Do you enjoy Sudoku, or is the cryptic crossword more your kind of thing? Maybe you prefer those devilish nine-letter puzzles or perhaps you’re still looking for Wally. People love puzzles, they love wrestling order from chaos, the sense from the nonsense, that rush of dopamine to the frontal lobe when the last piece falls into place.
We can’t get enough puzzles, and yet we hate having problems. Which is weird, because a problem is just a puzzle without a solution printed on the back.
Problems are puzzles for people who like a serious challenge. For a start, nobody knows the answer, which is what makes problems the best kinds of puzzle; the chance to be the first person to crack the solution.
Like puzzles, problems are full of clues for anyone with the patience to go looking, but unlike puzzles, problems usually contain multiple solutions, so you’re bound to find at least one. So why do so many people take such a negative view of what to some of us is a wonderful kind of puzzle?
One reason might be that problems are about us. They’re not something we ‘do’ so much as a world we inhabit. They can be personal, even painful and the consequences of not solving them can be too awful to contemplate. (There are no ‘life and death puzzles’.) And worst of all, there’s no guarantee that there is even a solution to be had no matter how hard you work at it. That’s enough to throw you off your game.
Maybe that’s why the best problem solvers I know somehow manage to distance themselves from all that fear, pain and uncertainty and indulge themselves in the sheer joy of the problem, as though it was nothing more than the Saturday morning crossword. Maybe that’s why outsiders manage to see the solutions that the insiders usually miss.
That’s the trick: to have the knowledge of the insider with the clarity and detachment of the outsider, to care enough to want to solve the problem but not so much that you can’t. You need to somehow embrace the gritty realism of the problem while also feeling that unshakable optimism in the promise of a solution… whatever it might turn out to be.
To help you get there, in future posts we’ll be bringing you various tools and techniques that we’ve picked up over the years, tricks of the trade designed to get you into the right frame of mind to tackle just about any problem with enthusiasm and confidence.
We’ll look at how to split huge problems you can’t solve into lots of teeny ones you can. We’ll explore fresh approaches to old problems and the benefits of sharing a problem with people who might not care about it as much as you do.
It’s just our way of sharing The Joy of Problems.
Gary
Hi Jason
Interesting thread this one. In an educational sense, the problem with ‘problem’ is the very term itself. Like the word ‘consequences’, it is shrouded in a negative context that often stifles free thinking and creative energy in terms of how we look at an idea or concept.
In schools, we are often hooked into what I call a ‘solutions based’ view of the world where students believe every problem has a solution and the search is to find it and regurgitate it. When in essence, the outcome should be about wrestling with the idea and internalisation of it and the discussion about what has been done is equally if not more valid. What’s wrong with no solution to a problem? Let’s look at any of the major conflicts in the world at the moment and one comes to the realisation the solutions aren’t often there because people’s perspectives are fixed in time, ideology or a cultural tradition. Diplomats use terms like ‘options’ over problems and solutions which is a word I would prefer to use because it has no obvious negativity attached to it and is more skewed towards both creative and analytical thought and or hope.
Gary:-)
Jason
Funny you should say that Gary, as I see a lot of that negative association in schools, business, politics and media but not so much in science, medicine or engineering, where I find more of a ‘puzzler’ mindset, the kind that truly enjoys a good problem, which is probably why they chose the professions they did. For myself, the more I appreciate cause and effect, the more I see just how subjective terms like ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ really are. So I guess my question to you is: should we change the words or change the attitude?
Gary
Hi Jason
Yes I think you are right. It is a mindset which is difficult to shift. It is almost embedded in our psyche that ‘problems’ equate to and difficulty a sense of foreboding for some vocations. The words ‘problem solving’ is slightly less threatening so because it has the ‘solving’ component and hints at an outcome but then it too runs into my concern of their having to be one!
The culture and environment of a workplace has a lot to do with it I think. How do we celebrate challenge and build an environment that seeks it out? Another major leadership dilemma that requires a broad approach. The diversity people in the organisation sure helps and the way leaders encourage, embrace and value this type of cultural paradigm.
Gary:-)
Jason
If it’s true that the mindset is largely vocational then I’d expect we could look at the cultures of the different professions and figure out what they were doing right. I’d expect to see a philosophical attitude to failure, a willingness to experiment, an ability to entertain imperfect and incomplete ideas and (as you point out) a kind of detachment that allows them to see a situation without assuming it to be either a problem or a solution. On the language side of the equation, I’ve come to think of ‘problems’ as situations a particular group doesn’t like and ‘solutions’ as ones they do. One man’s problem is another man’s payroll.