Define Before You Solve
The most common mistake in problem-solving is not getting the answer wrong. It is answering the wrong question.
In quality management, there is a discipline called DMAIC — Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control. It was developed for manufacturing, where it eliminated defects on production lines. The first phase is Define: establish what the actual problem is before you touch anything.
It sounds obvious. It is almost never done.
Modena, Italy — 185,000 people, in the Po Valley — has a traffic problem that everyone can see. Car mode share sits at 63%, according to the city's own sustainable mobility plan. There are 160,000 registered motor vehicles, roughly one per resident including infants. Commuters spend over 200 hours per year driving and around €5,700 on car ownership. A fit cyclist completes a typical urban trip in 36% less time than a car.
The instinct is to fix the traffic. Build a bypass. Widen the road. Add capacity.
But transport economists have known since 1962 that adding road capacity generates new demand. Anthony Downs described the phenomenon in Traffic Quarterly that year. Duranton and Turner confirmed it empirically in the American Economic Review in 2011: new highway capacity fills within one to five years. The solution reproduces the problem.
This is what happens when you skip the Define phase. You see congestion and reach for the road. You see the symptom and treat it. You solve what is visible rather than what is causal.
When you actually define the problem — when you follow the data instead of the complaint — you find that the real cost is not the traffic itself but the system that produces it. Modena has 120,000 parking spaces. The implicit annual subsidy for that free parking is approximately €41.8 million, calculated using the methodology in Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking. Every new housing unit is required by law to include 1.0–1.5 parking spaces, adding €15,000–25,000 to every apartment's price. The city builds car dependency into its physical structure, then wonders why 63% of trips happen by car.
Stockholm understood this. When it introduced congestion pricing in 2006, traffic in the metropolitan area dropped 20–22%, according to Jonas Eliasson's research in Transportation Research Part A. CO₂ emissions fell 2–3%. Not because they built more roads. Because they redefined the problem: not insufficient capacity, but underpriced demand.
Define before you solve. The first discipline of structured thinking — and the one most consistently skipped.
