Solving

Young infants, given a board and a handful of pegs, will puzzle and persevere until they have sorted all the coloured pegs into the correctly shaped holes. They can’t seem to help themselves – the need to solve is one of the first instincts of young children.

Solving makes us happy. Conversely, a failure to solve can drive us crazy – perhaps the last thing you should do is leave a crossword or wordle unsolved before you go to bed.

This isn’t just a human thing. Chimps and crows, for instance, will forego food until they’ve cracked something that is puzzling them. Ravens can be seen sitting on a branch cogitating until they fly down with a fix for what’s been bothering them. Dogs will return to problematic toys until they have conquered them. Nature abhors an unsolved puzzle.

So why is it that we train our professionals by drowning them in data instead of coaching them how to solve professional problems? Why do we make fidgety little boys sit quietly and participate in social skill training when their entire beings want to rip and tear and do enough stupid things until they sort out what really works? Why are our “professional development” programs mostly centered around talking heads?

Computers don’t fidget and belch. They sit quietly until you ask them to retrieve data, of which they possess a thousand times more than the cleverest doctor or engineer. Even artificial intelligence, designed to solve problems, tends toward brute analysis at high speed, not toward “what if” thinking or meanders in the meadows, where all the brilliant solutions are found.

The lessons? For yourself, never be too busy to let your mind vacation. Embrace the conundrum, don’t avoid it. The harder the problem, the more you’ll learn and the greater your mental acuity will increase.

For educators, especially educators of young boys and men, let your charges be aggressive with the right things, let them rough and tumble with the seemingly unsolvable. Their biology and their minds demand it. And if the girls want to get in there, all sweaty and gross, don’t tell them that ladies don’t do such things. You should only see the girls on my grandson’s hockey team.

Our leaders need to practice solving, not just for yesterday’s problems, but tomorrow’s. It’s pretty easy to replicate what more or less worked last year, it’s a whole other thing to wrestle with the questions that will affect our children, and their children.

Professional leaders, too, need to seize on the art of solving and let go of the tired notions which guided yesterday’s professions. There’s no better example of this than military doctrine in conflicts such as Ukraine and Iran, where yesterday’s billion dollar certainties crash in flames under the onslaught of here-and-now problem solvers whose byword is “innovate or die”.

Problem solving is perhaps the most critical tool of surviving and thriving. We need more, not less.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”