Most days at work require us to navigate and solve complex problems—a production bug impacting a large customer base, facing a roadblock when designing a product with many dependencies, not getting a buy-in on a new design proposal, stakeholders demanding early piloting of new features, and disagreements and conflicts that require careful handling of the situation.
These problems often come unannounced and don’t show up with a bang. They silently creep in and require you to navigate the unknowns, challenges, and uncertainty they bring along. Getting paralyzed by these problems, feeling scared, or waiting for someone to rescue you by showing you the way is a common response, but it also takes away the opportunity to stand out and show up strong.
Learning to solve complex problems on your own will not only enable you to do more impactful work but also put you in front of people who have the power to allocate work, provide opportunities, and shape your career. These people can lift you up by entrusting you with bigger and better challenges—making your problem-solving skills highly valued, appreciated, and always in demand.
Most of the time, the challenge in solving problems isn’t the complexity, but our attitude towards it. We spend more time agonizing about the obstacle in our path and less time finding solutions, staying determined, and navigating whatever shows up our way.
Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.
― Tina Fey
But to be a good problem solver, you need to be methodical in your approach. Follow these 5 steps each time you’re tasked with the responsibility to solve a complex problem:
State the Problem
Knowing what you’re trying to solve seems like the most obvious thing, and yet this is where most people make a mistake. They either have a vague idea of the problem or over-complicate it by combining too many issues that are either irrelevant or not important to the core issue at hand.
Throwing multiple problems in the same pile distracts you—you keep jumping between ideas, keep going around in circles, and keep chasing a perfect solution that will fix all your problems. But focusing on too many things at the same time prevents you from solving the real problem. Lack of clarity also leads to procrastination, analysis-paralysis, and
To navigate complexity, you need to be specific and directed towards the problem you’re trying to solve. Stating the problem clearly helps you achieve that goal. To do this:
- Think about the most important problem that needs to be addressed first.
- Ensure it’s a single problem and not a convoluted mess of too many issues.
- Try to phrase it in 2-3 lines. Anything more and there’s a likelihood that you’re digressing from the main issue.
- Validate it by repeating the problem to yourself and analyzing if the key situation is captured well.
You can’t hit a bullseye if you don’t know where the goal is and you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what problem you are trying to solve.
― Sarah K. Ramsey
Complexity can be paralyzing when you don’t take the time to define it clearly. By putting it into words, you can avoid solving the wrong problem as well as free up the mental space to build connections, draw insights, and find a way forward. State the problem clearly. Write it down somewhere. Don’t leave it vague or open-ended.
Dig Deeper, Get Rid of Superficial Analysis
Once you have the problem clearly defined, the next step isn’t to get down to problem-solving. Before jumping to solutions, you need to spend time analyzing the problem in more detail. Superficial analysis by rushing through the data or insights can lead you astray and cause you to make a wrong decision or implement a less effective solution.
You need to uncover assumptions, validate your hypothesis, acknowledge unpleasant realities, and dig deeper into the underlying root cause. What appears on the surface is often very different from reality—masked by our own biases, beliefs, past experiences, and judgments. Getting rid of these biases and preconceived notions is crucial to staying close to reality and making a more informed decision.
To navigate complexity, you need to go beyond your default tendency to lean towards specific conclusions and expand your thinking to include more possibilities. To do this:
- Ask questions. Questions give you access to different viewpoints and perspectives and unlock insights you would otherwise miss.
- Consciously pay attention to your biases, like confirmation bias, anchoring bias, availability heuristic, or framing effect, which influence how you perceive and interpret information.
- Look for data and patterns to identify if the problem at hand is repetitive or an isolated case. Gather other useful signals and metrics that might be put to use later.
- Define the amount of time and effort you’ll dedicate to the task and set a target date by which to complete this analysis. Don’t leave it open-ended to avoid analysis-paralysis.
Insights shift us toward a new story, a new set of beliefs that are more accurate, more comprehensive, and more useful. Our insights transform us in several ways. They change how we understand, act, see, feel, and desire. They change how we understand.They transform our thinking; our new story gives us a different viewpoint. They change how we act. In some cases insights transform our abilities as well as our understanding.
― Gary Klein
Being blinded by the stories in your mind or refusing to see the reality of your situation can turn complexity into chaos. You may overlook the important details or overindex on the wrong assumption. Don’t go with the first thought or the default idea that comes to mind. Dig deeper. Spend more time analyzing.
Design a Solution
This is the most difficult part and often the one with the most complexity. Despite all your due diligence in collecting data and analyzing the problem in detail, no solution can be perfect or risk-free—there are always unknowns and uncertainties involved. There are always competing possibilities. There’s always a risk of failure or the outcome not turning out the way you expected.
But you can’t let the fear of making a mistake or failing badly get in the way of strategizing and locking down on the path to take. When designing a solution, you need to choose the best possible option at the moment—list down different choices, review the pros and cons of each choice, and go with the one that seems most promising amongst them. Explore the uncharted territory. Don’t stick to tried-and-tested methods. Go with the hard choice, not the safest option. It may be scary in the beginning, but if successful can yield substantial rewards in the long run.
To navigate complexity, you have to look beyond the easy and secure and step into the discomfort zone. If it isn’t uncomfortable, it probably isn’t worth it. However, there are certain steps you can take to minimize the risk and prevent stepping into a panic zone:
- Adopt an experimental mindset. Try different solutions by using simple prototypes or running small experiments. Collect data. Base your decision on actual results, not theory or past achievements.
- Use a repertoire of mental models to think clearly and ground your decision-making in real insights. For example, the inversion mental model provides an objective way to explore the problem by thinking the opposite of what you seek. Reverse questioning can help you inquire into your own assumptions, beliefs, and, in turn, gain a better perspective to find answers to your original question with greater clarity and understanding. Second order thinking mental model can help you unravel the implications of your decision by thinking about its consequences in the future.
- Examine the feasibility of putting it into action by taking resources, timelines, and other constraints into account. A good enough solution that can be implemented in the given timeframe is better than a great solution that will miss the opportunity window.
- Consider the implications of not getting the desired results. Think of the best and the worst-case scenarios. Have an alternate plan ready in case you need to fallback to another strategy.
Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.
― Steve Magness
Solutioning is the hardest part because it tests your core skills as well as your risk-taking capacity. Don’t be risk-averse. Quit doing what’s natural, certain, convenient, or automatic. Take the hard road.
Put it into Action
Defining a solution gives you a direction. It solidifies the approach you wish to take. However, without actually acting on it, your work is only half done. Any approach you take will need multiple modifications once you enter the implementation phase. New challenges, new observations, and new learnings will guide you on the changes you need to make. Sitting with an approach and dissecting it will never lead to insights that can be attained by taking action and identifying what works and what needs attention. You can cut through the complexity only by taking action.
However, when working on something complex for the very first time, a wave of
Instead of major victories with outsized expectations, what if you targeted small wins—small daily goals that give a sense of progress; work that moves you forward, is fulfilling and rewarding, and where each step takes you closer to your destination.
Don’t try to achieve the biggest results in the smallest amount of time; take small steps for continual improvement. To do this:
- Break down your solution into monthly, bi-weekly, and daily goals.
- Set milestones to track progress and catch mistakes early.
- Review your approach and fine-tune it based on the gap between achieved outcomes and expected results.
- Focus on the process to reach your destination, don’t obsess about the end result.
Radical change is like charging up a steep hill—you may run out of wind before you reach the crest, or the thought of all the work ahead makes you give up no sooner than you’ve begun. There is an alternative… another path altogether, one that winds so gently up the hill that you hardly notice the climb. It is pleasant to negotiate and soft to tread. And all it requires is that you place one foot in front of the other.
— Robert Maurer
You can’t cut through complexity by designing beautiful solutions, but never really acting on them. Target small daily wins. Small wins may seem trivial individually, but they ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work, which turn into much bigger accomplishments over a period of time.
Gather Feedback and Improve
When you’re doing something worthwhile, failures and disappointments come along for the ride. Unexpected situations, a change in your circumstances, or not getting the desired results despite putting your best effort can throw your balance off a bit. Things are going to get hard. New problems are going to crop up. Instead of giving up, you must learn to dust yourself off, stand back up, and keep pushing ahead. You need to persevere and stay on the path without quitting. You need to adopt a learning attitude.
Success can be achieved only by stretching yourself and practicing courage to step into the unknown, not by playing it safe and staying inside your comfort zone. Give yourself permission to feel disappointed, but don’t let temporary setbacks turn into permanent excuses.
When confronted with an obstacle, use feedback to:
- Try a different strategy if whatever you’ve been doing hasn’t been working.
- Experiment with multiple options to determine the one that works.
- Challenge traditional methods and explore new ways of doing things.
- Practice multi-disciplinary thinking to get ideas from other domains and functions.
Anything you gain by solving one complex problem can also offer a great learning lesson to tackle future complexities—every challenge, obstacle, disappointment, achievement, success, failure, and mistake can be valuable when viewed through the lens of growth and improvement. By showing curiosity, you can gather excellent insights into your process—what parts you did well that might add value to future problems, what disastrous mistakes you made that must be discontinued, and what you missed out as opportunities to not let go in the future?
When you do take action, every result is an opportunity to reflect and learn valuable lessons. Even if what you take away from your assessment seems to be of small consequence, all of these small improvements taken together make a huge difference in the long term.
― Ken Watanabe
Opening your eyes without shutting down your ears can unravel a lot of complexity by making you derive value from hidden learning lessons. Don’t consider complexity as a barrier. Treat it as a challenge.
Summary
- When you don’t define the complex problem clearly, leave it open-ended or vague, solving the problem becomes harder because your attention gets spread out instead of focusing on the key areas. Not knowing what you want can also lead to procrastination. Clearly state the problem before getting down to solving it.
- Problems don’t show up alone. They come with many assumptions, biases, and preconceived notions. Not validating these assumptions or letting your biases determine the path forward can lead to bad choices and poor decisions. Before solving, pay attention to them. Dig deeper into the data and insights. Draw patterns instead of jumping to conclusions.
- Instead of getting stuck in analysis paralysis by chasing a perfect solution, find a good enough solution and move ahead with it. A solution that can be implemented timely is better than no solution at all. List down a few choices, think about their pros and cons, and finalize the one that seems most promising at the moment.
- A good solution can be converted into a great one by acting, learning, and iterating on it. Break down your solution into small steps, implement each one, gather insights, and adapt your strategy to make progress and move closer to your goal.
- Feedback collected during the entire process can lead to valuable lessons, not only for the problem at hand, but also for any future problems you may encounter. Proactively seek this feedback. Self-analyze and self-introspect to determine areas you did well and the changes you can bring to make things better.
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