Looking for problems instead of solutions

I’ve written a bunch about the difference between asking “why not” and asking “what if”. You might also think of this as a growth mindset, the “yes and” style from improv, or any of a number of other models.

It’s easy to hear these words and agree, and still miss the point of them. One thing I see often, particularly in engineers, is the pattern in the title of this post: looking for problems instead of solutions.

In fact, I saw this in one of my teams this week. We are an investigation team, so often what we are doing is under-defined: we are exploring a space where we don’t have a whole lot of information, and we are making best guesses as to how to proceed. One of the engineers on that team, rather than engaging with the brainstorm, was focusing on technical implementation and finding ways to invalidate the ideas by pointing out other similar efforts.

The challenge with this is that the issues raised weren’t wrong, per se - they just weren’t helpful. And this is the real challenge with this pattern - if you want to find problems, you always can. There are always distractions, other decisions you could make, things you could investigate more completely, ways to be more clever, and so on.

In my experience though, the really effective people in life are very good at doing only just enough of this kind of thinking to get themselves moving. There is usually a point of diminishing returns, and effective people are almost always impatient to get moving (sometimes too impatient - I’m guilty of this myself, so I have cultivated a pattern where I let myself dive in for a little while without understanding the situation much, and then I stop and regroup. This helps me get a better understanding - I get to take some action but I don’t get lost in that, and I also don’t get lost in research before moving).

There’s a saying: “thought without action is daydream, action without thought is nightmare”. That’s probably accurate - the advice above is useful but complicated to put in practice, because neither pole is completely right. But it’s worth watching yourself at the beginning of a task. When you raise issues or concerns, are they really things to be dealt with now? Or are they just excuses that get in the way of taking action and learning? At some point you have to stop looking for problems, and start looking for solutions.