To Be Entrepreneurial, Solve Small Problems Elegantly

What we’ll be focusing on this week is Entrepreneurial skills needed by a leader.
You think about the fact that climate change, and digitisation of the world and from what we’ve seen from the pandemic that we all need skills to be able to create change, to shift, to pivot.

One of them is to be Entrepreneurial, to make stuff happen that hasn’t happened before.  

You want to solve small problems elegantly.
Uber is a great example of solving a bunch of small problems:
My experience was getting  in old stinky taxis, they wouldn’t know where I was going, and they’d be late. The experience is crap. And I always thought there’s got to be a better way and I started using public transport until Uber came along.
It automatically knew where I wanted to go and I didn’t have to carry money. It would just go off my credit card.

Another example, I think about my toilet paper which is delivered by – Who Gives A Crap, it’s a subscription based business and I don’t have to worry about people panic buying toilet paper rolls.  

3 Important Ideas as a Leader

What entrepreneurial lessons can we copy from these success stories?

1.Go deep, then go wide

The mistake most of us make is we start by asking how I can solve the biggest problem for most people. We go really wide first. Being entrepreneurial is about solving a problem for a single person elegantly, you start with a single person and then go wide from there.

2. Map the problems

You’ve got to map the problems and see where the choke points are in the customer experience. Basically people will love you and use your service if you address their daily issues. I’ve found this over the years because they want to move away from something that sucks. 

3. Co-design

The design process is the idea that you actually create the solution with the audience.
And that both of you here are involved in designing a prototype of a service. 

1. Design
2. Test
3. Feedback

You do that over a series of sprints over a period of time. Now, this looks like the lean startup methodology, this is just how I do it and it works. So you do one and come with the next version. You now design and test simultaneously and then they get feedback and that continues on like that. 

Summary

If you want to be more entrepreneurial, remember, you don’t want to solve the biggest problem for everyone. You want to solve the single problem for a single person super elegantly and then you want to scale it up so go deep and then wide.

The second idea is to map the problem, know the choke points, know the aspirations and map them out and see how you can improve what’s there already.

And then third is design with your audience – design, test, and then do your feedback cycles until you get something that’s awesome.

I hope that’s been useful for you as a leader so that you can become more entrepreneurial.

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