Greg McKeown:
Welcome, everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here on this journey with you to learn to be able to understand what’s really important so that we can build a life around those things and eliminate all of the nonsense, all of the wrong problems that sometimes we waste our lives trying to solve.
We’re back here for part two with my interview with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. He spent years studying the problem of problems and particularly the skill of reframing problems in order to make sure that before we rush into solutions, we are actually addressing the best possible problem. By the end of this episode, you will have practical tools to be able to utilize immediately to improve your skill in this area. Let’s get to it.
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I love that example. I was just doing a keynote on Effortless, and one of the other speakers at the event was someone who has worked in three administrations in a row, so he’s not Republican or Democrat. He has worked in the White House responsible for the budgets of the White House itself through three administrations his presentation was about the first responses to the Covid pandemic and how it was framed internally because it was framed as a homeland security issue at first because it came from China from abroad. And so that was one of the reasons that the first set of actions being taken were to do with shutting down airports and shutting down flights from other places was because it wasn’t framed at first as a healthcare issue, it was homeland security. And I just thought this was a really interesting illustration of what you’re describing, I think, of how you see the problem is a big part of the problem.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
The crucial thing there is to get other people into the room to challenge your understanding because we all have these frames. Like if you speak to somebody from homeland security, naturally enough, they will see the threat in this. They will consider it that way, and that’s very hard. It’s just hard to back away from your own biases. The magic shortcut to that is to involve people in the discussion who come from different places. So sorry, you had a question?
Greg McKeown:
No, I just wanted to push on that. Not that I think you are wrong, I just, I’m just thinking about this case study they had around the table people from lots of different perspectives. So it wasn’t that the entire executive team were the homeland security people; it’s more nefarious than that and more consistent with what I think you are trying to teach us, which is that once it had been framed a certain way, no one questioned that framing for a while. For weeks, maybe months, before someone really said, well, hold on, the way we are even talking about this problem is affecting how we think about the solutions.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It is incredibly insidious. I have not found the perfect cure for it. I found it helps, first and foremost, to just teach people the difference between framing and analysis. So they need to know this is a real thing, and then they need to be capable of introducing it into the conversation. And weird enough, the reason I love the slow elevator example is it can very quickly share the core idea and why you are starting to look for, start a discussion about different ways of looking at it.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. You’ve said two things. I’m only interrupting cause I want to understand both of them. The first, you went through really quickly, which was the difference between framing and analyzing. Now I know we’ve touched upon those, but can you just again be really clear about what those differences are?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
The analysis is when you ask why is the elevator slow, and you understand the slowness exactly. And all the factors that contribute to why the elevator is slow. Framing is to ask, is this really about making the elevator faster, or is it about reducing people’s wait time, or is it about reducing frustration, or is it about making sure they don’t all arrive at the same time? So it is basically brainstorming not for solutions but for different ways of looking at the problem itself.
Greg McKeown:
It’s not something that’s done. I just think that the tendency towards analysis versus framing is really immense. Yes, and I wonder if you could go in before getting to this question of how to talk about it; why is it that we have such a bias for analysis rather than framing?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
I think it’s a how-to question because when you look at the research here, the idea has been run forever. The empirical research starts to crop up already in the sixties, and there’s just a ton of studies demonstrating this is really important.
Greg McKeown:
Can you talk about that as well? I know that we’re now dealing with so several things, but can you go back and tell us about that original research that was being done on creativity and its relationship between analysis and framing?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
The iconic study is from a Hungarian psychologist who passed away recently and his mentor J.W. Getzels. They go in, and they get a bunch of art students to go into a room, they give them a bunch of objects, and they tell them you have roughly an hour to create an interesting piece of art. What they noticed was that the most interesting or creative pieces of work, as judged by independent judges, came not from people who just like picked an object and tried to make it kind of look good. It came from people who spent a little bit more time examining even the objects in the room, kind of looking at them in different lights, going over to the window with them, and so on.
So basic finding error. They call this kind of problem finding or problem discovering. There is a correlation between people who did that and people who created more interesting works of art. So that’s the very first kind of empirical study back in the sixties.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. And so this is the article it’s called From Problem Solving to Problem Finding, and I just want to emphasize what you just said there, that there was a higher correlation between a creative output and one’s ability to reframe at the beginning than there was between people that were really good at brainstorming various solutions. Like there was more to be gained by getting creative about framing the problem than there was about framing the solution. Am I expressing that right?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Exactly. These people had a habit of just pausing for a second before jumping into action and trying to think creatively about the challenge itself versus how do I execute this in the most statistic way possible, if you will.
Greg McKeown:
That’s fantastic. Now let’s come back to this idea of why people aren’t good at the problem finding versus the problem solving.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
We haven’t taught them how. I think there’s a parallel interestingly to negotiation when you look at negotiation like we’ve known for ages that that’s an important thing to do, but it has been perceived at this specialist skill that’s kind of impenetrable, and you have to like professionalize yourself in it. Then you know the book Getting to Yes comes out, and that just puts out some very simple ways in which you can apply negotiations to whatever you’re doing, be that figuring out who does the dishes in your relationship or a big business problem and so on.
So I think that’s what’s been missing. People kind of know when you say it to them, hey you need to solve the right problem, but they have never been taught how to do it in a simple enough manner that they can so that they can replicate it on a Wednesday afternoon and that that’s really what I’ve been trying to create
Greg McKeown:
And we could go even further because there’s the absence of being taught how to do problem finding and problem framing, and then there’s the enormous emphasis that’s been made on analysis, problem solving. For example, it seems to me that actually everything in formal education from the beginning to almost the way to the end of education, formal education where it is about solving a problem that’s provided for you. It is answering a question that is provided for you, and that your A is based on the speed and accuracy to which you can give an answer that somebody else already wants you to give to it. And it only changes really to some extent at the master’s level and then again to some extent at the doctoral level that you actually are interested in what is the question you’re trying to answer and how would you frame that question and what would you think about that question. That, to me, is the first educational environment where you are actually being rewarded for that in any degree. Your reactions.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
I concur maybe adding one detail around that, which is the humanities is a positive exception to that. Now I agree with everything primary education, and so I think we are getting better at it now. I think more if you speak to people in the education space, now they’re aware of this, but how most of us, like if you’re an adult listener, that very much fits what you just described.
The humanities though I happen to be a humanities graduate. I studied film and media science in Copenhagen growing up, and basically, the thing you were taught there, for instance, was to like, you took a film, and you had to interpret it in different ways. So whatever film you picked me for Terry Williams, 12 Monkeys, and you could just see how many different people could come up with very different ways of looking at what’s even going on with this movie. Like, what is it about in some, so that’s weird enough, one place where I think we’ve gotten a little bit better in the humanities of emphasizing not here’s a problem, get to the right answer, but here’s a thing, what do you think this is about? Like that can get too fussy too. I do love having the reframing combined with strong analysis. It’s not that we are wrong in teaching that to people, but I do think actually I found that humanities records tend to be a little stronger in this.
Greg McKeown:
It’s an interesting perspective. Keep us moving forward here. So we haven’t taught people how, maybe we’ve overemphasized the analysis and brainstorming of, you know, to be solvers of a preexisting problem. Now teach us how.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
First thing you do, describe the problem separately from the solution you may have in mind. A lot of the time, you just see people describing the solution they want without being clear about the problem.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so describe the problem. What do you really mean by that?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
This could mean writing it down, just jotting down a few sentences and saying literally starting with the words the problem is that okay? Or it can even mean explaining this to somebody else, like saying hey, I have this problem with my uncle, or whatever. So state the problem separately from whatever solution you may have fallen in love with or have been focused on.
Beyond that, what I’ve done in my work is kind of try to take all the research out there and condense it into a couple of simple questioning strategies, if you will. So basically types of questions you can ask that are helpful in surfacing new perspectives.
One of my favorite ones is trying to rethink the goal. Like, so asking two questions.
A: What are you trying to achieve? What does success look like?
B: Could success look different? Like is there a different way that you could see what a good outcome is?
Very basic example, you’re at your annual big family gathering, maybe it’s Christmas or something similar, and you end up, of course, in a discussion about politics with your drunk uncle. Now is the right goal for you in that situation? How do I win the discussion? Or might a better goal be, hey, how do we have a better relationship, or how do we avoid that discussion so we have a more harmonious family gathering? But basically, what’s the goal? Like what does success look like, and are there other ways of winning? Could we rethink what success looks like?
Greg McKeown:
Okay, I like that more. What else can we do?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Bright spots I mentioned earlier that is the weird fact that in your history with a problem, often there has been a time in which the problem was less bad or where it didn’t happen except you didn’t really notice it. The instance I mentioned earlier, the story with Tanya and Brian where they suddenly realized, wait, we actually did have that discussion about the budget, and it was over breakfast, and it was totally pain-free. So trying to pay attention to the positive exceptions in your history with this problem. If you tend to fight with your wife about the budget, when was the time when you didn’t have as aggrieved a conversation about it, like as normal? What was different about that time?
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so I think I can summarize that A positive exception is a situation in which you achieved the goal without the negative experience.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Or even, or even it didn’t occur in the first place, the negative trigger. Like, I don’t know when you hang out with your dad, normally, something happens, but then it just didn’t happen at all at that time.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. So the absence of the problem.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Fantastic. What other tangible things can we do?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
This one applies to only some people, but I call it looking in the mirror, and that means asking how you are part of creating the problem.
Greg McKeown:
Sure.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
We tend to sometimes think that, well, I’m the innocent victim here in this situation, and the problem is caused by this idiot over there. Seeing ourselves as not just blame-free but free of even any input to the problem. I love the concept here. This is from Sheila Heen and Doug Stone from their book Difficult Conversations, which is contribution. Like, don’t talk about blame, who’s to blame for this problem. Talk about who contributes to why it happens. It might have been mostly the other person’s fault, but there’s also something you are doing or forgot to do. That meant that it keeps happening.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. And I think that there’s something to add to that, which is people can go back and listen to an episode where I interviewed C. Terry Warner about exactly this dynamic because if we are not careful, we get trapped. Not just by saying, well, it’s them, but also we get trapped by worrying that it’s all us. And so the very thought of looking in the mirror can be really terrifying because you say, well my goodness, what if it is entirely me and I’ve just, this whole problem is really about me. And that’s just so disorienting and so stressful for people in that conversation we called it the monster problem, which is that it’s so important for us to say that the other person is the monster that we also create a secondary problem, which is that we think, well, but what if I’m overdoing it that they aren’t really such a monster.
Well, what kind of monster would I be to be able to falsely accuse somebody or exaggerate the issue And so then we are totally trapped. And so what he says, the solution to that is that you say, well, there’s no monster. That very idea is keeping you trapped in this awful relationship dynamic. And so if you can separate it and you just get more precise in going, well look, this is what they have done, this is what I have done. And you really quite literally let the truth of it set you free, you suddenly can say, well, there’s no monster, and I’m not the monster, and I don’t have to keep proving that they are and then worrying that it must be me. And so I just wanted to add that layer to this idea of looking in the mirror so that you can, yes, look in the mirror and also see their part. But let’s see it truthfully
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
And it’s good sense a lot of this is about absolving those kinds of very binary. Is it yours of them things. I think that’s such a powerful thing. The monster problem.
Greg McKeown:
In the article, Are You Solving the Right Problems that you wrote in Harvard Business Review, you literally have a diagram that says problem framing on the left and then solution finding with your solution space on the right. And it’s trying to help people, as we’ve been discussing, to make sure that we are focused on that first space, creating a space, not years for it, but five minutes for it, a moment for it.
How can somebody, you know, coming back to the elevator problem, take that exact structure, you know, in the next 24 hours of listening to this and try to frame a problem better? Can you just give us, like now, after having given us several options, a single tool that people can apply immediately?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Take a piece of paper, on the top left-hand side, you write problem, and the top right-hand side, you write solution, and then you describe the problem just in a couple of words under the left-hand column. And then, instead of jumping to the right-hand side of the column, you try to come up with a different framing, staying on the left-hand side of the piece of paper.
So if you can come up with a couple of those, you can see how that starts to open doors for a different way of thinking about the problem. Again, back to the elevator thing, is the problem that the elevator slow, is it that people are late for the last bus home? Is that they’re patient? Is that they are trying to lower the rents? What’s going on?
So going in and trying to question your understanding of the problem, potentially using some of the strategies I shared here around rethinking the goal, looking for bright spots, looking in the mirror, and so on.
Greg McKeown:
That’s so good. I mean, the reason I’m so positive about what you just said is because I was doing it as you were describing it. So I’ve written down a problem, and that is the way that I would normally see this problem, and it brings forward many ideas of what one should do to address it. And instead, I just wrote down a couple of other ways of thinking about the problem, and they’re so different than the first and so much richer and more accurate.
I can see immediately alternative ways to address it. You know, I spent two minutes on this, maybe less than that, and it’s already a workable tool to be able to utilize. So thank you for sharing that, and thank you for helping us to think through not only our ability to solve problems but really solve the right problems. A final thing you want to share with us.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Find whoever you work with the most and share this with them. Because we think often of skills as individual skills. Now I can do this, but the most powerful way to do it and the way where it has real sticking power is when the two or three people that you most often work with, at home or at work, they know this too. So you can become a problem-solving unit. So you can become somebody who reminds each other, Hey, I think we’re jumping too quickly to solutions here. Let’s just take five minutes to question whether we even understand the client’s problem correctly or whatever. It is not ultimately an individual skill. It is better seen as a team capability, something you can share with your family or your colleagues and get better at this together.
Greg McKeown:
Thomas, it’s been fantastic having you on the podcast. Thank you for your insights.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Thank you, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
What is one thing that has stood out to you in this conversation with Thomas? What is one thing that you can do immediately to put this into action? I mean, within the next 5 minutes, 10 minutes. To schedule something, to do something, make it small but immediate. And who is one person that you can share this with?
Remember that there’s a whole ecosystem that I’m building to be able to make it easier for you to live a life that really matters. So there’s the book Essentialism, the book Effortless, the 1 Minute Wednesday newsletter. There’s the Academy, this podcast. So subscribe to it. Make it effortless for you to receive this every Tuesday and Thursday. And then, if it makes sense, invite your team and organization to be able to create culture, and let me know if I can be useful in that regard. Thank you. Really, thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time.
