There is an inertia in the world of management that pushes us towards immediate resolution. We reward the quick response and the patch that seems to close a debate in five minutes. It's an understandable reaction: uncertainty generates discomfort that only seems to be relieved by a decision. However, we often rush to execute solutions before truly understanding what we are trying to solve, and that is where the real risk lies.
This reflection is the driver that guides my way of understanding the environment and making decisions. It connects with a maxim from Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, which I have adopted as a fundamental principle: "Love the problem, not the solution". It's not a slogan, it's a matter of perspective. When we fall in love with a solution, be it a technology or a change of model, or something else, we become rigid and lose the ability to listen to the signals from the environment. Instead, focusing on the problem grants something much more valuable: the resilience to pivot when circumstances change.
This capacity for resistance to the easy way out is more relevant than ever today due to artificial intelligence. We live in the era of instant response. AI can give us optimized solutions in milliseconds, but it is still incapable of asking us the questions we really need. It is an accelerator of executions, but not a detector of purposes. It can optimize a route, but it won't tell us if that is the destination we should be heading to. In this context, falling in love with the problem is to assert our own judgment; it is the ability to silence the machinery to ask if we are facing the right challenge.
"That balance between the seny of analysis and the rauxa of impulse is what makes us a pole of innovation"
The differential value today does not lie in competing in speed with the algorithm, but in the ability to formulate the question that no one has asked yet. A well-posed question already contains half the answer. It is not about questioning to cause discomfort, but about exercising a curiosity that points out what we usually omit by inertia. Knowing how to interrogate reality is the most sophisticated tool to prevent invisible errors from becoming systemic.
This reinvention mindset is also a very Barcelona hallmark. If something defines our city, it is its historical capacity not to settle for what has been inherited. Barcelona is an ecosystem that has known how to "fall in love with its problems" to transform them into future assets. A clear example is the transformation of 22@ in Poblenou: the challenge was not simply to build offices, but to ask how to integrate technology into a historical industrial fabric to create a new neighborhood model. That balance between the seny of analysis and the rauxa of impulse is what makes us an innovation hub. Here there is a shared culture of analyzing challenges from different angles before embracing projects, seeking solid and lasting solutions.
In the end, what drives an organization forward is the constant openness to being surprised by the complexity of challenges. Only when we stop looking for the quick way out and understand the challenge in all its dimensions, relying on technology but without delegating our judgment to it, do solutions appear that truly transform our way of understanding the world. The quality of our answers will always be limited by the depth of our questions, and it is precisely in that search where we have our greatest opportunity to add value today.