8 Things Really Great Problem Solvers Do

We are all faced with challenges. Some people navigate difficulty better than others. Here's how they do it.

BY KEVIN DAUM, INC. 500 ENTREPRENEUR AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR@KEVINJDAUM

Life is full of problems and challenges. Most people become proficient at working through small issues or at least skirting them. But those who are exceptionally good at solving problems have a distinct advantage on the path to success. They often become leaders among their peers. The bigger the problems they can solve, the more they achieve and the more respect they earn.

It's true some people are natural problem solvers, but most anyone can sharpen their problem-solving skills with a little effort. Here are eight skills practiced problem solvers use regularly.

1. Remain objective.

Often problems occur because people are unaware of what's actually happening with the process. They get focused on a particular method or goal and then they unintentionally ignore what may be obvious warning signs. Great problem solvers approach each new problem as though it were brand new. That way they can apply a specific solution to the problem instead of a fix that may go only partway.

Article continues after video.

8 Things Really Great Problem Solvers Do

We are all faced with challenges. Some people navigate difficulty better than others. Here's how they do it.

BY KEVIN DAUM, INC. 500 ENTREPRENEUR AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR@KEVINJDAUM

and the more respect they earn.

It's true some people are natural problem solvers, but most anyone can sharpen their problem-solving skills with a little effort.

8. Cast ego aside.

Often great solutions to problems are ignored because a leader wants the solution to be his or her idea. Great problem solvers get joy from solving the problem. They are happy to give the credit to anyone who resolves an issue and moves everyone forward. They have no concern about getting the credit because in business there is no shortage of new problems to solve.

Here are eight skills practiced problem solvers use regularly.

1. Remain objective.

Article continues after video.

7 ‘Tips’ to Become a Better Creative Problem-Solver

10/06/2015 07:38 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017

We all have the potential to be great creative problem solvers, but what most people do not realize is that our ability to solve problems creatively, whether applied to product development, business models, brand strategy, positioning platforms or creative executions, is significantly limited by a series of natural mental biases.

The way we think and the mental patterns we use to select, process and analyze information can act as barriers and hold back our creative potential.

Some of the most common biases are:

1. The confirmation bias: The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. In addition, individuals may discredit information they find that does not support their existing views.

2. The self-serving bias: The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

3. The belief bias: When one’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.

4. Framing: Using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.

We’re all subject to these biases whether we want it or not and any of them can limit our ability to generate and entertain novel thoughts and ideas. So what can we do to overcome these biases and boost our creative problem-solving skills?

1. The first step is self-awareness. Simply being aware of and acknowledging the fact that our creative problem skills are limited by the way we think and process information is the first step to breaking some of those patterns. Doing so will then encourage you to find tools, techniques and tricks to overcome those biases and increase your problem solving skills, like the techniques we list below. It works for Alcoholics Anonymous and it works for creativity!

2. Detach yourself from the problem. The way we look at a problem is limited by the way we frame it, which in turn is influenced by our past experience, our knowledge, our beliefs and our mental processes. Framing matters, so it is not a surprise to us that ten out of the twenty-six Positioning-Roulette approaches to brand positioning and storytelling focus on the frame of reference. Re-framing the problem or looking for solutions from various perspective (or adjacent fields) is a great way to overcome some of the mental biases that plague us. Or as Einstein said “The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution”. In our experience the most effective “creativity techniques” use a two-step approach. The first step usually consists in moving away from the problem to facilitate the generation of new ideas, the second step then consists in translating those ideas back into tangible solutions that could solve the original problem.

3. Use a framework or a method to guide your thinking. Most people still don’t seem to realize that there is a method to creativity. Creativity doesn’t just happen. One significant benefit of a more methodical approach is that it helps drive and guide the idea finding process and thus helps overcome the biases and limitations mentioned above. This is where tools like Positioning-Roulette, a free web based idea generation app, come into play. They help guide your thinking and by doing so act as a distraction from many of your limiting mental biases. And while for obvious reasons we prefer our own Positioning-Roulette framework, the truth is that any framework (for example, the Maslow hierarchy of needs is another effective framework) will lead to better results than not using any.

4. Show empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes without judging. This “someone else” can be a consumer you are trying to convert or another team member during an ideation session. This is a very difficult thing to do but is also a very powerful way to unleash new solutions to a problem. Empathy doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree with the other person’s point of view, it just means that you can see things from their point of view for long enough to consider new solutions that may emerge from this perspective. A simple way to start is to practice empathy with your significant other. You’ll find this improves not only your ability to be creative but also your relationship!

5. Promote diversity of point of views. Avoid groupthink. We believe better solutions are generated when developed by a diverse group of people. If you are an intuitive thinker add a more rationally minded person to your ideation session, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. If you’re a team of business people add a creative minded person or artist to your ideation team. The trick here however is not just to add people that have a different working style than you, but also to listen to them and allow their perspective to influence the thinking and ideation process (see point 4). As someone told us once, the best leaders are “integrators”, they are able to listen to various points of view and incorporate those into the final solution. The tremendous side benefit: everyone involved in the process feels heard and takes ownership in the solution.

6. Focus on the right input and stimuli. Using thought starters and inputs from other fields or categories also helps short-circuit your own thinking patterns and boost your creative problem skills (see point three). However, not all thought-starters are created equal. Some will be more relevant to the type of problem you’re trying to solve than others. Looking at the world of ants and how they are organized and trying to draw conclusions on how to position a brand of yogurt might sound like a fun exercise (and it is) but it’s, in our experience, a complete waste of time.

7. Expand your own marketing knowledge and experience. The more diverse marketing problems you have worked on, the more cases in different categories you’ve been exposed to, the more flexible and agile your thought processes will become. You’ll be able to pull from a broader pool of know-how and experiences and synthesize more meaningful connections, ultimately leading to new types of solutions. This is where case studies come in handy as a short cut to “experience”. Knowing how a beer brand solved a trial generation problem in Australia might trigger an innovative solution on how to generate trial for a brand of mouthwash in the US. This is also where listening to the experience of someone who isn’t familiar with your category might be very beneficial as well.

Creative problem solving is at the core of what we do. Over time, we’ve learned how to sharpen those skills and we hope that these techniques will help you too. What tricks do you use to boost your creative problem skills? Let us know in the comment section below.

Ulli Appelbaum is the creator of the “Positioning Roulette Flash Cards”, a set of cards capturing the 26 universal approaches to brand story telling based on the analysis of over 1200 case studies and designed to guide and stimulate your thinking when developing brand positioning platforms, creating brand stories and generating new product ideas.

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5 Steps To Becoming An Expert Problem Solver

Scott Halford, Entrepreneur

Nov 13, 2010, 5:30 AM

Your ability to make money is directly proportionate to how well you solve problems for your customers.

Problem solving is one of the most highly valued characteristics you can have as an entrepreneur. Hone this skill and you reap the benefits of saving time, making money and finding the next big idea for your business.

First, there are three myths we need to take care of. Myth No. 1: Problem solving and critical thinking are the same.

Fact: Problem solving is a sub-set of its larger cousin, critical thinking.

Problem solving deals with the immediate issue, and critical thinking is required for long-term strategic issues.

Myth No. 2: Good problem solvers intuitively shoot from the hip.

makelessnoise via Flickr

Fact: Intuition is an important part of the process, but research shows that the more systematic problem solver has a better return with accurate and successful solutions.

Myth No. 3: If you come up with a good solution, you’re a good problem solver

Fact: There are five steps to good problem solving, and you need to follow through on each to be deemed a pro at it.

Now, on to the five steps. Step 1: Identify

The White House via Flickr

Identifying the correct problem to work on is often where people trip up. It’s not as simple as you might think -- breeze over this step at your own peril. Think about a business that has revenue issues. There could be a few hundred reasons for that issue.

Asking the right questions and being a smart detective help you zero in on the problem with precision. The good problem solver asks a lot of questions about what the problem really is, instead of guessing and making snap decisions about it

Step 2: Ideate

Now that you have a short list of what the problem might be, brainstorm all the possible solutions. The best brainstorming happens when you have the opportunity to bounce ideas off others. Get the right people in the room and think of as many solutions as you can. This is not the time to evaluate.

The physiological brain process of generating ideas is not the same as evaluating them, and they cannot be switched on at the same time. They are both critical processes, but don’t turn off the ideation by turning on the evaluation.

Step 3: Evaluate

Flickr via Michael Hashizume

This is when you evaluate the ideas you came up with during the ideation phase. Evaluate ideas first based on their impact on a goal, and secondly, on the complexity of the idea. Complexity is not about difficulty. Instead, it is determined by only two things: time and money.

Can the idea bring about successful results in the time constraints you have, and does it fit any known budget constraints you have? Ask yourself how large an impact the idea has. If you’re trying to cut $10,000 out of a budget and you come up with an idea that saves $100, the impact is relatively low. One with $1,000 becomes a higher-impact solution. You are looking for high–impact, low-complexity ideas.

Step 4: Execute

This is another step average problem solvers often skip. It does no good to come up with a great idea and then bungle execution on it. We’ve all been in those meetings where ideas are brainstormed and funneled into a few doable deeds, only to walk out of the meeting and never know when or how the ideas will be executed. Fruitless.

Come up with a plan to get your idea done. You don’t have to be the executor of the full idea, but as a problem solver, you have some responsibility for implementing the solution.

Step 5: Re-examine

The final step is to check in with the solution’s progress and determine if it is still the right one. There will be times when the problem still exists because the solution wasn’t right. Don’t throw in the towel.

Go back to step two and get going on the next solution to try.

Problem solving is no problem

Problem solving is a skill that pays handsomely. Practice the steps so that you become efficient at them. Require it of others you work with. Then execute.

Get them in the habit of always bringing at least one solution idea for every problem you identify. No problem.

Problem solving is not the only skill you should master...

10 Traits Every Amazing Boss Possesses >>

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How to Solve Problems Like an Expert

It's not so much what you know as how easily you can retrieve what you know.

You have a problem when your current situation differs from your desired goal. You want to be rich, but your checking account balance is circling the drain. You want to date that gorgeous person, but you get tongue-tied whenever you even think about it. You are running late for work, and your car won’t start. In each case, what you want and what you have are decidedly different.

Problem solving is nothing more and nothing less searching for means to reduce the differences between your goal state and your current state. Yes, that’s right: All problem solving, at bottom, is search. When there is a clear procedure that will take you from the one to the other, we call that a well-defined problem. Making scrambled eggs is a well-defined problem. For the first, you simply follow a recipe, and voila, you’ve got breakfast.

If there is no clear procedure, we call that an ill-defined problem. Unfortunately, most of life’s important problems are ill defined. How do you make enough money to save for retirement, how do you avoid war, or how do you get that girl or guy to go out with you? These are all ill-defined problems because they don’t have clear goal states (how much is “enough” for retirement?) or they don’t have clear solution paths (how do you attract the interest of someone you find attractive?).

In 1945, the brilliant mathematician, George Pólya (1887–1985) wrote the quintessential text for solving problems, aptly titled How to Solve It. Here is how he summarized the problem-solving process.

1. First, make sure you understand the problem. You do this by developing a representation of the essential aspects of the problem. You do that by searching your knowledge base for information that seems to you to be solution-relevant.

2. After understanding, then make a plan for solving the problem. This will also usually involve searching one’s knowledge base for solutions that are appropriate for the problem as represented.

3. Carry out the plan by executing your solutions.

4. Look back on your work and ask “how could it be better?”

That is how it should be done. But most people make one huge mistake that derails the entire process, making it far less likely that they will succeed. What is that mistake?

They skip the first step.

Regardless of the domain, inexperienced problem-solvers tend to jump right to the solution stage of problem solving, with typically disastrous consequences. They often use a trial-and-error strategy in which the first solution that comes to mind is put into play. Because they didn’t take the time to fully understand the problem, their solution attempts fail when foreseeable glitches arise.

In contrast, experts tend to spend more time developing a full understanding of the problem, comparing what they currently know about the problem with what they need to know in order to get a complete picture of the situation. Because they spend more time in the problem representation stage, they are more likely to derive successful solutions, and to spend less time overall in generating a successful solution.

Here are three tips for executing step one like an expert.

1. Organize knowledge correctly. Often, novices have all the knowledge they need to solve the problem at hand. They just can’t get to it because their knowledge is organized in ways that make it difficult to see the connection between the current problem and what they already know.

Experts organize their knowledge in problem schemas that include relevant information about a type of problem and the procedures for solving problems of that type. This means that when experts think about problems, relevant information is automatically activated in memory, along with relevant solution procedures. In contrast, when novices think about a problem, their knowledge is too general and too scattered throughout memory, making problem-solving a tedious trial-and-error search. For example, a novice salesperson will focus on the general goal of “make the sale”, and will apply sales techniques in willy-nilly or fixed fashion to reach that goal. An experienced salesperson will focus on the specific goal of understanding what the customer needs and wants, and in developing a trust relationship with the customer. As a result, the experienced salesperson spends less time “working” the customer or showing them things in which they have no interest.

2. Ask the right questions. If you’ve ever done a Google search, you know that the quality of the search results depends entirely on the quality of the keywords you use. Garbage in, garbage out. This in a nutshell, is the key to developing a strong understanding of a problem—asking the right questions.

Experts are more likely to ask the right questions because their domain-specific knowledge is organized more efficiently. Continuing with the previous example, an expert salesperson’s schema is organized around understanding customer wants and needs. As a result, he or she will spend more time asking specific questions about those needs and wants, and then tailoring subsequent choices to match the answers given. Sometimes the customer isn’t aware that there are product features that may be attractive to them. For example, they may focus on price yet be unaware that a higher priced item carries a better warranty. Because the salesperson has taken the time to impress upon the customer that their needs and wants matter, a relationship of trust is established that makes it easier for the salesperson to introduce these relevant features without putting the customer off. In contrast, novice salespeople will often deluge the customer with more product features than they can possibly remember and process, or will try hard-sell techniques that create an atmosphere of distrust.

3. Work forward from known to unknown. Because of the way expert knowledge is organized, experts solve problems by working forward from the information given (or information obtained) to arrive at a viable solution. Novices, on the other hand, tend to work backwards because they are focused more at arriving at a quick solution that at ensuring that they fully understand the problem. As a result, the typically have incomplete problem-solving schemas that are full of irrelevant information. This slows down the problem-solving process, and makes it less likely that a viable solution will be reached—or remembered!

For three more tips on how to be a better problem solver, see this article Dr. Art Markman.

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References: Pólya, George (1957). How to Solve It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Dr. Denise Cummins is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and the author of Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think (2012, Cambridge University Press).

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10 Characteristics of Good Problem Solvers

Good problem solvers are good thinkers. They have less drama and problems to begin with and don't get overly emotional when faced with a problem. They usually see problems as challenges and life experiences and try to stand above them, objectively.

By Michelle Roya Rad, Contributor

Professional psychologist, motivational writer

11/24/2013 11:27am EST | Updated January 24, 2014

This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Good problem solvers use a combination of intuition and logic to come up with their solutions. Intuition has more to do with the emotional and instinctive side of us and logic is more related to our cognition and thinking. Good problem solvers use both of these forces to get as much information as they can to come up with the best possible solution. In addition, they are reasonably open minded but logically skeptical.

Some of the general characteristics of good problem solvers are:

1. They don't need to be right all the time: They focus on finding the right solution rather than wanting to prove they are right at all costs.

2. They go beyond their own conditioning: They go beyond a fixated mind set and open up to new ways of thinking and can explore options.

3. They look for opportunity within the problem: They see problems as challenges and try to learn from them.

4. They know the difference between complex and simple thinking: They know when to do a systematic and complex thinking and when to go through short cuts and find an easy solution.

5. They have clear definition of what the problem is: They can specifically identity the problem.

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6. They use the power of words to connect with people: They are socially well developed and find ways to connect with people and try to find happy-middle solutions.

7. They don't create problems for others: They understand that to have their problem solved they can't create problems for others. Good problems solvers who create fair solutions make a conscious effort not to harm others for a self-interest intention. They know such acts will have long term consequences even if the problem is temporarily solved.

8. They do prevention more than intervention: Good problem solvers have a number of skills to prevent problems from happening in the first place. They usually face less drama, conflict, and stressful situations since they have clear boundaries, don't let their rights violated and do not violate other people's rights. They are more of a positive thinker so naturally they are surrounded with more positivity and have more energy to be productive.

9. They explore their options: They see more than one solution to a problem and find new and productive ways to deal with new problems as they arise. They also have a backup plan if the first solution does not work and can ask for support and advise when needed.

10. They have reasonable expectations: Good problem solvers have reasonable expectations as to what the solution would be. They understand that there are many elements effecting a situation and that idealistic ways of thinking and going about solving a problem will be counterproductive.

At the end, good problem solvers do not have too many irrational fears when dealing with problems. They can visualize the worst case scenario, work their way out of it and let go of the fear attached to it. Fear can make your logic and intuition shady and your decisions unproductive.

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