“Great problem solvers are made, not born” tells us Charles Conn and Robert McLean in their article. They found “six mutually reinforcing approaches” making leaders great problem solvers. Using their method if do not solve each problem, definitely can achieve better outcome that we have so far!
- Be curious
When facing uncertainty, remember behavior of the four years old child, asking never ending “Why?” Our brain is imposing patterns what in a past represented a solution to us or other people, but the current one is a different and unique situation. As we ask questions, answers describe here and now making possible to formulate better and more creative solution to the current problem.
2. Tolerate Ambiguity
The real world is highly uncertain. The reality unfolds as the complex product of stochastic processes and human reactions. The best problem solvers can’t appear as a brilliant engineer giving targeted, precise solution to each situation. Instead we form hypotheses, translate it to data, analyze and refine it, formulate a solution, refine it, finalize it – or drop it down to pick up and try another one. This requires embracing of imperfection, accepting the ambiguity of the situation and form the solution which can be odd rather than certain.
3. Take a dragonfly eye-view
Dragonflies have large, compound eyes, with thousands of lenses and photoreceptors sensitive to different wavelengths of light. We don’t know exact how the brain of this insects forms a picture to them, the analogy is important for us: describe situation from multiple points of view, using different tools and systems for analysis and accept the complex picture (might be contradictory in details) as the reality. This is the point from where can start searching of solution.
4. Pursue occurrent behavior
Occurrent behavior is what actually happens in a time and place, not what was potential or predicted behavior. Complex problems don’t give up their secrets easily, they do not follow a pattern or a recipe – but that shouldn’t deter problem solvers from exploring. The mindset requires to be a restless experimenter – this allows us to generate our own data, which aren’t available to competitors and gives us insights that others don’t have.
5. Tap into collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd
The experience shows: it’s a mistake to believe about our team that the smartest people are all in the room. They aren’t there. And it’s not a problem, if you can access their intelligence via another means. Crowdsourcing invites the best people to work with you. Conn and McLean describe an experiment where organizers were searching for an algorithm for recognizing size and specie of fishes. They offered a prize and 2293 teams were attracted to work on solution. The result is an unique algorithm, the best on the earth!
6. Show and tell to drive action
Although usually not associated to problem solving, this mindset is critical: it connects audience with a problem, picking up their interest, than combination of logic and persuasion drives to action. Conn and McLean tells how activists brought 17 bucket of water in a meeting room when asking support for restoration of oyster reefs , declaring this amount of water is filtered by one shell in a day. Decision makers were curious what represents buckets, and need for conservation become touchable through its physical dimension – led program to be approved.
The mindset of problem solvers is just an important as the method they apply. Creative application of mindsets from above list creates new possibilities in our unpredictable world!
Charles Conn and Robert McLean (both alumnus of McKinsey’s Sydney office) are authors of article “Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times” (published 15-th September 2020 by McKinsey. Complete article you found here https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/six-problem-solving-mindsets-for-very-uncertain-times#)
