Weird question (for a website about work, anyway): How does one find love?
When it comes to dynamic, emergent, always-changing situations, in other words: complexity, our notion of problem solving has to evolve—heck, even calling it problem solving is a bit of misnomer (one: it’s often managing problems like your uncle manages his cholesterol, two: solving one problem more often than not leads to new problems emerging).
When we get a new project, or see a new patient, or a new problem is identified, our first interaction with the project/patient/problem is recognizable as just a bundle of “stuff” to figure out: disconnected facts, assumptions, statistics waiting for us to make sense of it in order to proceed. We might have existing tools to help us: an intake process, a clinical protocol, a data model—all of which provide information, but none of which changes the fact that we’ve never seen this problem before.
So solving problems that haven’t been solved before at work, an activity we’re doing more and more of, is a lot like finding love: There’s no guide, though there is plenty of advice—some of which helps and much of which is useless.
Finding love requires exploration and discovery. That’s what we call dating. Exploration and discovery are also happening between dates in the conversations with friends, family, and with yourself about what has transpired on those dates. We learn what we like and need from being in a relationship and, more often than not, what we don’t.
The cycle between a breakup and Someone New continues with learning and refining of what Mr., Mrs., or Mx., Right could look like, and not just physical appearance but also that optimal mix of human intangibles that leads to long-term connection.
Then it happens. It’s found. Love emerges from the connection of two people in the context of their relationship. Their love isn’t right for anyone else, just for the two of them. It’s one answer for one case. And it’s been informed and made possible through the accumulation of all those previous relationship efforts that didn’t work out.
While new problems at work are nearly never as personally important as finding love, how we approach them is quite similar.
Solving new problems requires a process of exploration. A process that recognizes context and supports discovery. One that exists equally for understanding as it does for problem solving. A process that allows the solution to emerge or be discovered.
It’s called Figure It Out. And I’m not even being cheeky.
When a problem hasn’t been solved before, when no one has the answer, when knowledge and experience and relationships must be relied on, when learning is occurring while working is happening, too—it’s Figure It Out at work.
Figure It Out is as applicable to determining strategy as it is to leading a project as it is to performing a task for the first time.
Figure It Out is a problem-solving/making-progress attitude that embraces exploration, discovery, and learning through action in complex, uncertain, and novel situations. It recognizes that a solution in these situations cannot be predetermined but rather emerges through experimentation, adaptation, or iteration. Figure It Out is how we solve new problems.
There are many approaches that I classify as Figure It Out. Some of them:
- Agile methods
- Design processes
- Plan-Do-Check-Act
- Scientific method
- Safe-to-try experiments
- Trial and error
- Probe, Sense, and Respond
- Rolling up your sleeves and doing the work
- Prototypes
- Asking questions
- Living life
Living life? Yes, living life. Life itself is an endless series of new problems and challenges that we navigate using Figure It Out. From the moment we're born, we're exploring, experimenting, and learning as we encounter novel situations and adapt to our always-changing environment.
So you’ve been using Figure It Out since the start. Figure It Out was the attitude we used to learn how to ride a bike, read a book, and kick a ball; it’s the approach we use to cook a meal, find a job, and try a new coffee shop. It’s even Figure It Out at work for life’s more important challenges like friendship, parenting, and, as we’ve discussed, love.
Figure It Out is an attitude we’re becoming more and more comfortable with deploying at work because more surprise is leading to more and more new problems.
Call them flips, small steps, probes, prototypes, quests, experiments, sprints, cycles, actions, iterations, just figuring it out, or something else, solving problems using Figure It Out occurs through action and relies on knowledge, experience, and learning. Then recognizing the effects of that action. Then deciding what to do next. Over and over. Again and again.
Until we find the solution.
Contrast Figure It Out with industrialized management’s preferred approach: best practices! Knowing how we’re going to solve a problem, at exactly the moment the problem occurs, and knowing exactly the expected outcome is a luxury we no longer have for most of the problems we’re working on. Hitting that trifecta requires extreme luck.
Figure It Out is the alternative to conjuring luck.
[Audience: Are you saying applying best practices is a bygone approach for our world?
Drew: Yes, I am. This is a sensible answer and not an extreme take, and a truth we already know in practice: take (almost) any example of a best practice you’ve applied to a problem at work and ask—did you make any adjustments to the best practice when making it work for your organization?
More than anything, and especially more important than any particular method, is the idea that acting on a new problem is required to both understand the problem and solve the problem, while also accepting that any single action may not result in the hoped-for solution.
Just as in dating, where each experience (and most especially when it’s disappointing) provides insight into what it is we’re looking for in a partner, every informed and reasoned action on a new problem contributes to a deeper understanding of the problem, even if it doesn’t lead to a solution.
And in those situations, whether in finding love or at work: Take what you learn and try again. The right solution, like the right partner, is out there waiting to be discovered.
We just have to figure it out.
