Thinkers50 Curated LinkedIn Live with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg | What’s Your Problem?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem-solving. His books include “Innovation as Usual” which he co-authored with Patty Miller and most recently “What’s Your Problem?”. Thomas has shared and refined his reframing method with some of the leading organizations in the world, including Microsoft, Wall Street Journal, and the United Nations.

Transcript:

Des Dearlove:
Hello, welcome to Thinkers50 Radar 2021 series, brought you with LinkedIn Live. I’m Des Dearlove.

Stuart Crainer:
And I’m Stuart Crainer. And we are the founders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking and sharing the leading management ideas of our age, ideas that can make a real difference in the world.

Des Dearlove:
Our belief in the power of ideas has been the foundation of our work since we launched the first ever global ranking of management thinkers in 2001. And we’ve published a new Thinkers50 ranking every two years since. It remains the premier ranking of its kind.

Stuart Crainer:
So we are supernaturally excited that 2021, a year in which fresh thinking and human ingenuity are more important than ever, is also a Thinkers50 year. Nominations are now open for both the ranking of management thinkers and the distinguished achievement awards, which the FT accurately and enterprisingly calls the Oscars of management thinking.

Des Dearlove:
In the summer, we’ll have the awards shortlist to savor. And the year’s finale, on the 15th and 16th of November, will bring all the excitement of a new ranking and the naming of our Thinkers50 2021 award recipients. But we start the year with the Thinkers50 Radar class, the 30 up and coming business thinkers to watch in the coming months.

Stuart Crainer:
In this series of 30 minute webinars, we want to showcase some of those ideas to bring you the most exciting new voices of management thinking.

Des Dearlove:
Our guest today is Danish born author and thought leader Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. Thomas is a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem solving. His books include Innovation As Usual, which he co-authored with Patty Miller, and most recently, What’s Your Problem? To solve the toughest problems, change the problems you solve.

Stuart Crainer:
Thomas has shared and refined his reframing method with some of the leading organizations in the world, including Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal and the United Nations.

Des Dearlove:
And he holds an MA in media science from the University of Copenhagen and an MBA from IESE Business School. And prior to his business career, Thomas served for four years as an officer with the Danish Royal guards.

Stuart Crainer:
We want to use the chat function to make the session as interactive as possible. So please share where you are joining us from today, and please post your questions as we go along. Thomas, welcome. The virtual stage is yours.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Fantastic. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, Des. And hello, everybody. It is a pleasure. I’m going to start with sharing a story from my new book. And it is a story of basically, as you can read here, a man who hated his boss. And it comes originally from Robert Sternberg, who’s a big name in connectivity. And this is supposedly a true story. The essence is that there was a leader at one point working in the automobile industry. And he loved his job utterly, but he hated his boss. They just couldn’t work together. And so, of course, he decided, well, I have a problem. I need to get out of this. And then he went in and figured out, how do I do that best? Well, of course I go in and find a head hunter.

And so in essence he went to the headhunter. He explained the situation. And the headhunter said, “Great. At the moment in our industry here, there’s a high demand for experienced executives such as yourself. It will not be a problem to find a new job for you. That same evening though, he went back to his wife and they had a discussion, not on how to use the head hunter, but trying to think differently about the problem itself. And that led them to a very different approach. The next morning, the head hunter went, sorry. The leader went back to the head hunter again. And he said to the head hunter, “You know what? This is the CV of my boss. Can you find a new job for my boss?” Basically went in and solved a different problem compared to the original one. And as Robert Sternberg has it, what happened was that the boss, having no clue about what was going on, he accepted this job and the leader was promoted into his old boss’ role.

Why do I start sharing that story? It’s not just because it’s entertaining, it’s because it also highlights a central idea that we, again and again, have overlooked when it comes to problem solving. We tend to think that there’s two parts, like solving the problem. And before that, we have to analyze it. But there is a third missing skill, which is the notion of framing the problem correctly. This notion, if you will, in academia we talk about problem finding. In practice, you can think of it as the art of solving the right problems. And that’s really what my work has [inaudible]. How do we get better at that?

Why do we need to get better at it? Well, that’s a necessity, it turns out, because we’re pretty horrible at it as it stands. Now, when I went out, surveyed people on this, I went out and surveyed, first and foremost, more than a hundred CEOs and C-suite executives. 85% of them came back to me and said, solving the wrong problems, that’s very prevalent in our organizations, and we tend to waste a lot of time and money on it. I also went out and surveyed more than 200 experts, asking them, when a client comes to you with a problem asking for your help, how often are they solving the wrong or the right problem?

And those more than 200 people told me, effectively, that for every 10 problems they see, for three of them, the client is looking at the completely wrong problem. This is literally, they ended up solving a very, very different problem compared to the one that the client initially put on the table. For five of them, there was at least some rethinking needed compared to the original problem. It was in the right direction, but it still needed to be rethought or reframed somehow. And only two of the 10 ended up being, yes, that is in fact, the right problem, the client who came to us has correctly identified their own problem and they’re now asking us to help solve it.

This is, of course, a little bit biased because these are problems we’re looking at that are big enough that you take them to a consultant or an expert of some kind. But still, the point is we have known about the importance of reframing since the time of Einstein. The first empirical studies came in the ’60s already. And yet today we are horrible at it. It is insane to me how often really experienced executives just don’t solve the right problem because they haven’t [inaudible] this one easy skill.

What am I going to share with you today? I’m going to share with you three immediate steps that you can apply to a problem you’re facing here and now. And the focus of these steps is really this notion of, instead of doing how you normally do, like okay, we have a problem, let’s get into the solution phase immediately. This is about taking a different route. And it doesn’t necessarily take more than maybe 5 to 10 minutes. I’ll get back to that.

Step number one, let’s say you have a problem you’re facing right here and now. The first thing you want to do is to go in and reframe the problem. What do I mean with that? What we tend to do when it comes to problem solving. Well, I see two mistakes. And the second one is more interesting than the first. The first one is the most prevalent. Namely, you have a problem, well, people jump straight into the solution phase. They go in and they say, how do we solve this problem? And then they spend all of their time thinking about the best way to either use a head hunter or some other way of finding a job.

The second mistake that people make, those are people who are a little bit better at problem solving. They know they have to analyze the problem first before they just swing into action, but still they get trapped in analysis. They effectively take the problem for granted, and then they delve into that and figure out, well, what is the best way for me to find a new job or similar? What we are talking about here is different because, as you’ll notice, if you start with an analysis, you are still trapped in the original framing of the problem. What this is about, reframing the problem, is to deliberately not delve into the detail of the first problem statement, but instead looking at it and trying to see if there’s a different way of thinking about the problem. This is the notion that I call reframing the problem, which happens here in this transition. Is there a different way of thinking about the problem itself? That’s the first step. So pay to attention to the frame, how is this problem framed? Might it be framed differently?

The second list. You can actually see that in the story as well, that is to involve other people. Essentially, I think especially smart people have a tendency to think that they can just handle all of their problems themselves. What makes a huge difference, I found in my work, and there’s some research on this too, of course, is that if you take others into the conversation, that’s a much, much faster way of discovering your own blind spots. The essence is here, when you think about your problems, well, you can see it as, okay, here’s the problem. And I’m here next to it. In theory, you are the person who best understands this problem. You are closest to it. But in practice, we can be too close to our own problems to see them clearly. We all have blind spots when it comes to problems. We all have our own favorite hammer, like Abraham Kaplan and Abraham Maslow’s famous law of the hammer that I’m sure you run into.

It can really, really help to get somebody in who is a little bit further away from the problem to help you in this process. One important thing here is, when you involve somebody else in the conversation, first focus on the problem. Don’t ask them for a solution. Ask them deliberately to think about the problem with you. Ask, do you think I’m solving the right problem? And then, importantly, do not expect them to have answers for you. By virtue of being further away from the problem, these people typically cannot just, oh, here’s what you need to do. Here’s the answer. What they do instead, and what they are better used as, is to ask questions that makes you rethink the nature of your problem. So deliberately, when you sit down with somebody else, say, “Hey, can I spend 10 minutes just discussing this problem with you? And don’t try to solve it. I’d like you to try to challenge my thinking. Try to help me explore if there’s something I’m overlooking or should think differently about when it comes to this problem.”

Third and final step. Once you’ve had that discussion, you need to figure out a basic thing, namely, how to move forward. Why do I say that? When I first developed my framework, I knew that most executives are pretty action prone. And so, I didn’t actually have this step. I was kind of like, well, people know that. Except, I realized that, especially when I worked with people who had PhDs, who were experts in their field or whatever, there was a tendency to get trapped in paralysis by analysis. And so, what we’re talking about here is not necessarily a long two week exercise where you go off to the mountains and think deep thoughts of about your problem. Because the reality is, we don’t have that kind of time for 98% of the problems we are dealing with in our day to day lives.

This is a method you use in maybe 5, 10 minute increments where you very rapidly check, is there something here I need to think differently about? You can almost think of this as, do you know one of these heartbeat monitors? You start out, there’s there. And then luckily, hopefully, your heart keeps beating. That is a little bit similar to the reframing process. When you start in a problem solving journey, you do a quick check to figure out, Hey, is this actually framed correctly? And then you swing back into action. And then, say, next week after you’ve talked to some people, maybe you created a small prototype of something, whatever. Then you go back again and ask, given what we did this week, is there anything new we need to consider as to the nature of the problem?

So this act of reframing, it is not a long, deep dive step one in most problem solving processes. It is a mindset that goes on continuously as you work at the same time on solving the problem itself. That’s the three pieces of advice I’ll share. We’ll jump over here back to the discussion. And please share some inputs or thoughts or reactions, whatever you have in the chat.
To summarize here, we are not solving the right problems. We are pretty terrible at it. And there are simple ways to get better at it. In this case, try this simple three step process. Focus on the frame, reframe the problem, discuss it with some other people, and then figure out how do we move forward? With that, that is a quick 10 minute introduction to the topic I wrote about in my book, and the method. Stu and Des, let’s get over to you. Let’s hear what you and the audience has to say.

Des Dearlove:
Fantastic stuff, Thomas. I’m very struck by the second step. Who are these others that we want to discuss it with? I mean, let’s keep this really practical. I know your work is very practical, but who are we talking about? What sort of people can really add value at this stage?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
So three quick rules of thumb for this. And the first one is just the most pragmatic. It’s whoever you have time to involve. If you only have five minutes, it’s a burning problem, whatever. Well, then you pull in your spouse or your colleagues sitting right next to you or whatever. Second rule of thumb, if it’s an important problem. And you do have a little bit more time, the general rule thumb is, the more important the problem, the more effort you should invest in pulling people in who are different than you. We know from a lot of research that diversity works. This is true here, too. If you’re pulling your colleague sitting next to you every day, they probably see the world kind of like you do. Whereas if you pull somebody else in, who is from a different industry, has a different background, a different ethnicity, whatever, you tend to get more useful perspectives in that process.

Rule number three. And this is an interesting one that I observed in practice. When you think about, especially sensitive problems, we all have problems that are kind of, hey, happy to discuss. And then we have problems that are kind of iffy. With the sensitive problems in particular, I think it is so interesting to see. I’m going to move this for a second. What happens is effectively this, because it’s sensitive, then we go in, well, I start with somebody I can trust. And then once I know I can trust them, then I can go in and share it. Problem with that. The people you trust, they tend to be like you. It’s a well established finding in research that we tend to like people who are similar to ourselves. Which means that if you use this rule of thumb, just only discuss sensitive problems with people you trust, you actually inadvertently lock yourself in to getting less diverse perspectives on your problem. And there’s a whole group of people you’re keeping outside of your turtle to solve the problem.

What’s noticeable here, when I work with companies, you can see this working the other way, too. If you go out with people you don’t know that well, and you take a chance and share a sensitive problem with them, that can generate trust very, very rapidly. So one specific recommendation is really, whenever you can, try to pick people where it feels a little bit more risky to open the door and bring them into the conversation. Don’t just go with the people you trust already. The one caveat is, of course, if you under NDAs and it’s something secret, then there are different rules. But that’s, I think, three good ways of thinking about it. The practical angle, the diversity angle, and this issue with trust.

Stuart Crainer:
Thank you everybody for joining us. Please send in your questions as they occur to you. I mean, one thing that occurs to me, Thomas, how does your military experience inform this thinking? I can’t imagine in a military situation you saying, “Sorry guys, let’s just reframe the problem.”

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
So that’s actually really interesting because it turns out the army does this. I started as [inaudible]. I worked my way up. And I became eventually a first Lieutenant. And as part of that, you’re trained in attack, like okay, you are out, you’re in the field. Somebody is shooting at you, what do you do? Interestingly enough, if you’re leading that, the military has a very simple methodology that, in effect, achieves this. They go in and say, imagine two different ways this battle could play out. They could come up along that fence, or they could try to sneak over along this hill. And then you try to merge them and defend against both.

So it is a very, very low tech way of considering at least two different perspectives on your problem. And this happens very, very fast. So the military actually does have elements of this, even in their combat practice, to some extent. The one thing I’d say is, the army thing sounds so impressive when you’re like, oh, you were in the military. This was the Danish military. Let’s be clear. Mostly, what we did was to run around and practice saying we surrender in different languages.

Stuart Crainer:
At least you knew what the problem was.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Exactly. Does anybody speak…

Stuart Crainer:
So how do you know if something is framed correctly?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Well, two different versions. One is the basic one that you, of course, need to go out into the real world and test it. So you have a new idea about what the problem might be. Well, you need to talk to your customer or whoever is involved, to check it. Or in the startup world, you go out and build a minimal viable product or whatnot.

Having said that, I have very often seen people have a strong sense of whether they do in the actual discussion after five to 10 minutes. Why is that? That’s because we already have exposure to the problem in the past. Sometimes there’s been something floating around in the back of people’s minds. And once you hear a story or a new perspective on the problem, then you go, oh, that would explain the reaction we’ve been seeing from our employees or whatever it is. So you may have to test it. But actually, often, you have a strong intuition about it. Once that new thing is put on the table, you suddenly have a feeling of surprise, and like, oh, this matches the pattern we see.

Des Dearlove:
Very interesting when you were talking about the military experience and how that played out, because it resonated for me with integrative thinking, a lot similar to Roger Martin’s work. And the idea that, I think it was Scott Fitzgerald who said, the sign of being able to hold to conflicting ideas at the same time is the sign of a first rate mind. I think we do suffer from binary thinking. We do the either/or. And sometimes the and is more important. Does that resonate for you?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Absolutely. Roger Martin is one of my favorite thinkers in this field. And his point, it almost maps to the military thing. You are facing a choice, we can do A or we can do B. What his research has shown is that people who are good at finding new ways of doing business, of rethinking their business model and whatnot, they have a greater tolerance for the messiness of trying to integrate those thoughts. So instead of saying, okay, these are our two options. Well, you go in and try to see, is there some way of creating a third option or integrating parts and aspects of both of this.

This, incidentally, is also supported by decision science. So Paul Knott from Ohio State University, who has done a ton of research on how executives make decisions in practice, he found that you get a bad hit rate, a bad success rate, when you only consider two choices like, should we invest in A or B? You’re almost always better off by inventing at least one [inaudible] option. So should we invest in A, B, C, or maybe just save the money for now and wait until better opportunities come up? Just by virtue of considering multiple options, more than two options, you increase your hit rate pretty dramatically. And even if you end up choosing the one you originally had thought about, there’s something about just having multiple options to consider that solidifies your decision somehow.

Stuart Crainer:
One question we always ask people these days is, has the pandemic changed your ideas? Which seems a ridiculous question to ask you, Thomas. But actually, if people are working virtually, the issues you are raising actually become more complicated, I think more demanding for people.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Plus and minus. I think there are situations in which the problems are physically anchored. To an extent, you need to go to the spot where this is occurring and spend time there. Evidently, the pandemic has affected that. Having said that, what this magnificent technology is showing us, you can pull in people from very different domains and very quickly get their input. In the old days, people would just not be as accustomed to setting up a quick Zoom thing and getting input.

One of the really powerful methods I have been teaching my clients, it’s called question storming. It goes back to the eighties, at least. But it’s, in essence, this practice of having a group of people and not doing Q&A, but just gathering their questions very rapidly. And this is particularly powerful for virtual, because you can use the chat. So if one of you had a problem, we could say, “Hey, describe the problem in two minutes. And then 150 people on a call, this might be a part of the town hall, will just fire away in the chat any input they have on it. I’ve used this with a good deal of companies. And it is a very, very powerful way of actually using our new virtual environment to do something that is even better than what we were capable of doing before.

Des Dearlove:
I see an element of democratizing the problem and sort of crowdsourcing in that. So that’s interesting. We have a question from Maina. Forgive me if I’ve mispronounced your name. Thomas, you mentioned intuition. How do you balance intuition and rational thinking to come up with potentially the best problem frame? I think which sort of alludes to Stuart’s question, how do you know when you found a better framing?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
I’d say the role here is really around intuition, because most people are more comfortable, I’d say, with the rational part of the problem solving. Intuition, you use best when you understand its limitations. What does that mean? Well, we don’t necessarily have an inner source of truth to everything, like oh, my intuition says this, so it must be right. That can get you in trouble.

There’s some pretty interesting research that says that your intuition is trustworthy if two conditions are fulfilled. First and foremost, it has to be something that you have done a good deal. Most people don’t do a lot of job interviews, and so their intuition about a job interview is not very good. Something they’ve done more than a hundred times, they have a stronger intuition around it. Second factor. You need to have clear feedback on whether your decision was good. Again, a reason why we’re not good at job interviews is because, well, do we hire the wrong person? It takes a while to find out, especially if you work separate from them. And there are so many other factors that impinge on that, which means you don’t actually get very clear feedback from the world as to whether you did it. Whereas if you play golf and you hit, you know if you miss or don’t miss getting the hole in one, the ball in the hole.

So being mindful of those two things, being mindful of when your intuition has limits. And secondly, of course, back to this thing again, about bringing in different people with different intuitions, because somewhere in the crossfire of your intuitions, you’re going to forge a better decision.

Stuart Crainer:
Tell us, Thomas, about the 5 to 10 minute interactions. I like the sound of these, because people spend an awful lot of time on, I mean, a number of meetings we’ve had where it’s scheduled for an hour, and somebody, not us normally, talks and fills the space. But I like the 5 to 10 minutes. That’s how decisions are made in the real world, I think.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Yeah. You mentioned democratizing earlier. It is my big mission to try to democratize this skill because the truth is, it has been with us for a while, but it has been locked up with experts. Some people in design thinking are really good at it. But most of us are not design thinking educated at all, or whatnot. So democratization is critical. And to that end, it doesn’t work if we assume we need to spend an hour on something, because most of the time you only may only have that like, Wednesday afternoon, you have a problem. It is not realistic to expect you can just press pause and [inaudible].

So what does this mean in practice? The one thing I found is, you need to tell people what you’re doing. If you are saying, hey, I want to check if we are solving the right problems. And then one good example, I share one in my book, which is around a slow elevator [inaudible] one of our earlier calls. I shared the one with the boss. If you have a small story or example of somebody who did this previously, that opens the door for people to understand what you’re trying to do. You might say, remember how Nokia lost the phone battle by effectively solving the wrong problem. They thought about building better hardware when Apple understood it was about the apps and the ecosystem. I’m afraid we are about to do same thing here. Can we spend the minute talking about the nature of the problem itself?

The time block thing also helps people who are very action driven understand that this is just something we’re going to spend 10 minutes on. It’s not going to devolve into ruminating and discussing forever without forward movement. We need that at the end.

Des Dearlove:
It almost sounds like the signaling that’s required to say, because I agree, a lot of people are very action oriented. And so it’s like, I mean, it’s become a cliche, but, oh, we need to brainstorm. It signals that we’re at least trying to go into a different mode. Perhaps we need a signal for this to say, let’s reframe. Let’s just spend 10 minutes to reframe. But I think you’re right, the fact that, if we’re not going to spend the whole afternoon, let alone weeks and weeks reframing.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
And I found, there’s a question here of legitimacy. Like, do you have permission with whoever you’re working with, your client, your boss, to go in and challenge their understanding of the problem? One of the reasons that I put this together is so people who understand how to reframe have something to show their boss or their client and say, “Hey, there’s this Harvard published method that we’d like to spend 10 minutes on. That tends to open the door a little bit more than if you just start talking. Then you might get a, why are we still talking about the problem? Let’s move forward.

Stuart Crainer:
Has big data made paralysis by analysis more prevalent? I mean they first mentioned paralysis by analysis in the 1960s, with Igor Ansoff and strategic management. And at that point, the ways you could analyze companies was quite limited, where now it’s unlimited.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Yeah. I’d say there are two interesting perspectives on big data. One is definitely that you can get trapped in this idea of, hey, we need more data, or we have this huge data set we don’t know what to do with. So it can contribute to paralysis by analysis. More interestingly, I think reframing is actually critical to use big data correctly, because if you just go out and gather data, well, what are you going to use it for? People who use big data well, they have a clear problem understanding. They know what they want to go out and test.

In academia, you create a very clear definition of what your intended outcome is before you start experimenting or, or gathering data. I see the same thing there, you go in and you have a specific theory about what you want, instead of getting into this classical, let’s just scrape all the data we have. And then, I wonder what we can use this for. Not as powerful way of working with this as a more focused and directed method of using.

Des Dearlove:
Okay, fantastic. I’m afraid we’re out of time. But one final piece of practical advice, what should people do who watch this? This is the sort of stuff that feels like you could pick it up and start doing something with it tomorrow.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
It is. And I would say, when you have a problem, try this. But before you do that, maybe find one colleague or your spouse or whoever’s around you when you tend to solve problems, and either share this with them or tell them about the method. You can do this alone, and you can get really good at it and make a big difference. But you will have a much, much easier time doing this, and getting really good at it if you have one or two people in your immediate circle who also understands this and can help you think about it differently. Ultimately, it is both a team skill and an individual skill. So go out and get somebody to understand this if you think it is relevant for you.

Des Dearlove:
Thomas, thank you. Fantastic as ever. And thank you to everybody for tuning in. Join us next time for more fresh thinking with Thinkers50 Radar webinar. We look forward to seeing you then.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:
Thank you.

Stuart Crainer:
Thank you.