Picture this.
You and your best friend are having a picnic by the river.
As you're sipping your drinks and chatting about life and such, suddenly you hear a shout.
You jump to your feet and to your horror, you see a child drowning.
“Help, the current is too strong!” she shouts.
In what looks like a scene from Baywatch, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim back to shore.
Before you can recover, you hear another child cry for help.
Without thinking, you and your friend jump back in the river to rescue her as well.
Then another struggling child drifts into sight.
And another.
And another.
The two of you can barely keep up.
You are getting tired.
Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, running away.
“Where are you going? Don’t leave me here. I cannot do this on my own!” you shout.
Your friend looks back and says, “I’m going upstream to find the asshole who’s throwing all these kids in the water.”
I love this story.
It offers a metaphor about how we live, work and think.
So often in our lives, we get stuck in a cycle of response.
We put out fires.
We deal with emergencies.
We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems.
My advice?
Don’t get blinded by the problem you’re facing.
Don’t face it head-on.
Take a breather.
Detach for a moment.
Take the high ground.
Look around.
And reframe the problem.
You see, reframing is not about finding the real problem.
It's about finding a better problem to solve.
Reframing begins by asking: ‘Is this the right problem to solve?’
If you’ve got a problem you can’t solve, get upstream and change it into a problem you can solve, that’s creative thinking. (Amen, Dave Trott) It’s better to make a fix there, rather than being battered over and over downstream.
"A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem." — Don Norman, The Design of Everything.
Folks at BlackBerry didn’t get it and continued to improve its physical keyboards because they wanted to focus on business emails.
Kodak didn’t recognize its own invention of digital photography as disruptive.
Blockbuster turned down a deal with Netflix because it didn’t think customers wanted movies delivered.
Do you remember Segway?
Google+?
And list goes on and on.
Then there are those who got it.
One of the main drags of phoning any company is being put on hold.
Or talking to a damn robot.
Mayer, Australia’s leading department store had to put 600,000 customers on hold.
40% of those calls were abandoned.
That's a lot of unhappy customers.
So what did Myer do?
They thought upstream of the problem.
Suddenly holding on the phone doesn’t seem so bad, right?
Actually, you feel good about it.
When we’re blind to a problem, we treat it like the weather. We may know it’s bad, but we just shrug our shoulders. “What am I supposed to do about it? It’s the weather.” Problem blindness creates passivity, even in the face of enormous harm. Problem blindness explains why extraordinarily smart people do extraordinarily dumb things or make bad decisions.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg in the north Atlantic and sunk.
Of its 2,200 passengers and crew, only 705 survived, plucked out of 16 lifeboats by the Carpathia.
Imagine how many more might have lived if crew members had thought of the iceberg as not just the cause of the disaster but a life-saving solution.
Newspapers from the time estimated the size of the iceberg to be between 15-30 meter high and 100-150 meter long.
The lifeboats might have ferried people there to look for a flat spot.
The Titanic itself was navigable for a while and might have been able to pull close enough to the iceberg for people to scramble on.
Fixated on the fact that icebergs sink ships, people overlooked the size and shape of the iceberg and the fact that it would not sink.
Scott Summit, the founder of Bespoke, created a brand-new way to envision prosthetics for people who have lost a limb.
The word “bespoke” comes from Old English and means “custom-tailored.”
That is exactly what his company does.
Summit’s biggest insight was that some people with artificial limbs are embarrassed by their disability and want to hide their artificial limbs as much as possible.
He reframed the problem by looking at an artificial limb not just as a functional medical device but as a fashion statement.
Not only is the leg functional but the wearer is actually proud to display it publicly.
I’ve just finished a book called What’s your problem by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg.
The key learning for me is that the way you frame a problem determines which solutions you come up with.
By shifting the way you see the problem - that is, by reframing it - you can often find better solutions.
Thomas writes here:
"To see how this works, consider this classic example, the slow elevator problem: You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s old and slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem. First of all, notice how this problem isn’t presented to you neutrally. Like most of the problems we encounter in the real world, someone has already framed it for you: the problem is that the elevator is slow. In our eagerness to find a solution, many of us don’t notice how the problem is framed; we take it for granted. As a result, we start coming up with ideas for how to make the elevator faster: Could we upgrade the motor? Could we improve the algorithm? Do we need to install a new elevator? These solutions might work. However, if you pose this problem to building managers, they suggest a much more elegant solution: put up mirrors next to the elevator. This simple measure has proved effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at—namely themselves.”
We need reframing & upstream thinking to be taught in schools and the boardroom too.
We all face more than enough problems.
It’s about time we cross ‘solving the wrong problems’ off the list.
It’s high time to start solving the right problems, to start solving them right, and to start solving them fast.
That’s my rant, I hope it resonates. Until next time.
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