A wise friend and colleague named Josh McManus is fond of advising people to “fall in love with your problem.”
I must have heard him say this dozens of times. And often I wondered, what does that even mean? Aren’t we better off falling in love with solutions? Yet, as we do with people who have proven themselves wise and helpful in the past, I trusted there must be something to this piece of advice.
Sure enough, over time I have discovered that falling in love with our problems works for everyone — whether your business is in the for-profit or the nonprofit world, whether you are selling coffee or trying to improve public education or looking to improve your staff’s productivity.
We live in a world that is decidedly solutions-oriented. The workplace tends to value the person who jumps the fastest and most assertively to answers, interventions, fixes. We lionize the colleagues who are decisive and directive. We read their leap toward action as strength, a sense of urgency, a marker of good instincts.
And yet I have seen again and again that springing into action often means skipping the critical steps of asking questions and seeking a deep understanding of the problem. A proposed solution is an attempt to attack the specific elements of a problem. It is thus built on one’s understanding of the nature of the problem.
When my friend suggests that we fall in love with our problems, he is urging us to slow down, be curious, examine the issue from every angle, be open to surprises and set aside assumptions. He urges us to “observe the problem in the wild,” to listen to primary sources who are living the problem and let them inform our understanding of it. And, just as it happens in all the greatest love stories, we should strive to go through all of these steps over and over again, constantly learning more, eagerly revisiting our problem and proposed solutions. We should resist the tendency to conclude that we “know better” and instead continually rediscover the problem.
While this discovery work sounds counterintuitive and perhaps impractical with a burning problem in front of us, I have seen that those who take the time to fall in love with their problems move through the solution development part of the job much more quickly and with dramatically better outcomes. By contrast, those who fall in love with their solutions tend to overinvest in one answer and often cannot adjust their tactics to meet changing circumstances. Slavish devotion to a solution or strategy can cost us the flexibility and agility required to address complex problems with a lot of moving parts.
At the end of the day, by falling in love with the problems we face, we come to discover deeper, more meaningful solutions. And that is an outcome anyone can love.
Christine Amer Mayer is president of the GAR Foundation
