#OneWinWednesday: Stop solutioning (at first) and love the problem.
This article talks in terms of product development.
I read it through the lens of a coach.
Coaches spend time helping their clients become unstuck. A client will have a problem or is unsatisfied with a portion of their professional or personal life and needs somebody to help them look at things in a different way so they can discover the path forward.
As a coach, I occasionally meet people who want a very quick fix to their problems. Can you blame them? Society is used to being able to binge watch an entire season of a show over one weekend.
This knee-jerk solutioning will often lead to unsustainable fixes and the problem will continue. The article gives a great analogy: bailing water out of a boat instead of finding the hole and patching it.
Instead of immediate solutioning, the author states that you must take an interest in the problem. The fact is that people often don’t really know what the root cause of the problem is, what impact it has, and why they want to fix it. When you take the time to dig down, you might find that the impact of a problem isn’t that bad and then you can prioritize solutioning in your busy schedule.
Once you identify what the problem is, and let’s say it’s a biggie, a good exercise is to imagine your situation in 6 months once the problem is solved. How does this feel? In what way is your life better? If your life is much better, this validates 1) the negative impact the problem is having and 2) the need to fix it. What motivation to move forward!
A good indication of readiness to do the hard work of solutioning (solution identification and implementation) is to imagine your life in six months if the problem is NOT solved. Is this a situation you can live with? How is this impacting your work, relationships, health?
Thrive Coaching and Consulting hint: solutioning may not be as difficult as you think, and you just need a little help working through it.
Bottom line is this: avoid solutioning right away and dig into the problem as a step towards a long-lasting fix that will positively impact your life.
