Solution vs. Problem

Kate is a senior vice president at a regional transit authority. She has run operations there for four years. She is efficient, experienced, and usually right. She is also very frustrated.

"I do the research and bring the answer," she told me. "And the room takes it apart anyway."

I asked her to paint me a picture of what that looks like. She walks into difficult meetings typically prepared with four content slides, and the rest in an appendix. She uses slide one as an executive summary, consisting of the problem statement and solution. She walks through the thinking and puts more detail in an appendix of additional slides. She admitted that nobody gets to those.

She has the numbers. On-time performance is down four points in two years. Rider complaints cluster in three corridors. To Kate, the problem at hand is vivid, urgent, and hers alone. And she is always prepared with a solution.

"What if the room isn't rejecting your solution, they just haven’t agreed to the problem?"

When a solution arrives too early, the conversation anchors on it and works on it. What will the solution cost, what are the risks, and when can it happen? No one in the room is going to work on the question. A solution presented before the problem is agreed upon is not a solution yet.

I suggested she try a new approach. Lead with what she knows is true, then tell the story that lets people feel that truth. Then stop, let the silence work, and give others the space to sit inside the problem with her.

Her homework was one meeting. Bring the problem and nothing else. No recommendation on slide one, only three open-ended questions.

She did. The meeting ran long, which she counted as the first good sign in months. The solution they landed on was close to the one she would have presented on her own. The difference was that this time, the room asked her for it.

Before you bring the answer, bring the problem.

The Question:

What solution are you defending in rooms that have never agreed on the problem?

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." — G.K. Chesterton