AI’s value lies in knowing how to frame a need, an outcome or a problem.

Link to the article: Harvard Business Review

All the AI prompt-fluencers will soon understand that focusing on solutions isn’t the right way.

It has not been the right way, even before AI was mainstream, however it seems it’s easier to showcase fast solutions that solve few customer needs, but that isn’t going to help people and organizations as much in the future.

As I’ve mentioned before, prompting isn’t something people should be working out, the experience that companies build should be the one doing the heavy lifting.

However, as this great article from Oguz A. Acar in Harvard Business Review points out:

Mastering the art of problem formulation is crucial when dealing with AI systems.

Without comprehensively understanding and correctly formulating real-world problems, even the most sophisticated AI prompts may fall short.

The process as per the author includes four key steps:

1️⃣ Problem Diagnosis - Identifying the core problem that AI needs to solve.

2️⃣ Problem Decomposition - Breaking complex problems into smaller, more manageable sub-problems.

3️⃣ Problem Reframing - Altering the perspective from which a problem is viewed to encourage a broader scope of potential solutions.

4️⃣ Problem Constraint Design - Defining the problem's boundaries, allowing the AI to focus on generating solutions within a specified context, while also inviting creative possibilities by varying the constraints.

So while all the carousels on LinkedIn focus on the prompts, it’s best you learn how to frame problems, if you truly want to solve problems.

Robert