John Loud wanted to write on leather. Ink pens of the time couldn’t handle rough, coarse surfaces. And so he invented a new kind of pen. One that used a small rotating steel ball held in a socket. The pen would dispense ink over the steel ball, and one could write when the ball would press and rotate against the writing surface.

Loud got the patent for his ball pen in 1888. But even though it seemed such a nice idea, the pen flopped.

No one bought the ball pen.

Loud’s patent lapsed. Why? Because either the ink would leak out. Or get clogged when the ball jammed in its socket.

There was no precision engineering back then. And so, the ball was either too tight in its socket, or too loose. And so the writer either saw ink get clogged or it overflowed and created a mess.

Over the next 50 years, dozens of inventors tried to fix the same issue. 

Inventors all over Europe and America would see a malfunctioning ball pen. And love the nifty theoretical design of using a ball to print the ink on writing surfaces. They would try engineering a perfect ball mechanism. But the pens would still leak, or get clogged, or skip ink and write unevenly.

The engineering technology was not mature enough to create tiny perfectly sized metal balls fit their sockets and rotate without getting stuck. It seemed like the idea of the ball pen would remain practically infeasible, till technology caught up and allowed precision engineering.

That was until Laszlo Biro tried to solve the problem at hand. 

Biro was a journalist, not an engineer. And so, he saw things differently than other inventors who had tried to tackle the ball pen problem.

Biro took one look at the ball and knew that he could do no better than others in making the ball fit the socket perfectly, across multiple pens consistently. But he asked the key question that other inventors had not: why focus on the ball at all?

Biro shifted his focus on the ink instead. He worked with his brother – who was a dentist – to create a thicker ink than the one used in ink pens. The thicker viscosity of the ink meant that even if the ball didn’t fit the socket perfectly, the ink would not leak out!

Biro got a patent in 1938 – 50 years after Loud’s patent!

The art of reframing

Most engineering and problem solving books teach you to find the constraints of the system. Pinpoint the right constraint and solving it becomes easy.

But dozens of inventors had already diagnosed the constraint: the ball didn’t fit the socket. Focusing on the right constraint doesn’t always help solve it.

What helped Biro was reframing the problem. Seeing things from a different perspective. This ability of seeing things from a different point of view than others is what unlocked progress.

How to learn the art of reframing?

1. 

The first step is you need to cultivate a flexible mindset. Not get stuck to one way of solving. And this is a lot harder than it seems. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It is very hard to drop the hammer.

The only consistent way of doing it is to imagine: Imagine that the current way of solving the problem is impossible. 

So take a break and condition your mind: the current path is impossible. The current path is impossible. The current path is impossible. 

Force yourself to look at new options.

2. 

Amateur photographers fiddle with the lens. Great photographers take a step back from the shot and scan the whole scene. They shift their focus: where is the unexpected light coming from? 

To reframe, you first have to look outside the frame. You have to zoom out. And then zoom in to another variable.

And how to zoom in to the right variable? By asking the key question: what is the problem behind the problem?

For ball pens, the problem was not actually the ball and socket inefficiency. The problem was smooth writing consistently.

Once Biro fixed the real problem with ink, and not the ball – more people started using the ball pen. Marcel Bich licensed Biro’s patents and launched the iconic Bic pens in 1953. Over a 100 billion Bic ball pens have been sold worldwide since then – making the ball pens one of the most successful consumer products in history!

Action Summary:

• Problem solving often gets stuck not from lack of effort, but from lack of angle. If progress feels blocked, don’t double down. Reframe instead. Zoom out, look around, zoom back in.
  
• Ask: what is the problem behind the problem? That’s how you find better light – the right spot to zoom back in.