There are phrases, quotes, whose meaning is immediately obvious and resonates like the obvious. Others tickle your intellect without at first sight meaning anything particularly interesting or brilliant, and you want to find a meaning for them, ideally brilliant, even though their author certainly had no ambitions in this respect.
This is what happened to me when I heard “When you can’t solve a problem, change the problem”. I can assure you that the author had no real intellectual ambitions, but it’s a bit as if I’d been faced with a marketing concept that “clicked” and said to myself “I’ve got to come up with a product to go with it”. (I’ll tell you where I heard it later, and then you’ll understand why I have little doubt about the ambition of that phrase).
So what does that mean?
Reformulate the problem
The problem may simply be ill-defined , in which case you need to try and reformulate it.
Just as when you have an equation developed in front of you, factoring it often helps you to understand things and deal with them more effectively.
This also corresponds to the search for root causes. Often, we get bent out of shape trying to solve the consequences of a problem but not its root causes, so we either solve nothing or the problem reappears indefinitely at regular intervals.
For example, instead of saying “our sales are falling”, ask the question: “how can we better meet our customers’ needs?”
A change of perspective
Sometimes a problem seems insoluble because we always approach it from the same angle or with the same tools.
“When you only have one hammer, you want every problem to look like a nail”.
It’s a good idea to ask for an outsider’s view of things, because sometimes a candid eye can see things that we’ve lost sight of by dint of having them in front of us.
You can also use design thinking or the 5 Whys method to dig a little deeper.
Delegate or outsource
If a problem seems unsolvable for a team or an individual, “changing the problem” can also mean delegating or outsourcing its resolution. If the outside eye doesn’t help to understand it better, perhaps outside hands can solve it.
This means identifying experts or external partners capable of bringing a fresh perspective and specific skills.
Change your goals
Perhaps your objectives are no longer adapted to your environment or reality. One of the characteristics of a “good” objective is that it should be achievable . Sometimes, however, it is badly set, or a radical change of context has made it unattainable. The worst thing in this hypothesis is that, when faced with an unattainable goal, people give up and don’t even try to do their best.
An in-depth analysis of the context, or even a strategic analysis (SWOT, PESTEL), can help adjust organizational objectives.
Bottom line
Very often, when we get stuck in the face of a problem, we either get the wrong problem or take it the wrong way.
Changing the problem doesn’t (always) mean giving up and moving on to something else, but simply changing your approach or perspective.
PS: the quotation comes from Les Guignols (the french equivalent of Spitting Image in the UK and the US) and was put into Jacques Chirac’s mouth at the time of the failed dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997, and could be interpreted as “failing to master things, let’s pretend we’ve organized them”. I leave it to you to deduce the managerial significance that its authors must have had in mind.
Not very interesting, except for the fact that it forced me to think a little in front of a blank page.
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