Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

On the most underrated skill in research, entrepreneurship

Almost every month, someone sits across from me,  a student, an aspiring entrepreneur, a young researcher  and announces what they want to do.
“I want to do my PhD and I am going to look at AI, or use AI, or delve into Behavioural Science and make use of Neuroscience.”
“I want to prove that radio is not dead.”
“I am thinking of developing a new capitalism theory.”

” I have a great AI business idea and it will turn the business into a unicorn within a year, the first of its kind in Africa”

” My business is going to use bitcoin, crypto to facilitate transaction. A first by a Black person”

And every time, I listen. Then I ask the same question I have been asking for years:

Before you boil the ocean and save the world at the same time,  what is the problem you are solving for?

The silence that follows tells me everything.
The number one reason businesses fail is not poor execution, insufficient funding, or bad timing. It is offering a solution that has no market need. Building a product no one wants. Constructing a bridge to nowhere. The problem was never clear  or worse, the problem only exists for the person building the solution. They have created a market of one: a product designed for themselves that serves no one else at scale.

This same failure mode haunts academia. PhD candidates rush to pick up methodologies,  AI, neuroscience, critical theory,  as if the sophistication of the tool guarantees the significance of the inquiry. It does not. A hammer is only useful when you know what needs to be built.

What the World’s Greatest Thinkers Say About the Problem
This is not a new observation. The most consequential minds in science, philosophy, and systems design all arrived at the same conclusion: the quality of your thinking begins with the quality of the problem you identify. Before the method. Before the solution. Before the intervention.

Albert Einstein.  Formulation Over Execution
“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.”
Einstein argued that true progress in science does not come from applying tools,  even sophisticated ones,  but from raising new questions and seeing old dilemmas from a genuinely fresh angle. If you have an hour to save the world, he suggested, spend fifty-five minutes diagnosing the problem.

John Dewey.  A Problem Well Put Is Half Solved
“A problem well put is half solved.“
The American pragmatist philosopher maintained that we do not actually begin thinking until we are confronted with a specific, disruptive snag in our environment. Until a problem is clearly demarcated, any action we take is blind, reactive flailing rather than intelligent progress. Clarity of problem is the beginning of thought, not merely a precursor to it.

Russell Ackoff. The Danger of the Wrong Problem
“We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.”
The pioneer of systems thinking brought a harsh truth to organizational design: treating symptoms instead of foundational, systemic causes creates an illusion of progress while compounding the original crisis. Solving the wrong problem with excellence is still failure. It is just a more expensive failure.

Abraham Maslow.  When the Tool Becomes the Trap
“If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”
This speaks directly to the students who announce they want to use AI or Behavioural Science before they have identified what needs to be understood. Letting the method dictate the inquiry produces shallow, useless conclusions. The tool must serve the problem,  never the other way around.

Why a Clearly Defined Problem Matters
A well-defined problem is not merely an administrative exercise. It is an intellectual and strategic lighthouse. When it is absent, everything downstream drifts.

It prevents waste. A sharp problem stops you from burning capital, time, and intellectual energy on inquiries that lead nowhere.
It acts as a filter. A well-crafted problem statement tells you immediately what data, literature, and methodology to ignore,  a gift that most researchers and entrepreneurs undervalue.
It enables scale. When you define a problem by its shared human friction,  by the gap it creates in many lives, not just your own,  you ensure that any solution you build can reach people beyond yourself.
It aligns effort. In research or in business, a crisp problem creates a shared, unarguable mission. It ends debates about direction before they begin.

How to Get to a Clear Defined Problem
The challenge is that most people do not arrive at a clear problem through inspiration. They arrive there through interrogation. Here are the frameworks that work:

The Socratic Method: Question the Premises
If a student says “I want to prove radio is not dead,” I do not accept the framing. I push: Why does it matter if it lives? Who suffers if it dies? What specific gap does radio fill that digital streaming leaves wide open? Which audience is underserved, and why? Strip the premise bare and force it to earn its place as a meaningful inquiry.

First Principles Deconstruction
Do not let students or entrepreneurs hide behind large abstractions like “capitalism” or “the digital economy.” Break the system to its foundational truths. Find the specific point of failure. What assumption, if removed, causes the observed problem to vanish? That is where the real research lives.

The Five Whys
Push past the surface symptom. If a business is failing, do not build an app. Ask why it is failing. Then ask why that is the case. Then again. Five layers deep, you stop treating the rash and start addressing the infection beneath it.

How to Craft a Clear Problem Statement
A precise problem statement must completely abandon solutions and methodologies. It is not about what you plan to do. It is about what is broken, for whom, and why that matters.

A useful problem statement works as a three-part formula:

The Problem Statement Formula
1. The Context. What is the current state of reality?
2. The Friction (The Gap).  Where is the breakdown, the pain point, the missing link?
3. The Impact.. Who cares, why does it matter, and what happens if this remains broken?


Weak (Solution-First):
“I want to use AI and neuroscience to improve corporate workspace productivity.”
This is an echo chamber of tools with no baseline target. There is no defined friction, no identified population, no evidence of scale. It is the sound of a solution looking for a problem.

Strong (Problem-First):
“Remote knowledge workers experience acute cognitive fatigue within three hours of continuous digital meetings, resulting in a measurable drop in creative problem-solving output. Current enterprise software has no mechanism to detect or mitigate this specific form of cognitive overload.”
This names the population. It names the friction. It names the gap. And it leaves the solution entirely open,  because at the problem-definition stage, the solution is not your business yet.

The Final Word
By forcing yourself  and those around you, to define the friction before reaching for the tools, you avoid the ultimate intellectual tragedy: executing a useless task flawlessly.

The PhD student who picks up AI before identifying a meaningful research gap will produce technically sophisticated work about nothing important. The entrepreneur who builds a product before validating a real problem will launch at scale into an empty market.
A well-defined problem is an amazing lighthouse to finding answers. Without it, you are not a researcher or a builder. You are a sailor at sea, in the dark, with no shore in sight.

So before anything else,  before the framework, before the model, before the funding proposal, before the methodology chapter,  answer this:

What is the problem you are solving for?
Everything else follows from there.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..