The Leadership Shift: Moving Beyond Problems to Solutions

"The solution doesn’t care where the problem came from."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Have you ever thought about where you take the conversation when a team member, client or friend comes to you with a problem?

Most leaders and mentors go first to help them unpack the problem, searching for how it started, who caused it, what went wrong.
 
But what if we focused more on what’s working already in spite of the problem existing, or when the problem happens less, or what they want instead of the problem?

This quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein is a great reminder:

You don’t need to fix the problem to move forward.
  Solutions live in the past, present and future - not the history of the problem. Or finding the root cause.
 
Whether you’re leading a team, mentoring someone, or navigating change, you can shift the energy by asking a few of these questions:

Has there been a time when the problem happened less or you were able to work through it? How did you do that?
How would you know things were getting better?
What would you like instead of what is happening now?

Try them out! Or do you have some even better questions to redirect the conversation to solutions rather than problems?

Our aim is to help co-create solutions in a collaborative way not to find out what caused the problem.