The Brawndo Problem

WHAT GOES WRONG WHEN NO-ONE ASKS THE USEFUL QUESTIONS‍

In 2006, a film imagined a future where the world's problems had become so obvious that even politicians knew they were in trouble.

The President of the United States, a former pro wrestler and porn star, which felt like satire at the time, stands in front of Congress and admits the country is falling apart. Crops are dying. The economy's done. Nobody knows why.

The crops are dying because someone watered them with a sports drink; “Brawndo”.

Brawndo had bought the FDA and the FCC. It had the data, the market share, and the institutional backing. When crops started failing, the solution was already in the room: Brawndo has what plants crave. It has electrolytes. The brief was written, the stakeholders were aligned, and the rollout was complete before anyone asked what plants actually need.

Water, as it turns out.

The project delivered perfectly. It just solved the wrong problem. By the time Joe Bauers — an ordinary man from the present day, transplanted five centuries into this future and the only person left capable of thinking clearly — pointed this out, the farms were dust, the economy had collapsed, and the people in charge were still defending the brief.

The film was Idiocracy. It opened in seven cities, with no marketing and no press screenings. The studio didn't know what to do with it. A decade later it was being quoted in newspapers to explain real geopolitical events, which says something about the film, or the world, or both.

The failure of the crops is a key plot point in Idiocracy, but we’re all living with our own Brawndo Problem. And it’s more common in organisations than anyone running a project retrospective would care to admit.

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The Brawndo Problem & Champion's Bias

The Brawndo Problem is what happens when a solution gets locked in before the problem is properly understood. Innovation strategist Nathan Baird calls it the solution-first trap, and it costs organisations millions in wasted effort, burnt goodwill, and opportunity cost that never shows up on a project report.

A team follows the brief, hits every milestone, ships the new ‘thing’ on time. Launch day arrives with the energy of Monday morning. Nobody uses it. Nobody knows why they have it.

It tends to go wrong in one of three ways, each more expensive than the last.

The first is Champion's Bias. Someone senior, or just very enthusiastic, falls in love with an idea and the team runs with it. Nobody seriously tests whether it solves a real problem, because pushing back feels like being the tall poppy. The idea makes it all the way to delivery untouched. Brawndo had electrolytes; plants crave electrolytes. The brand was behind it. The brief was signed off. Nobody asked a useful question. Depending on the seniority of the champion, it might be nobody asked any questions.

The second is the Echo Chamber. The team builds a business case, polished decks, financial modelling, the works, without a single piece of real customer input. Everyone agrees it's a great idea, because everyone agreed before they started, without ever thinking where the use lay. The customer is a ghost, and you know you can’t serve those ghost customers.

The third is the Point of No Return. Build mode starts and the customer only sees the product at launch. By then the budget's spent, the timeline's done, and go-live is tomorrow. Brawndo was already in every irrigation pipe in the country before Joe Bauers arrived. The real fix was earlier, more useful questions.

Most projects don’t include second chances to ask useful questions

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The usefulness of Joe, and of BAs

Joe Bauers is the only person in the room who was willing to ask whether the crops might need something more than electrolytes. He stays focused on the actual problem long after everyone else has moved on to defending their solution.

That's what a good business analyst does.

Most teams are rewarded for finishing the thing. The BA is rewarded for making sure what gets finished is worth the effort, which means staying curious and asking useful questions longer than is comfortable.

It's easy to talk to customers in a way that confirms what you already think. A good BA follows the conversation, not the script. Often, the answer is already in the organisation, buried in a report, sitting with a frontline staff member, or stuck between two teams that don't talk to each other. Find that before you build anything new. Treat every assumption in the brief as a useful question waiting to be asked. "We know our customers want this" is a starting point, not a conclusion.

This has to be built into how the project runs, not bolted on when things start wobbling.

Start with discovery, not solutioning. Before anyone uncaps a whiteboard pen, get clear on the problem behind the problem. A clunky process might be a workflow issue, a people issue, or the result of a decision made three systems ago. Dig before you design.

Then build to solve the core problem well; the edge cases can wait. Most New Zealand organisations are running lean, and knowing the difference between what's essential and what's just interesting is half the job.

When you go live, that's the start of finding out whether any of this worked. Are people using it? Did it solve the problem? Is someone's day actually better?

Then you can sit back and crack a Brawndo.

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Avoid the dumbing down

There's always pressure to move faster at the start. Stakeholders want to see progress and discovery can feel like stalling. But fixing the wrong problem late costs far more than understanding it properly at the beginning. If you can even fix it at all.

Everyone involved in the Brawndo irrigation project was busy. Meetings were held. Decisions were made. The rollout was executed flawlessly. None of it was useful, because nobody stopped to ask whether it needed to exist.

Find your Joe. Put someone in the room whose job is to care about the right problem, and who is persistent in pursuit of it. Give them the time and the access to do it properly.

At Redvespa, that's what our business analysts do. We've pulled what we've learned from projects that landed and projects that didn't into a practical toolkit to help teams ask better questions earlier.

Now, put down the Brawndo, download the Navigating Projects Toolkit, and get started on your useful questions.

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Jamie is Redvespa's Head of Experience. He hopes this article is useful and wants you to know Idiocracy is not, currently, available within a standard subscription for any New Zealand streaming service.‍