by Bill Cottringer 

Life is a series of problem-solving opportunities. The problems you face will either defeat you or develop you depending on how you respond to them.  ~Rick Warren.

    Life presents us with three different sets of conflicts which require reasonable resolution in measuring the quality of our lives with any degree of satisfying success and happiness. Ironically failures can often pave the way for success in conflict resolution and problem-solving. These main challenging conflicts, or life problems, involve us vs. life, others and ourselves. Below are seven common sense principles of problem-solving learned from failures in the trenches:

1. Dig much deeper below the noisy surface symptoms.

     And this means even deeper once you stumble upon the obvious causes of the problem. Only stop when you don’t need to ask any more, “why is this?” questions. A large national security company was having some trouble controlling rising costs of high turnover at a local Midwest Branch office. The first look determined that it was a Midwest economy problem in an employee’s market. There wasn’t much the company could do about this problem cause.

       But further investigation in the trenches, discovered the core cause of the high turnover was mostly due to poor communication within the Branch office and between the head office. Additionally, in-person interviews uncovered some mistrust that the security officers perceived with their supervisors and managers. Once those problems were dealt with, the turnover rate got back to the 15% level, which was deemed reasonable, given the rate of pay and general work conditions.

2. Realize some problems can’t be solved, only managed.

     Communication in a relationship or any situation with others, is a good example of an on-going problem that can’t ever be completely resolved. This is one of our most difficult challenges and good communication is best viewed as a work in progress. We have no control over others and the best we can do is manage better responses to dishonest or unhealthy communication by others. Dishonesty is a particular problem in communication. People generally lie because they fear what will happen if they tell the truth. And sometimes lying becomes such a strong habit that the person doesn’t know what the truth is.

     A negative response to such dishonesty is like pouring gasoline onto a burning fire. The best way to manage this kind of behavior is the same as dealing with a fire—take away the fuel making the fire burn. As a prison warden, I knew that lying was a way of life with inmates, so I never gave them a reason to lie by just asking for facts and details. Not making a reason for any type of behavior is the best way to stop it. Admittedly this isn’t always easy, but doing the right thing rarely is.

3. Some past failed solutions can be reused in new and unusual ways to be successful.

     This principle is borrowed from John Maxwell’s definition of creativity, just being the act of adding something new or different to an already existing thing or situation. One simple example is cracking some eggs to make an omelette. And some conversions of photos from color to black and white get better results with more contrast in details, where others lose the impact of a particular color pairing. And failed attempts to find a job may just be a matter of applying for the right one at the right time.

     So, instead of identifying a harmful drug interaction that a physician is trying to cure a person’s disease with, looking for the compounding effect of another medical condition might be more revealing.  And of course, any new situation may involve better timing or an additional different variable that wasn’t present when the older solution failed. The idea here, is if you keep trying to solve a problem without getting results, they could come when you change something in your problem-solving approach. We all know the classic definition of mental illness.

4. Many problem-solving successes only come after a long series of failures.

     Well, folks like Babe Ruth, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Eddison, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Disney, and Steven Spielberg can all safely testify to the accuracy of this principle. The problem here is that we tend to get frustrated and want to quit as soon as we experience one-too-many failures. While it is important to know the few things you should probably quit, it is more important to know the ones you shouldn’t quit. Tenacity is almost always a virtue.

      Some solutions to the more difficult problems often appear just around the last corner we don’t make it to, or under the last rock we don’t flip over. One food service manager kept trying to get one of the servers to improve hygiene because of customer’s complaints. The manager failed, no matter how many different approaches she used, until she finally figured out the male server didn’t want to be told what to do by a female boss. Being flexible, the female manager gave the task to one of the male shift supervisors, and the problem went away quickly and voluntarily.

5. Successful problem-solving solutions can quickly become obsolete.

     Unfortunately, we have a natural tendency to want to overuse solutions to problems once we have found them to be successful in solving one problem in the past that seems to be similar to one in hand. We even actively look for and even invent problems to apply our tried-and-true solutions to. But this “picking the low hanging fruit” strategy never seems to work in the long run. Maybe problems and solutions have some human characteristics of wanting to be unique and mysterious.

     And each new problem situation is always different in important ways which may impede success in applying the old solution to a new problem. For example, the successful solution applied to our earlier turnover problem may fall short with a teacher trying to halt class dropouts, maybe due more to the escalating cost of textbooks or technology expenses the students can’t afford.  And once in an earlier prison job, the warden found out an inmate hygiene problem was medically caused rather than poor bathing habits.

6. Two Physics principles are relevant.

     Sometimes you can get stuck in problem-solving when looking for the solution in your current field of interest, where tunnel vision often rules.  Law enforcement can learn to navigate dangerous situations by understanding two important physics principles that are very relevant to all problem situations. These are: (1) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where everything is in perpetual flux and there are no guaranteed outcomes, and (2) Einstein’s idea, “reality is an illusion, although a very persistent one.” Practically translated this means, “things aren’t always what they seem” as referenced by Phaedrus, Proverbs 29:6-7 and also Al Pacino in the intriguing spy movie “The Recruit.”

     In knowing these two physics principles in preparing to enter into dangerous situations with potential violent criminals, law enforcement officers become more aware of the problems of first appearances becoming deceptive, and all the multitude of variables that can influence the best outcome. Armed with such valuable knowledge the police officers can build the necessary confidence and competence needed to de-escalate or mitigate the dangerous situation, rather than aggravate it.

7. Timing is everything in anything.

     Good timing in applying a sound solution to a complex problem, will always be an important consideration. And becoming more sensitive to the point of no return, can sharpen the awareness of the right time at the last minute to be more successful in solving an on-going problem than being premature of too late. In the current political climate, this is what the winning candidate will understand and take advantage of. And in another example, Abraham Lincoln warned us that the best opportunities in life came in twos, so it was always a good idea to know when the first one has come and gone, so you don’t miss the second chance.

     When providing useful feedback to other, being sensitive to the right time to do this, especially when they ask for it or need it most to avoid harm, can greatly improve impact. The so-called luck factor of any success is more aptly the good timing of your efforts meeting the right opportunity at the tight time and place.  Trying to teach a new emergency response strategy during an actual emergency probably won’t get the expected results as much as a leader demonstrating a response that others are already trained on. In education, good timing is exemplified by teachable moments.

8. Sometimes we need to change directions.

     This clever problem-solving strategy comes from two outstanding sport psychologists, Brent Rushall and Robert Nideffer. With the sports examples of divers and golfers, it can be very revealing to spot defective moves in the diving routine or golf swing by viewing the whole process backwards from the diving water entry and golf swing follow-through from the starting stances to the performance. That is basically another version of keep asking why questions backwards until you reach the point that there are no more viable answers as to what is most influencing the failed effort.

    Changing the starting perspective is another useful strategy. If we are searching a building or vehicle to prove the presence of contraband that is one thing, However switching perspectives in searching to disprove the presence of contraband, may very well involve a different search method and get much different results. And of course sometimes we look for external causes of a problem and miss the internal ones that may contribute more to the cause of the problem, like our own back story, mere presence or involvement in trying to solve the problem.

9. We often make problems too complex.

     Let’s face it, at times we all make life much more complicated and complex than it really needs to be, in order to succeed in what we are doing. Or worse yet, we stop and accept the close-by simple solutions instead of wading through the swamps of complexity to get to the real land of simple on the other side of the complexity. Who knows, maybe this is related to our insatiable taste for challenges and surprise endings, starting with the childhood game of hide and seek which we all have played. However, no one likes to hide so well that they aren’t ever found. The same is probably true of the solutions hiding in some problems.

     In engineering there is a simple principle of perturbation, or strategic points in a building which facilitate implosion. Sadly, 9-11 comes to mind. In psychology, these are “P” points, or small, strategic interventions in time and place that get the biggest results, like book titles, newspaper headlines, alarming statistics, and political sound bites. With the complex problem of employee job dissatisfaction, the “P” points are in asking and getting accurate answers to five critical question every employee or team member has: (1) Why am I here? (2) What am I supposed to be doing? (3) How am I supposed to be doing it? (4) where do I got to get help? (5) What’s in it for me?

10. Are some problems unsolvable or unmanageable?

     We have all experienced difficult problems in our lives that we couldn’t solve no matter how hard we tried or no matter how many times we used a different approach. But maybe the problem is in the “trying,” which Ken Blanchard of the One-minute Manager fame, referred to as just “a noisy way of not doing something.” And of course, we may be seeing the solution to a problem clearly, but it is not our preferred way out of the problem or a favored solution that we know will end up causing more serious problems to be solved.

     If we understand the significance of what Einstein is talking about reality being an illusion, a good starting point is to question who exactly is doing the “trying” in problem-solving? According to the erudite philosopher Alan Watts, the distinct sense of having a separate self to use ego resources to try and solve a problem is likened to your eyes trying to see themselves. Not possible! Your eyes, the process of seeing and what they see, are all one and the same. Much like night and day just being different sides to the same coin. By merging yourself and resources in becoming one with the problem, the solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem will always appear, magically.

     Now try out any of these ten sensible problem-solving strategies together and watch your problem-solving skills help you get much better results.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.  ~Abraham Maslow.