In baseball Sammy Sosa wins you a lot of press. However he doesn’t win you penants. The guys who do that are the ones who consistently hit singles and doubles. Not sexy, but when they go to bat your team will take another base.

Its similar in business. Consistent delivery of value is better than dramatic black swans. And I’ve found that starting with pain delivers the more consistent, marketable value than starting with what I think is a good idea for a product.

So while focusing on pain may be a bit reductionist, it is only meant to be, as you said, a good starting point. For what? For discovering high-potential value business opportunities. And conceptualizing around a known business opportunity is a far more bankable business success strategy than starting with an idea and hope to stumble across the opportunity.

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You mustn’t confuse awareness or articulation of pain with existence of pain. Just because people aren’t consciously aware of pain, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. For example nurses face new workflow obstacles all the time. And they just deal. Soon they loose awareness of the new problem and it just fades into the background with the countless other problems they have. Yet the problem remains, draining their productivity and happiness. Ask them, and they won’t articulate the problem. Observe them and you quickly see the problem and its interconnection with many others.

As a designer I see understanding and articulating the problems others cannot as the first half of my job.

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I try to never talk about the iPod here–but it seems you’ve cornered me the iPod is perhaps the least innovative product that comes to mind. It is merely a new plastic case on a product Sony proved over 25 years ago, and Diamond Rio took digital about a 10 years ago. Apple neither discovered, nor validated anything–all that work had long been done. They merely recognized a problem that was preventing players from crossing the chasm: they were ugly, geeky and hard to use. Apple addressed these problems and busted its ass to get the word out.

Furthermore the iPod was not so much about what the market wanted–it was about moving Apple away from computer business where it had been taking a beating and could not get ahead, toward consumer electronics, a much much larger market that places more value on what Apple does best than computer markets had. The iPod solved Apple’s pain.

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What evidence do you have that the West feels very little pain anymore. Global measures of happiness do not show western countries at the top.

Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe… Greece—hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. (The Economist)

It strikes me more that we simply have different pains from people elsewhere in the economic pyramid. Our pains are psychic and social, rather than about survival. So while our pains may be more trivial, they are more complex, varied and numerous than those felt be people striving for survival.

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Anyway, something tells me that we aren’t really disagreeing, and thanks for commenting with something that made me think.

In Western developed nations we have very little pain any more, compared to people at the bottom of the pyramid (the economic one, not the Maslow one). Our pains are either very small things like the paper coffee filters are hard to separate, or very big things like life pressures of time, money, family, etc. The first one products and designers can deal with very well, the second is much harder for a product to solve (and arguably many of those pressures are created by the products themselves).

If you haven’t seen it, check out Todd Wilken’s post on the Adaptive Path blog about “A New Framework”. don’t know if html’s going to work here so I’ll just type it: http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2006/07/13/a-new-framework/

That’s a good question. I’m sure there are sources of opportunity other than pain. However I’ve found that expploring customer pains most consistently (though now always) reveals wothy opportunities.

So any thoughts on other sources of opportunity that deliver success more than mere chance or dumb luck?