Greg McKeown:
Hello everyone. This is Greg McKeown. I’m your host, and I am on this journey with you to learn to understand so that we can live a life that really matters and make a contribution.
How much do you waste time, money, energy, and even your life solving the wrong problems? That’s a question posed by my guest today. This is part one of a two-part interview with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. I became aware of his work after reading an article that he wrote in Harvard Business Review. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to reframe problems in order to reveal unexpected solutions. Let’s get to it.
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Thomas, welcome to the podcast.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Thank you, Greg. Thanks for inviting me.
Greg McKeown:
In your work on solving the right problems, you use a slow elevator metaphor. Can you describe what that is and why it matters?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It’s really the best way of explaining the core idea in my book, and it goes like this, you imagine that you own an office building and the people, the tenants in the building, they are complaining about the elevator that is too slow, and some of them may have threatened to break their lease if you don’t kind of fix this problem.
Now, what most people do in that situation is just to jump straight into action and like, okay, how do we solve this? How do we make the elevator faster? Can we put in a better motor, or can we maybe buy a new elevator, find the money for that?
There are people who kind of are better at problem-solving, and they go in and say, wait, we gotta ask questions first, which is a good first step. And they say, wait, why is the elevator slow? And they’re trying to think about that. And you know, they examine the problem understanding in detail, and even those people may miss the most important thing, which is that the first pop problem that’s put in front of you is not necessarily the right problem to look at.
So if you ask a clever landlord, you know, they might suggest a very different solution, namely putting up mirrors in the hallway next to the elevator because they know what happens is when people see a mirror, they fall in love with their own reflection, they forget time and so on. And that, I think that idea really encapsulates this central difference between, you know, just asking questions or analyzing a problem and then reframing it, which is the key concept, like going in and asking, wait, is this actually the problem we should be paying attention to? Or is there a very different way of looking at the problem? Namely is not that the elevator is slow is that people hate waiting, and the mirror is a great solution for that.
So that’s kind of, in a nutshell, the way to explain what reframing is about and how it’s different from analysis. And as you can probably sense why it is so important.
Greg McKeown:
Well, why don’t you give us a little more about that? Why is this so important beyond the elevator explanation? Why, for somebody listening to this right now, should they prioritize this ability?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Well, they shouldn’t if they don’t have any problems in their lives. I would say it’s been striking to me working with problems for many years that we have problems in our lives, and they have been around for a while, and we keep just kind of hammering our heads into the wall trying to solve the same way.
Now if our listeners may feel that describes their problems, or some of them, that’s very normal. Like I have, I’ve met people who, for 10 years, have kind of held onto some kind of understanding of a problem. And then, once in a while, once you get a new perspective on it, once you start questioning what the problem actually is, you can find new or better solutions.
Like it’s telling in the elevator example, it might actually solve the problem if you go in and buy a new elevator. But that’s a really expensive solution. And most of our problems have more than one solution. And one of those other solutions you can find is probably a more creative, cheaper, better, smarter, and easier way to do it. So, I just see this all the time, people in all walks of life, from professionals in their personal lives and so on, they just kind of fall into that trap of quickly saying, oh, this is the problem. And they hold onto that understanding of the problem forever. Half the time, it’s not the right problem to solve it all the other half of the time. It’s kind of, maybe it’s the right problem, but there’s a smarter way of going about this that they’re completely missing. That’s maybe in the short version of it, I’d say.
Greg McKeown:
What kind of problems can people listening to this use this approach to address? Is it any kind of problem? Like, give me something tangible that someone is likely to experience?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Well, I mean, so as preparation for this call, I listened to some of your other podcasts, and one with Jeremy Utley talking about every problem is an idea problem, right? And one of the ones that interested me was kind of, when I looked at my own life, I had this thing of my laptop cord where that I kind of, whenever I had to move, I plucked it out, and I went somewhere else, and I took it with me and so on. And it actually took me years to realize that you can buy two laptop cords, right? You can leave one at home, and you can have one in your bag. So, that’s a very minuscule problem. But an interesting example for me of one of those cases where we just have small problems, we’re just kind of accepting that they’re there, and we don’t necessarily have to.
Let me give you another example. One of my, one of my favorite stories from it, which is from Robert Sternberg, who, who probably knows one of the big creativity researchers, he has this wonderful story of a, uh, leader who was really sick of his boss, like he just hated working for this guy. And he finally goes to a headhunter, an executive search firm, and he says, Hey, can you, can you help me find a new job? And the headhunter says, sure. There’s a ton of demand in our industry at the moment. This is going to be pretty easy. Now, luckily the man goes back and talks to, talks to his wife about it too. And the wife is kind of a, she’s trained in kind of the whole reframing thing, and together they come up with a different way of thinking about it, which is basically the next day the man goes back to the head hunter. He says, you know what? Here is the CV of my boss. Can you find a new job for him? And the story, according to Sternberg, the story, literally this is a true story, he says. It ends with the boss unknowingly getting an offer from the head hunter. He accepts, and the protagonist of our story ends up being promoted to his old boss’s job staying in the company he loves but away from the boss he hates. So just an example there.
Greg McKeown:
No, it’s a terrific example. I love that idea. And I am completely sold on the principle that you are advocating that we shouldn’t just be solving the surface problems or the way that those problems first appear to us, but that we need to dig down so that we can understand what the real issue is so that we can address the right thing. Because nothing matters if you’re addressing the wrong problem.
So, I want to keep asking that same thought process here. When I hear the term problem solving or problem finding or problem reframing, it still seems conceptual, but it’s so relevant to so many of the things that are going on in our lives. What other practical illustrations can you give us of the kinds of problems this would be relevant for?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
So this applies to all sources of problems, but I mean, what I, what I love to start with is actually problems from the personal domain because they’re very accessible, and it’s somehow easier to start using this even at work if you first kind of grapple with it with your own relationships.
Here’s an example, my good friend Tanya Luna, she’s an author as well. She’s married to Brian, and her and Brian tended to have a good deal of fights in their relationships, good marriage, but kind of on occasion, they get into this side really bitter fights about, I don’t know, the budget or whatever.
Their initial thinking was fascinating to me because they, of course, were frightened. They said like, well we have different childhoods, we are from different parts of the world and different values, and blah blah blah. And none of that helped at all. Like they had long discussions around it didn’t move the needle.
At one point, Tanya starts looking for what I call bright spots. It’s a term actually that Ben Heath has also kind of thrown about, meaning positive exceptions. Like when did you ever discuss the budget and it was not a problem, like you did not get into this bitter fight. And Tanya realized, wait, we actually had a discussion recently over breakfast where we spoke about this issue, and it was fine. It did not devolve into a bitter fight. And just looking at that made her realize that there’s a very important different way to frame the problem. Not as a fraudulent thing, not as a devalue thing, but just saying most of our fights tend to happen after 10 o’clock at night because we, we kind of, we are tired, we’re hungry, and so on.
And so she instigated basically this rule, the sacred 10 o’clock rule, which is in their marriage, if anybody brings up something contentious and it’s after 10 o’clock, the other person just says like, ah, 10 o’clock, and that means we are gonna get a little bit up earlier the next day and have a discussion about that. So super simple application of how, you know, in a relationship, for instance, you can struggle with some issue for a long, long time until you spend a little bit of time thinking about, wait, what is the problem here? And is there a different way of looking at it?
Greg McKeown:
I love these examples. Do you have another one?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
I don’t know how relevant this is to all your readers, but I think it applies to maybe a lot of types of work. But when I was writing my book, uh, this is a personal example, I initially thought, well, I have to gather all of the knowledge around problem reframing from all the different disciplines and kind of put it all in there.
And at some point during this process, I realized I’m trying to look smart by doing this, and I’m kind of following this idea of what a book should be. And I, what struck me was, and this kind of is one of the areas in which I think your work impacts as well on Essentialism, what is the most important thing here? It is to give people something easy and tangible to do into, which means I took out almost everything that I have stuffed in there and tried to make it like as bare bones as possible in order to make it something people could remember and they could use.
So I think even that shift of starting to notice how you are approaching something you’re trying to do, what are your goals, and are they necessarily the best goals to focus on? Are you better off focusing on the goals of the reader or whoever you’re trying to talk to? That’s just one I’d say from my personal life.
Greg McKeown:
It’s just terrific. What is the moment in somebody’s life where they would know that they’re thinking about their problems in the wrong way?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
There is no one moment. There is though this thing of kind of when you have tried solving it before and haven’t made headway on it, now the first time that happens, okay, well, maybe you just need to try again a little bit smarter. But once you’ve started noticing it several times that you’re not making headway on this basic thing, I think that is, that should be a trigger for you to step into a different space where you don’t try to solve it. You actually try to even just write down the problem and try to question your understanding of it.
Greg McKeown:
So literally, any time you are facing a repeated problem of any kind, that would be a trigger.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Yes. One that you don’t feel you’re making progress on. Not saying necessarily you should use this all the time. I mean, there is such a thing as over-applying it. If you have, you know, if you have friends who are coaches, they might sometimes fall into that trap of like, you go up to them, and you say, Hey, can you tell me where the coffee is? And they go, what’s your real problem?
One important thing about this way of thinking is I think of it as something that’s a little bit scale-free. One of the big mistakes I think we made is to think that whenever you have to think about a problem, you have to go deep, deep into it. Like you have to go two weeks to the mountains, think deep thought and so on. That just means you’re never going to use it.
The way I use it really depends on the moment. So sometimes there’s room for going in more depth, other times it’s literally you’re standing in a hallway, there’s a friend of yours or a colleague kind of asking you a question and, and instead of responding with a solution, you might ask one or two questions back.
So I think this can be a very nimble practice. And in the back of my head, I always have this, like, when people come to me with a problem, I always have this kind of like, how are they framing this problem? Is that the right problem to solve or the right problem to pay attention to?
Greg McKeown:
This is important what you’re saying because I think there is a false dichotomy where people think, on the one hand, I can either be fast and surface, or on the other hand, I can be slow, thorough, and right. And if you think you only have those two options and you are already feeling time, pressure, and stress, and too many things going on in your life, then you’re going to keep pressing the fast button. Well, we just have to react to this. Yeah. Whereas what you just said is there is this third alternative. There’s a way to rapidly get to the right problem. Go ahead. Your thoughts.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Spot on. I feel like that false dichotomy has caused a lot, caused a lot of suffering if you will. I think, weirdly enough, it’s kind of been propagated by a saying that I both love and hate. And I’m sure you know it is that like it’s attributed to Einstein, he never said it, but this thing about if I had an hour, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.
I love it because it gets people to pay attention to the problem. And I hate it because it actually prescribes it. You should spend most of the time just thinking deep thoughts about the problem – that’s wrong. The way I teach people to use this is you might have a problem, and you spend literally five minutes on trying to question it, trying to kind of ask if that’s the right problem. Then you swing into action, you do stuff, you talk to people, you prototype, and so on.
And then next Monday, you take another step back and say, wait a second, given what we’ve been doing this week, are we sure we still understand the problem correctly? Do we actually need to talk to maybe the customer we are dealing with to see if they have a different need than we think it is or whatever?
So it is much more of a quick practice and iterated over time. Don’t think you have to have the perfect diagnosis before you move forward. See it as something you do in the conjunction with moving forward and trying to do.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I think that’s such an important illustration of this.
So we’ve identified when somebody should be triggering this thought process, right? If you’re irritated by the same problem multiple times, you shift into this other gear. This reframing the problem. And I wonder if you could really just define what you mean when you say reframe the problem.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It is to step away from your first understanding of the problem. Look, I refer back to the elevator here again. If you just analyze the problem, you ask why is the elevator slow. And what you’ll notice is that kind of makes you dig deeper into the first framing of the problem that the elevator is slow. Reframing is to say, wait, what if the speed of the elevator is not the issue we should be looking at. Could this be, you know, this waiting time? Could it be that they already arrive at the same time at the elevator? Could it be that it’s a ploy to renegotiate the rent? Whatever.
So that crucial step of questioning your first understanding of the problem, instead of just trying to dissect it immediately and kind of understand all the details of it. I sometimes refer to problems as swimming pools. There’s a swimming pool right in front of you. It is so tempting to just jump into it and splash around. Instead of doing that as your first thing, kind of try to step back and look around, see if there are other ways of other swimming pools nearby, if you will. Other ways of kind of thinking about the problem before you go.
Greg McKeown:
We could describe this, I think, in a four-word question, which is what’s the real issue? Is that right?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It could, although I don’t want to, I want to nuance that because there’s, I love that question again because it drives people to question the understanding of the problem. The one thing I would probably change is the word real. Because here’s a thing about the way we think about problems. We think there’s one real problem. Like you’ll notice this in the language people use. They say like what’s the root cause implying that everything else is just symptoms. There’s one real problem.
What I think is super important is most of the problems we face have multiple solutions, and they have, they are multiple causes for why they happen, which is great news. You might find a real problem to solve, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a better problem out there to solve as well. You could fix the elevator by making it faster, by you know, buying a new elevator, or you could fix the wait, which is a lot cheaper.
Greg McKeown:
So, improve the question for me. What’s the golden question to start with? If you want to reframe the problem, try to get to what the underlying issues are, what’s the right question?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
The sentence I teach people to use is just to say, Wait, are we solving the right problem? And the wait part is kind of to make them pause a little bit, and then that questioning like makes asking them to question the problem. Are we solving the right problem? Or sometimes what you need to do is just to start with, Wait, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Because sometimes, people will come to you asking for a solution, not necessarily being clear about what they’re trying to achieve with that solution.
Greg McKeown:
My experience with this is that people almost never say what they really mean the first time around.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Correct.
Greg McKeown:
Is that your experience?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
I surveyed a good deal of people I’ve kind of taught this to, and I ask about their experiences with other people. One thing, you know, many people go like, well, I never do this with my problems, but all the people in like my employees do it all the time. Or so I ask them when they were facing somebody coming to them with a problem, I ask, how often is that the right problem to solve? They basically said one out of five times it is the right problem. Two out of five times, it is somewhat in the direction of the right problem, but there’s something you need to kind of tweak or change about it to get it right. And two out of five times, it is completely the wrong question to focus on. If those numbers hold up, that’s a massive amount of problems we tend to get wrong.
Greg McKeown:
Well, my mind is going in two directions. On the one hand, I want for you to illustrate other examples, the range of tangible examples that this methodology can address. And on the other hand, I want to go to what are the tangible skills to be able to do this. What are those precise phrases? What are the skills beyond those phrases? And I still think I want more of the first because, for example, you have for your book Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, you know his statement he makes about your book, what’s your problem if you want the superpower of solving better problems, read this book. And that just reminds me that the problem of solving the wrong problem is a massive problem. It’s not just for the slight irritations in our lives. It’s like we could spend masses of resources.
I’ve worked with organizations that have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars working on something that ended up not even being the issue. Or creating a product that didn’t actually meet a real need or a marriage where somebody has been married for 10 years, or 15 years and they’ve put in tons of effort like you couldn’t knock people’s effort. But at the end, they’re on the edge now of getting a divorce because they are not meeting each other’s needs in that relationship. And I just see the problem everywhere, and it’s like, I don’t want us to take that for granted in this conversation.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It’s striking to me. I mentioned I like to start with personal problems cause those are kind of easy to access. It’s striking to me how this applies to some of the biggest problems we are dealing with as well. And I think, for example, with Eric Smith, he says, you may know, involved in some of the work around national security and so on, one of the big problems at, if you’re looking at the Department of Defense that they work with a lot of companies like, like non-governmental organizations and so on. And what they often do in their process is, of course, to put out a request for proposal or, like they say, Hey, we need this thing. And then the different companies come back and say, Hey, here’s what we can do. One of the problems in that process is that sometimes whoever’s creating that request over-specified the problem, so they go in and say, here’s exactly what we need.
They’re describing a solution. In reality, often, you can find much better approaches that doesn’t involve that specific solution. Once it’s in the proposal, because of the rules of procurement and the way we run these things, you actually have to find that, like you, you can inadvertently lock an entire industry into one specific solution. That’s not the best one because you crafted the proposal that way or the request for the proposal.
So this is a big issue. This affects us massively. And a super simple way of thinking about this is if let’s say, there’s a region in which, hey, we need more fresh water supplies here. Do you go in and say, Hey, we need the most cost-effective way to drill wells in this area. That’s specifying a solution versus just stating what you want, which is we need to supply fresh water to this area. Like that other one opens the door for creative solutions. That doesn’t necessarily involve digging a will, but if you lock yourself into describing we want wells, you have a problem.
Greg McKeown:
What was one thing that stood out to you in today’s episode? Was it the slow elevator problem or something else? What is one thing that you can do immediately to put this into action? And who’s one person that you can share this episode with so that you can help them and they can help you to live a life that really matters?
Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
