Problem Solving for Professionals

How do you solve problems? If you’re like most people, you look at what’s gone wrong, and you fix it. While that’s an effective strategy in the short-term, it’s really just correcting the symptom. Real problem-solving requires treating the conditions that allowed the problem to arise in the first place, thus resolving the problem permanently.

For example, suppose you’ve decided that your marketing isn’t producing the results you want. You assume that the amount of your effort will determine your results: more is better. Based on that assumption, the simple solution would be to increase the marketing efforts you’re making now, so you attend two networking events a month, arrange to take a potential client to lunch twice a week rather than just once, and so on. And that might help you to develop more business – but it also might not, or you might not devote the time to following through on your plans.

Instead, perhaps you might pause to evaluate the effectiveness of your current efforts and discover that every time you attend a particular networking meeting, you walk away with valuable new contacts that bring in business 40% of the time. Rather than increasing your efforts in marketing generally, perhaps it would make sense to deepen your contacts within that group, perhaps dropping another group altogether. To find that solution, though, you’d have to examine your assumption that more efforts leads to better results.

Or suppose you decide that you want to communicate more effectively with your assistant to correct a problem that’s developed in which he or she doesn’t deliver things you request “ASAP” in what you consider to be a timely manner. You conclude that your assistant doesn’t pay attention when you say ASAP, so you tailor your solution to that issue. You might emphasize that you need the work “ASAP, really, as soon you can get it done.” You might express disappointment when work isn’t delivered as quickly as you’d hoped. You might even sit down with your assistant and explain the problem and ask how the two of you might solve it together. But the problem might well continue until you discover that when you say ASAP, your assistant interprets that to mean “as soon as conveniently possible” rather than “drop everything and do this now.”

Or perhaps the real issue is that you act as if you were working in an emergency room, running from crisis to crisis so that everything is on an ASAP basis, which means that nothing is a priority. A shift in your perspective is the only thing that will truly solve the problem here.

What we’re discussing here is single-loop learning, in which we tinker with our strategies in reaction to our results, as compared with double-loop learning, in which we examine the assumptions and perspectives that underlie the problem and, if needed, create new assumptions and perspectives to support a new set of strategies to solve the problem permanently. The task is to stop climbing the same tree harder, faster, or smarter and instead to pause and ask whether this is the tree to be climbing at all and if so, why.

Effective problem-solving requires effective diagnosis of the problem, not just the symptoms. Identifying and challenging our assumptions and expectations is key to creating meaningful and lasting change, whether personal or professional. Each of us has the ability to do this. However, recognizing the frame that we use to perceive the world may be difficult simply because we’re so accustomed to our own assumptions and beliefs.

Consider this Albert Einstein quotation: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” When solving a critical problem, then, consider how to get input from someone who isn’t predisposed to seeing your situation in the same way that you do: colleagues, a mentor, or a professional coach. Whatever approach you use, your efficiency (and indeed, your professional success) requires that you be ruthless about getting to the root of the problem.


Problem Solving for Professionals - To learn more about this author, visit Julie Fleming-Brown's Website.

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