The Hard Thing About Hard Problems
There's no shortage of problems in the world — but only a few are actually worth your time and money to solve.
The Hard Thing About Hard Problems
Look around right now and the world does not appear to be short of problems. At the time of writing, a new war has broken out across the Middle East following Iran’s escalation — the kind of headline that stops you mid-scroll and makes everything else feel small. Add to that the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, economic disruption, and supply chains still recovering from years of shocks. The scale of what is wrong can feel genuinely overwhelming. And as business owners, founders, and directors, there is a part of us that wants to respond to all of it.
But we cannot. Not really. The honest truth is that most of the world’s biggest problems are not ours to solve, at least not directly through the work we do day to day. What we can do is focus on the problems within our reach, the ones where our decisions, our capital, and our time can actually make a difference.
The question is: which ones?
Because there is no shortage of problems at that level either. Walk into any business, any operations team, any field service environment, and within the first hour you will find a dozen things that are slow, clunky, duplicated, or broken. The real challenge is not identifying problems. It is working out which ones are actually worth your time and money to solve.
That distinction is harder than it sounds, and it catches a lot of smart people out.
The frequency trap
The first instinct most people have is to look for pain. Where are things breaking? What is causing frustration? And that is a reasonable starting point. But there is a catch: the problems that cause the most visible friction are often not the ones worth solving.
Think about it this way. If something goes wrong once or twice a year, it is annoying when it happens. People notice it, they talk about it, they remember it. It has sharp edges. But it is rare. And rare problems, for all their irritation, do not represent meaningful leverage. You could spend six months building a solution and improve someone’s working life by maybe a day in total. That is not a business. That is a feature.
The problems worth solving are the ones happening every single day.
The invisibility problem
Here is where it gets counterintuitive. If your end user is experiencing a problem every single day, chances are they no longer see it as a problem. It has become the job. It is just how things are done.
We see this constantly in our work at Alive Industries. You sit down with someone, ask them to walk you through their day, and they say something like: “So I log in here, pull the data, copy it into this spreadsheet, then move it over to the other system, and then I send a summary to the team.” And they say all of that at the same speed, in the same tone, as if describing something completely unremarkable.
You stop them. “How long does that take you?”
“Oh, I do it every morning. Maybe 45 minutes.”
That is 45 minutes, every day, on a task that in most cases could be reduced to near zero. It is not an unusual story. McKinsey research found that knowledge workers spend nearly two hours every single day just searching for and gathering information, tasks that barely register as inefficiencies to the people doing them. But they have done it so many times that it is woven into their identity as a worker. It is their workflow. Pointing it out does not always land the way you might expect either, because to suggest it is a problem can feel like suggesting they have been doing their job wrong. They have not. They have been doing their job exactly as they were taught, within the constraints they were given.
The problems you are looking for are often invisible to the people living inside them.
Edge cases are a distraction
When organisations come to us wanting to explore where technology can help, there is a pattern we see again and again. They lead with edge cases.
The exception that sometimes causes an issue. The scenario that trips up the system once in a while. The workaround that three people in the business know about and nobody has documented. These feel like problems worth fixing because they are the things people notice, the things that cause the occasional headache that lands on someone’s desk.
But there is something important buried in that observation: if you are noticing something, if it is sharp enough to catch your attention, it probably does not happen that often. The things that happen constantly tend to fade into the background precisely because of their frequency. The edge cases stay visible. The bottlenecks become furniture.
That is not to say edge cases are never worth addressing. Sometimes they are genuinely important. But leading with them, before you have mapped the day-to-day reality of how work actually gets done, is usually the wrong order of operations.
Where good problems tend to hide
So where do you find the problems worth solving? There are a few places we keep coming back to.
Bottlenecks are the most reliable signal. Not the dramatic moments of failure, but the quiet, structural points in a process where everything slows down, where work queues, where people are constantly waiting on something or manually bridging two systems that should talk to each other. These are the places where daily friction compounds into something that meaningfully limits a business.
One of our most successful project types at Alive is a pattern that shows up across industries: the senior staff member who has become the de facto knowledge base. Junior engineers or newer team members call them throughout the day, sometimes multiple times, to ask questions that only that person knows the answer to. It has always been this way. The senior person is stretched thin. The junior staff are dependent on them. And because of regulatory requirements, this knowledge transfer cannot simply be abandoned. The business has to maintain it to stay compliant.
What makes this a great problem? It happens every single day. It costs real time from the most experienced and expensive people in the team. And the constraint driving it, compliance, is not going away. The business cannot scale without either hiring more of those senior staff, which is slow and expensive, or finding a smarter way to distribute that knowledge.
Compliance and regulation more broadly are a strong indicator for this reason. These are problems that the people experiencing them have no power to remove. There is no version of the business where they stop needing to comply. A 2024 UK government survey found that 63% of businesses consider the time taken on compliance to be a burden, up from 58% just two years earlier. And research from TheCityUK and PwC found that regulatory compliance costs for UK financial services firms now exceed £33.9 billion annually, representing over 13% of average operating costs, with 84% of compliance leaders reporting costs have increased over the past five years.
The energy does not go into making the obligation disappear. It goes into finding the most efficient way to meet it. And that is exactly the kind of permanent, recurring constraint that creates lasting demand for a well-built solution. The problem is not going away. The need is daily. The people dealing with it are not hoping it disappears. They are hoping it becomes less painful.
Who actually spots the good problems
Here is something we have noticed over years of working with clients: the people best placed to identify a genuinely valuable problem are rarely the ones experiencing it directly.
The person doing the manual data transfer every morning does not see it as a problem. The senior engineer fielding calls all day does not necessarily flag it as something to fix. They are just doing their jobs.
The insight tends to come from one level up. The manager, the director, the founder who is watching the patterns. The person who finds themselves saying, quietly, to no one in particular: “Why is it always this? Every time we are running behind, it traces back to the same thing. Why is that always the thing?”
That question, asked enough times, is usually pointing at something real. It is the signal buried in the noise of day-to-day operations. And the people asking it are, often without realising it, doing the most important work in the entire process: identifying the bottleneck that everyone else has stopped seeing.
This is also why, when clients come to us and say “we have got lots of problems, help us find the right one to solve with AI,” it is genuinely difficult. Not impossible, but hard. Digging for the right problem from the outside, without the accumulated pattern recognition that comes from being inside a business, takes a long time and a lot of trust. The projects that go best are the ones where someone has already done that work. Where a smart, observant person has looked at their operation and thought: that, right there, that is the thing. Now help me fix it.
The job of asking better questions
At Alive, a significant part of what we do in early conversations with clients is not technical at all. It is helping people develop a clearer picture of what is actually costing them, day after day, versus what simply feels like a problem because it occasionally surfaces in a way that gets noticed.
It requires patience, because the first answer is rarely the right one. “What are your biggest pain points?” tends to surface the edge cases. The more useful question is something closer to: “Walk me through what happened before 10am this morning.” Or: “What is the last thing you had to do manually that you wish you did not?” The everyday mundane work is where the real answers live.
The hard thing about hard problems is that they tend to be hiding in plain sight. Not disguised as complexity, but as normality. As just how it is. As the way things have always been done.
And often, they are waiting for someone to walk in and ask why.
Alive Industries helps organisations identify and build intelligent solutions to operational problems. If you are trying to work out where technology can genuinely move the needle for your business, we would love to talk.