about here this morning but the latest local BitDepth, a newsletter done consistently over the years by photographer and writer Mark Lyndersay, immediately roused my inner problem solver.

I put on my software engineer hat and wrote a bit about this D’Hub (D Hub, phonetically) initiative, which I think is poorly named and late. In that commentary, I got right to one of the main things I say when solving problems.

People ask the wrong questions.

That’s not far from the challenges posed by D’Hub. At least 2 of the challenges require special knowledge of technology and paper processes that are not readily publicly available, one of them tries to solve something that already has solutions (measuring noise pollution), and still another is trying to supplant Doctors and medical records.

These are weird challenges. This is not to say that they are illegitimate problems. I think maybe 3-4 out of the 5 are, but they were put out there with insufficient information because those that wrote them don’t understand the problems well enough to define them. Groundwork, even in innovation, is necessary.

In fact I’ll say that groundwork, especially in innovation, is an absolute necessity.

Groundwork always starts with questions. What is in place now? Why can’t that system do what is required? Can we adapt the present system to do what is needed? What other things does the system need to do? And so on.

These are things learned with experience, and young developers rush to innovate while more senior people are much more circumspect because we survived being young developers who were trying to innovate.

We learned to ask the right questions, as any problem solver does.

This applies so much to everything in life that I consider it a life skill, and I think you should too.