PREFACE

Have you ever encountered something in your life that wasn’t working as well as you knew it could? Something costly, painful, or frustrating to your family or your business?

Perhaps your dishwasher doesn’t dry your dishes well, and you’re wasting your time hand drying them. Perhaps your business can’t create enough of its product to meet customer demand. Perhaps your organizational processes are dysfunctional and unable to make good decisions. You may be trying to change bad habits in yourself or others, such as trying to eat better. Or maybe you are hoping to resolve a conflict with a colleague or loved one.

How many times have you or your organization tried to solve these hard problems and failed? How often do you build expensive workarounds, or just tolerate them as “part of life?” How many problems in your life have become so commonplace that you don’t even notice them anymore?

Imagine a life in which you can see the problems around you and have confidence that you’ll solve them. Imagine having great war stories of improving your life, your business, and your community by tackling the hardest problems that hold you back from your potential.

You can become an even better problem-solver. I want to help unleash your problem-solving potential and that of others so together we can form a powerful force for change.

HOW THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU

There are hundreds of books on problem-solving. Most of these focus on solving simple problems, or provide a step-by-step problem-solving method that the authors hope will help you progress on harder problems, like following a recipe.

When cooking an easy dish or solving an easy problem, a very specific step-by-step guide that you can robotically follow can lead you to victory, like with boiling an egg. But you’ll notice that you can’t take a totally untrained cook, hand them a recipe for a complicated gourmet dish, and expect it to come out very good. Great chefs demonstrate behaviors that set them apart from other cooks, allowing them to consistently create complex, novel dishes—even dishes others have never thought of before.

Great problem-solvers possess a specific set of behaviors that they apply to solve the hardest problems—the kinds others call “impossible” or have simply accepted as an unchangeable force of nature.

This book will help you understand the behaviors that great problem-solvers use to tackle the hardest problems with skill and panache, regardless of the industry or nature of the problem. These behaviors are universal and will help you to skillfully use whatever problem-solving methods you happen to know.

WHAT PROBLEMS CAN YOU SOLVE WITH THE RIGHT BEHAVIORS?

Regardless of what you do in life and work, I bet you face problems that are important to you and that you fail to fully understand and resolve. You can change this if you recognize the strong problem-solving ability you already possess, enhance this ability, and then apply it to the tough problems around you. Here are some examples of problems you can work on by using the right behaviors:

• Technical problems at home, such as low water pressure or a door that won’t close.

• Technical problems at work, such as critical assets breaking down or underperforming, faulty computer networks, or product quality problems.

• Organizational problems in your business, such as high employee turnover, low customer satisfaction, and logistics headaches.

• Personal health and behavioral problems, such as struggling to adopt new habits that will help you improve your health. Perhaps you want to lose weight or become more physically fit.

• Problems of personal conflict, in which two people that care about each other are upset and don’t see eye-to-eye.

• Societal problems, such as global poverty or violence.

I believe the approaches I cover in this book are applicable to any hard problem, and I encourage you to think about hard problems in your life and draw parallels with the stories I share. I look forward to you adding to these stories with your own successes as you begin to solve hard problems.

This book is not a step-by-step guide. Instead, it will help you understand the behaviors you need to nurture if you want to be the greatest problem-solver you can be. Fulfilling your potential as a problem-solver requires practicing these behaviors, stretching yourself, and ideally, getting strong coaching. I have found no shortcuts or magical methods that can circumvent this. But with practice, you can fulfill that potential, and make both your life and community a better place.