Life Problems are that infuriating part of life that kicks you when you aren’t expecting it. Often they are a circumstance outside of our control that we now have to adjust to, sometimes they are of our own making. Solving Problems starts with understanding them, then finding the Solution, and then Reviewing the whole process to see if it worked.
Math Misses the Human
At school, we are given many problems to solve. These are generally idealised problems that do not actually directly affect you or someone you know, that is, they are just a “thing that happens” without a personal consequence. Personal consequences involve feelings, morality and other messy concepts – things that we can’t actually ignore when we are looking at Life Problems.
Math and Science give us excellent tools for going from a known problem to a desired outcome, and we should very definitely use them. , but skip past an important
Understanding Change (Grief and Loss)
We cover Change (Grief and Loss) in full on another page, via the übler-Ross Model.
In brief, we make a dynamic working mental model of the world from which we can make predictions. Those predictions allow us to make wise choices in the moment to change our immediate future – like catching a ball, you need to know where it is going to catch it when it arrives. If you start to move after it has got to you, you’ve missed it.
When our prediction fails, we are at first Surprised (a fundamental emotion) which prevents us from acting until we can better understand what is going on. We then do some reality checking via Denial, try to fix it via Bargaining, pump energy into the system to empower fixing or an emergency via Anger (another fundamental emotion), upon none of that working we go reconcile loss and change via Sadness (another fundamental emotion), confirm that our new mental model is working via Acceptance, and then begin Planning for the future again.
We have reviewed the human Change process as we don’t try to fix things that are working. Solving Problems needs to fundamentally understand that we are trying to improve something if it needs improving. There will be a level of dealing with Change that we may need to go through in order to get down to making solutions that can work. That means dealing with our Surprise feelings, some Denial of reality as we evaluate what is and isn’t true, some level of Bargaining to reduce the cost of a solutions, and likely adrenaline fueled feelings such as Anger, Anxiety, and Meltdowns.
Just a quick note: feeling is what you feel, mood is an average of feeling over time, and emotion is the feeling that someone else thinks you are showing. Often people use these terms interchangeably, but we will try to be accurate.
Understanding, Solving & Review
Understanding, Planning & Review is an excellent tool for watching your own natural progres through a problem, and is a good tool to understand and support another person in their problem. Understanding, Solving and Review takes the natural human problem solving method and formalises it into a three stage process
- Understanding the problem
- Solving the problem
- Reviewing the outcome
1. Understanding
In Stage 1 we are working on Understanding the problem.
Feelings
When something occurs that doesn’t fit with our predictions, we will initially feel Surprised, often followed up with an adrenaline fueled feeling:
- Anger / aggression
- Anxiety
- Meltdown
- Paranoia
Feelings help us to preload an understanding of a situation and preload a response to that assumed understanding. It is important for us to identify how you feel in response to a situation, or if helping another person, what they feel in response to what they perceived.
Once you know the feelings involved, you can then consider how the Initial Narrative is biased and or reinforced by that feeling.
It is important to note if a person is looping this and the next phase, doubling down on their feelings and distorting their narrative on each loop to fit their feelings. This can include Motivated Reasoning (the person has an agenda), avoidance of one’s own part in the event (self interest, may be a sign of toxic persona, see Cycle of Violence, Pursuit), or Special Pleading (extending a story to fit an interpretation).
Reactive Feelings
This is a Reactive Feeling to our perception of what has occurred. When correct, this feeling will speed up our responses, offering us a default action, that is a Reaction, that should lead to our survival. Survival does not require happiness.
In the above image, we see the Instinct Loop depicted, where following an Event or Incident what we sense is filtered through our biology and Memory to flavour our Perception of that occurrence. The result of this is reported to our frontal cortex as a Feeling, an emotional reaction to what we think happened. More on breaking this entire process down, and if your Instinct is erroneous, replacing it with a better method in Retraining the Brain page.
Initially we will believe our Reactive Feeling when we look at what has happened, so it is important to identify what we are feeling. If we are helping someone else, it is important to recognise that their feeling is possibly correct and possibly wrong – but either way, they are feeling it. We can validate how they are feeling without validating the Event as a fact until later, nor do we have to buy into their feeling as a representation of reality.
Feelings are Contagious
Humans are social animals. We can do things on our own, but as a species, we are more powerful in groups. To help coordinate group action, we communicate nonverbally via body language, which leans strongly on feelings and empathy. This results in or feelings being contagious with those who care about us.
Imagine the scene: we are in the wilds of the old world, sitting at camp, mending some equipment. I see a lion behind you, stalking us. You can’t see it, but you do note the change in my body language and the expression on my face. You response to my fear with your own fear and your body goes into flight/fight mode, ready to take my cue of which to shift to, or if I fail to act (I froze), you will just run for it and hope that works. I don’t have to tell you that you are in danger with words, my feeling of fear is caught by you, and you just know.
This works great in a situation like this, but is awful when you are trying to support someone through a problem, especially if:
- Their Reactive Feeling is erroneous
- Your catching their feeling is going to bar you from being helpful
- Your catching their feeling triggers a heightening of their feeling, which you then catch, looping the feelings into disaster
What we can do is show a calm and caring emotion. The person whom we are helping will start to catch our calmness and that will help them to move to the next stage.
Sometimes, though, it is important to dip into the feeling that they are emoting and travel that pathway with them. An example of when this is appropriate is when someone is grieving the loss of something important to them.
Initial Narrative
This phase can be done in parallel to the Feelings stage, or afterwards depending on the situation.
The Initial Narrative is the story that strings together what you perceived to happen with what you are initially feeling. It often has facts and assumptions intermixed without distinction and an explanatory story that explains why things happened. This is the automatic system we use to create a model of the event so that we can start to make predictions on what we currently understand. In an emergency, this will do – but it is rarely an emergency so we can take the time to get this right.
Before we move on, it is important to look at what is our Initial Narrative of the event. Much like understanding the Reactive Feeling, this helps us know what our automatic reactive system is working with so that we can bias that out.
When helping another person, do not fact check or fact challenge yet. They need to be heard, so that their Feelings and Initial Narrative can be explained to you, so that you can be useful. It can be very hard to not challenge their Feelings and Initial Narrative, especially when it is about you. Passively hear them, giving acknowledgements that you have heard what they are saying and you are trying to understand, without agreeing that they are right.
For example, I can acknowledge that “when you heard me say I don’t care about how that effects you, that hurt” without agreeing that I said that, or intended to hurt them. This is their emotional reaction to their perception I am trying to understand, and I can’t do that if I don’t listen to their emotional reaction or their interpretation of their perception.
The person’s Feelings can be valid even if their reasoning is wrong – after all, they are experiencing that feeling and that affects them.
Reality Checking, Facts versus Assumption
Once you know what you are feeling and have assessed what you think happened to trigger that feeling, you can start to do some fact checking. This is where you separate the known provable facts from fair assumptions (likely that it happened but have no proof) and unfair assumptions (unlikely that it happened also with no proof).
It can be very hard to tease this out. It is very human to backfill an explanation and think that we have proof of that explanation. A trick to separate the two is to consider if you had to provide evidence in a court of law, what would be considered tangible evidence (written words, photos, video, another person’s witness, a timely record you made of the vent) and what would be hearsay (why you think they were thinking, what someone else told you without directly witnessing it) and keep an eye out for things that “seem like how it must have been” but you don’t actually know.
If you are helping someone else, ask questions about what they actually saw and heard. Whenever they say “because [explanation]” point out that the because part is speculation about what the other person was thinking or their reasoning, which is an assumption. We want to initially verify just the facts – what we know and can reasonably prove actually happened. Then we look at and evaluate how accurate the assumptions are. Assumptions are inherently unprovable, so we have to accept that the most reasonable assumption can still be wrong until we get supportive evidence. Assumptions that seem likely in the absence of a narrative (because they are bad people, or they wanted to scam me) need to be separated from assumptions that explain the narrative. For example, it is fair to assume that Peter drove or was driven to the scene, because they didn’t have time to walk, but it is not fair to assume that Peter must have punched someone because they are mean, unless we know that Peter did actually punch someone. (Sorry if your name is Peter).
Once we can identify the actual facts, strong assumptions and weak assumptions, we should also check if there are errors in what we thought was true and is provably wrong, or where we based the explanatory narrative off “facts” that were actually assumptions, especially weak assumptions.
Fact Finding and Fact Driven Narrative
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Sherlock Holmes
Once we have established what is fact and what is not, taking a look at the known facts and the known outcome.
Part of this process is looking back at what we thought were facts and refiltering them through how we were feeling earlier – did that distort those facts? If so, in the currently calmer mood, what were the actual facts and from there, what might they mean to our explanatory narrative?
Can we create a more robust and accurate explanation for the event with a minimum of justification from strong assumptions? If so, what is it?
If we cannot create a robust explanation, then what seems to be missing for us to make this incident to make sense? Can you gather more information to fill in those blanks? Who do you need to talk to and or what reasonable evidence can you find to decrease the need for assumptions?
If you are helping someone else, ask questions like “how do you know that?” and “how likely is that?” and “are you fitting that explanation to your Initial Narrative or are you finding a Narrative that fits the facts?” Try to be nice and patient with them.
It is a useful tool to consider several different Narratives that fit the facts and outcome. I like to promote a “best case”, a “worse case” and “most likely case” versions of the explanatory narrative. Consider which of these narratives is the most useful to you.
Exploring
Once we have a Fact Driven Narrative, where we have a likely explanation for what happened that is heavily fact based with a minimum of assumptions, we can now start to explore solutions to that problem.
Self Solving Problems
Some things resolve themselves without any help from us.
We are trying to avoid the Indiana Jones Problem – where it is fair to argue that the character Indiana Jones objectively made no real difference to the outcome of the story, although the character would certainly argue otherwise. With that idea in mind, what is a likely outcome if you did nothing, assuming that no other unexpected factor occurs? If this matter is likely to resolve itself, then that is the best initial tactic to make.
Ask yourself “From what I know now, if I did nothing, what is likely to happen? Am I satisfied with that likely outcome?”
We are looking for a “good enough” outcome, be careful of perfect.
“Don’t let Perfection become the Enemy of Good” – Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
If that is good enough, then that is fine, monitor the situation if you feel it needed (so you can intervene if it is needed) and move on.
Exploring Outcomes: Reasonable Ideal tells us What and Why
If you are not happy with that outcome, then we need to continue to explore. Our next question is “what is the reasonable ideal outcome that I want?” We aren’t likely to get this, but it does help the process to ask and establish that. When I say “reasonable”, I don’t mean that following my disagreement with Peter, we establish world peace – that would be nice, and I wouldn’t be upset if that happened – but I’m not likely to actually manage to achieve that.
Our next question is “What is it about that outcome that helps us to define it as ‘good‘?” This line of exploration helps us move away from a specific thing having to be done for this to become good and instead look at why that specific thing is good, so we understand better what the actual problem is.
For example, my disagreement with Peter may have led to verbal violence, and my simplistic ideal reasonable solution is that the goes away. What is it about Peter going away that makes this good for me? Exploring that, if Peter goes away, then Peter won’t be aggressive towards me again, that is, I am likely to conclude that I want to feel safe from Peter repeating aggression.
The Problem: I don’t feel safe
A solution should include: I feel safe
Exploring Outcomes: Riffing on What and Why
While the ideal solution has “Peter goes away” for me to “feel safe”, what other solutions include “I feel safe” without Peter having to go away? If there is no other forms of that, then the solution process is aimed towards “Peter goes away”, but other I may find that other solutions can include
- Peter learns to not be aggressive
- Peter knows there is direct consequences to being aggressive, so shouldn’t dare
- I understand why Peter did what he did, and the aggression was a mistake, so likely isn’t going to repeat
- I understand that I mistook Peter raising his voice and direct speech as verbal aggression, rather than his urgency to stop me from doing a regrettable action, due to imminent risk
Any of these outcomes may result in me “feeling safe” and would be acceptable.
Ownership
If helping another, they need to own the solution.
2. Solving
In Understanding, we have understand the situation that occurred and identified what the Problem is, and also explored what Outcome we would be happy with, and if we have to take Action because it won’t resolve itself.
Solving involves:
- Creating a plan
- Assessing current resources
- Identifying missing resources
- Using the current resources to get those missing resources
- Updating the plan
- Implementing the plan
Due to the sheer enormous number of problems that may need to be solved, we are not going to go into specifics of how to fix any situation. Instead we are going to explore a process to understand how we can generically solve most problems.
Creating a Plan
It is not too uncommon that in the Exploration Stage of Understanding, that a Plan starts to form. It is also fine if no plan has yet formed.
If no plan is yet proposing itself, a good question to ask is “How do I get from here to the most likely good outcome?” Don’t be too concerned about resources such as money, friends and skills. This is first plan exploration is a basic template that we will refine later.
Many common problems have common workable solutions, and there really is no need to reinvent the wheel. If you are experiencing a common problem, use a common solutions. If you don’t know how to solve that common problem, you may need to talk to someone who knows more about that and use their skills.
Many hands make light work,
two heads are better than one.
Not all problems are common problems. A variant of problems are the one that on the surface look like common problems, but there is a complex element that makes the common solutions fail. In these cases, a unique solution may need to be formed to specifically address this problem – even so, you will find many parts of the Plan will still be fairly standard / common.
Another key question to ask is “If I do nothing, will the problem resolve itself?” Very often, the best plan is to “watch and monitor”. If the likely outcome of doing nothing is not good, then your plan needs to include actions taken by you.
Be mindful not to make the solution too complex.
[Picture of a simple flow chart]; [picture of a complex flow chart]
It is fine to have a Plan that has a few contingencies for likely problems. If you get to “Contingency path 4”, fill it with “I’ll make it up at the time if we go there”. Consider that you have got to [insert your age here] years old and so far survived everything that has happened to you. You will survive a plan going off the rails and having to ad lib a solution on the spot. It may not be smooth or ideal, but it will often be good enough. The rest of the plan will make up for a few minor ad libbed details. If the plan goes too far off the rails, then start this process (Creating a Plan or at worst Understanding, Solving and Reviewing) again as soon as you have some space to do so.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy”,
attributed to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Resources
All plans cost. That cost might be time, energy, friends, skills, knowledge, patience and goods.
What resources does your plan need to succeed? What can you make cheaper?
Importantly what do you currently personally have easy access to? What can you easily and reliably get hold of? Do you need to delay while you build or acquire those resources?
If the majority of your plan relies only on what you already have, it is a good plan. If your plan needs a significant amount of resources that you do not have easy and reliable access to, that may be a bad plan or the situation is that complex.
Taking a look at the above, you may see that you have some missing important resource to implement your plan. Some of those may be needed now or soon which requires you to get it soon. Every resource you do not have enough of, or easy access to is a potential flaw in your plan – a point that may become failure. Having a missing resource may be fine if you can acquire it, but may become a problem later if you cannot. If you don’t have reliable access to that missing resource, then it is wise to create a Plan B – what to do if you can’t get that resource.
The better plans are plans that have that work without needing anyone or anything else, but would benefit in personal cost and be more reliable if you do get that resource.
The two extremes we would like to avoid are:
- Plans only ever rely on our own resources
- Plans lean heavily on everyone else
There are going to be times where each of these are needed or good, but they should be your average plan.
Acquiring Missing Resources
There are resources that make a plan work that are feasible and resources that are not. For example, “all I need is a billion dollars to make this plan work”, is likely not going to be a good plan for the majority of people on Earth. While the plan might work if you get that billion, the odds of acquiring it is very low, making that plan a very low success plan.
While it is possible to win lottery or some other figurative gift from the gods, this is not a plan that you have control over, making it a poor plan. This is what I refer to as the Lottery Win Fallacy – where you rely on winning lottery (or similar) for your plan to work. Chance is not a plan. To pay my mortgage, I should not be relying on winning lottery to make this months payment. What I should do is come up with a plan where the probability of success is very high, such as have a job, to pay the mortgage. If I do happen to win the lotto, then great – but that is a bonus, not the plan.
To get resources, we need to spend resources. That often means using what you have to get what you need. For example, I can get a friend for help moving the furniture. To get that – and to get that friends to help, I need to reach out and call them, ask them, and hopefully have good standing with that friend.
Review and Updating the Plan
From your initial ideas about how to deal with the problem as you understand it after exploring, to creating an initial plan, assessing resources, and attempting to acquire any missing resources, it is likely that your initial idea and plan may need to be revised, adjusted and updated.
You may need to repeat the cycle a few times, depending on the complexity of the problem.
Implementing the Plan, aka Do It.
Ideas, plans, resources are important parts to a solution. If you do not implement the plan and use those resources, it counts for naught.
So, go and do the plan.
Check as you go that it is working as you expect.
3. Reviewing
The plan has been completed. The plan created from gaining a deeper understanding of the problem that you were reacting to.
A part of our human process is that any time that we have survived a problem, we store in our memory the solution we did to address that problem. The more times we do that solution (practice), the more likely we are to use that solution in the future.
It is possible to move on with your life now, and just allow for the automatic memory process to store our solution.
However, there is a better way.
Reviewing how well the solution worked and learning from that.
Did it Work?
The most important question to ask upon completing the plan (or as the plan progresses) is “Did it work? / Is it working?”
If the answer is “No”, then we must wonder
- Did we misunderstand the problem? (that is, fixing the wrong thing) OR
- Has something else changed about the problem? (external interference or dynamically evolving problems)
Either way, new evaluation needs to be done before proceeding. This may only need a modification of the plan to solve the problem, or it may require completely scrapping the plan and starting again.
If the answer was “Yes”, then continue down.
Does this Require Maintenance?
Some solutions to problems are one off solutions, because the nature of the problem is that it only needs to be fixed once.
Other problems benefit from or require ongoing maintenance. A trite analogy is the problem of hunger, the solution is to eat, which only lasts for so long before you need to eat again because you have used that food as fuel; or paying off a utility bill often lasts for only so long before another bill arrives.
Improvements: What have we learned & Can we improve
Now that you have completed the plan and solved the problem, if you were to do this all over again, what would you improve?
Stepping through each part of the plan, was it smart, desperate, over developed or good?
Did the plan go smoothly? Did it work as you first outlined, or did you need to make lots of changes on the fly? Were those changes due to unpredictable circumstances, or because you mistook many initial facts?
Are there skills that would have made solving this problem much easier, and is it worth investing some time to learn those skills?
By reviewing these aspects and coming up with some better methods for the future, you prime your future self to have a better idea about how to solve this kind of problem in the future. It is important to not spend too much time on this, but also not too little – perhaps half an hour to three hours is enough.
Also be careful about what feelings you invest in this. We want to be happy that the plan worked (if it did), some minor regrets over what didn’t work well, and mostly hope for a better future. If we get stuck on feeling guilty for things that were out of our control, we are making a mistake – guilt is only appropriate if you knowingly did actions to cause harm without any other better option being available to you at the time. Often, people mistake regret for poor solutions as guilt for being mean, and then over push how “guilty” they feel, instead of just acknowledging their regret and accepting that they have now learned some important lessons and will do better next time.
Conclusion
Understanding, Solving and Review allow us to first Understand the real problem we have experienced (or a friend has), work out a viable Solution to that problem, and then Review how that went to improve our store of knowledge for future problems.
With this we can gain confidence that we can solve problems that arise, and that our behaviours and habits will also improve – because we put effort into making an automatic process better.
