What this means for your business
- The Astrodome's 4,596 skylights met their brief exactly. The brief was the problem.
- A stated requirement usually describes the visible symptom, not its cause.
- The cost of a wrong problem definition compounds downstream. Painting the roof killed the grass, and the grass was replaced with plastic.
- Define the problem first, and the solution becomes an engineering question rather than a gamble.
Transcript
Houston, 1965. The Astrodome, home of the Houston Astros baseball team, is the world's first fully enclosed domed stadium. They called it the Eighth Wonder.
Look up. Four thousand, five hundred and ninety-six skylights engineered to put exactly enough sunlight on the field to keep real grass alive. They worked perfectly.
Then the Astros played an afternoon game against Baltimore. The fielders looked up into the glare and lost the ball in the roof. Four fly balls dropped untouched. They tried orange baseballs. They tried sunglasses. Nothing worked.
The engineering was flawless, but the problem definition had been wrong. They had asked how to grow grass indoors, not how to play baseball indoors. Define the wrong problem, and you'll solve the wrong problem brilliantly.
So they painted the glass roof. The glare went away, but so did the sunlight. Within weeks, the grass was dying, and the groundskeepers were spray painting it green. It never recovered.
So in 1966, the Astrodome became the first major professional stadium to install synthetic turf, giving AstroTurf its name.
Working on the right problem?
Progentic's discovery phase exists to answer that question before anyone builds anything. It runs under an agreed cap, and the findings belong to you.
Book a Free Consultation