How to help another person find a solution to any problem
Miscellaneous / / July 13, 2022
There are at least six ways to boost creativity.
When a colleague, friend or partner is in a difficult situation and comes to you for advice, the easiest way is to offer a ready-made solution to the problem. But instead, it is better to guide the person and help him come up with a plan for himself. In his work “You Can Change Others!” business coaches Peter Bregman and Howie Jacobson have put together a few ways to do just that. The book was published in Russian by Alpina Publisher, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from chapter 24.
Expand your options by lowering the bar for success
Help your partner get rid of the feeling of pressure by reminding that you and he are not looking for the “right” option now, but simply sorting through all the possible ones. Even wacky ideas, unlikely schemes, and wild guesses will do.
Wrong approach
Ben: I could apologize to Ramona in front of everyone at our next meeting. But it just shakes me when I think about it.
Dara: Yes, it's quite risky - what if the effect is reversed?
Ben: Yes you are right. It's better to forget about it.
The right approach
Ben: I could apologize to Ramona in front of everyone at our next meeting. But it just shakes me when I think about it.
Dara: It seems pretty risky, right? It's great that you decided to say this. Let's put it on the list.
Ben: What if it backfires?
Dara: It may be like that. None of our options is a guarantee of success. Then we will choose the one in which the risk-benefit ratio is comfortable for you, but no matter what happens, we will learn something anyway.
Another way to lower the bar for success is to ask, “What would you do if you didn’t care if it worked or not?”
Expand the range of options by remembering past attempts
Remind your partner of what he has already tried to do. Past attempts—successful or not—may provide clues as to what might work in the future. If the attempt was unsuccessful, this will tell you what not to do; in this case, you can come up with new options - opposite or different in some way. People often stop doing what they were good for a variety of reasons. It is possible that you will be able to build the past strategy into the new plan.
Expand your options with "What if..."
Sometimes people limit the flight of thought to what they consider possible. You can spur your partner's creativity with two types of hypothetical questions.
The first type removes restrictions. The second one adds them.
Dara used the first type of question with Ben when she asked him what he would do if he had an unlimited budget. If your partner runs out of ideas, remove the restrictions that prevent idea generation.
- “What would you do if you had unlimited funds?”
- “What can you try if you have all the time you want?”
- “What would you try to do if you made all the decisions here yourself?”
- “What would you do if you were sure that your data is 100% accurate?”
How does adding constraints stimulate creativity? The history of entrepreneurship shows that people can be very creative when their resources are limited. When the obvious paths are closed, they are forced to use unusual techniques that can be much more elegant and effective than existing practices.
Here is an example. Due to the pandemic, the Monkey Bar Gym in Madison, Wisconsin was forced to close. The prospect of liquidating the business loomed before the owners. Can there be a gym that you can't go to? But they found another option: went online.
Now the owners, John and Jesse Hinds, say they will never go back to the traditional business again.
They're saving $180,000 a year in rent, they're recruiting clients all over the world, and thanks to Zoom, they're able to offer instant feedback to a lot of people at the same time. The restrictions allowed them to achieve revenue growth, improve their product, expand their customer base, and reduce stress. One of their new clients, Howie, lives a thousand miles away. The power of restraint allowed him to pump biceps.
If not for the pandemic restrictions, John and Jesse Hinds might never have expanded their vision — and their business.
If your partner's thought continues down the same path that led him to a dead end before, spur creativity by adding restrictions:
- “How would you approach this problem if you only had 15 minutes to solve it?”
- “What if you couldn’t spend a dime on solving the problem?”
- "What would you do if there was no way to remove Ramona from the team?"
Expand your options with emotional courage
It happens that the options invented by the partner are not sufficiently diverse and bold. Is this normal, or is it worth expanding their range? In fact, it doesn't have to be once in a while.
Your ultimate goal is to come up with a plan with a reasonable chance of success. If a new opportunity has suddenly opened up a whole new set of options for your partner, it doesn't have to be difficult for them.
However, if the opportunity requires emotional courage—if one has to take risks and do uncomfortable things—then push the partner to think more broadly and eliminate the filter that prevents him from thinking about what he considers unusual for myself.
If the opportunity requires emotional courage, try asking a question like, "What's the scariest thing you could do in this situation?" This question helps break down stereotypes as it openly invites the partner to imagine activities that go beyond what they tend to do. usually.
You can ask other questions that expand the scope of creative planning:
- “What is the least expected action of you?”
- "What seems unthinkable to you?"
- “What didn’t it even occur to you to discuss before?”
- "Is there a truth that no one speaks?"
- “If you had a cap of invisibility and could act or speak without being recognized, what would you do?”
Expand the range of options with reverse questions
Another way to break down constraints is to ask questions to identify options with the lowest, not the highest, probability of success. Asking the other way around like this can spur creativity.
First, they can be funny. Researchers Mark Beeman and John Kunios found that people were 20% better at creative storytelling tasks if they watched a short humorous Robin Williams first.
Secondly, such questions directly allow your partner to come up with "stupid" answers, which reduces pressure and increases the willingness to take risks.
Third, a good idea can emerge as the opposite of a “stupid” one. Once, while advising marketing clients who couldn’t figure out how to increase their website conversion rate, Howie reminded them of the desirable actions, which visitors to a particular page were supposed to do, and then asked: “How to make them less likely to do this?” Clients right here offered him a lot of ideas: reduce the font of key phrases, hide the “Subscribe” button on another page, promise to send spam to everyone who leaves their email address, etc. Within minutes of starting this ridiculous exercise, they had a long list of improvements that were the opposite of what they had just come up with.
Here are some options for such questions "on the contrary."
- “What exactly won’t work here?”
- “What might the most unfortunate approach look like?”
- “Which option will bring the least benefit with the most effort?”
- "How can you make the problem worse?"
Expand the range of options using the ladder method
Sometimes creativity partner suffers because of the magnitude of the problem or opportunity. The partner may try to solve it completely, immediately and forever, but this does not give a result. You can help him get rid of the “all or nothing” stereotype by introducing the ladder method, i.e. by breaking the big climb down into steps that are manageable.
These stages can be identified in several ways.
The first way is to consider the desired result as the goal of the project and make a list of the stages of its implementation. Then you need to arrange these stages in chronological order and break them down into smaller steps that can be completed one at a time.
For example, if the desired outcome is to write a book, then the first stage might be to describe ideal reader (in this case, you, by the way) or a list of questions to answer this book. If you want to run five kilometers, you can first try jogging from one lamppost to another without stepping.
A great ladder question: “What can you do this week to be in a better position next week?”
Another way is to distribute the steps of the ladder according to the difficulty of overcoming them. The lifter adds weight gradually. Likewise, your partner can start with simpler activities to gain experience and confidence and prepare to overcome more difficult stages.
For example, for a person who is afraid of public speaking, raising their hand and speaking at a company-wide meeting would be too scary a prospect to even consider. But speaking out at a team meeting or even a video call with a group of relatives is a much more feasible task to start with.
The third method is especially effective if the goal is to change sustainable habits or behavioral pattern. In this case, the “ladder” can be built by choosing specific moments and situations in which something needs to be changed, and mastering them gradually. This is much more efficient than trying to achieve a one-time complete transformation.
For example, it can be difficult to take a deep breath and wait before speaking if it's a hard day's evening and your child is acting completely intolerable. But doing this at 10:00 am during a video conference with an annoying colleague is already easier. With practice on video calls, you can develop habits that are useful in more difficult situations, including - eventually - at home in the evenings.
It is believed that you cannot change others - only yourself. But the authors of the book argue that this popular statement can be argued. Peter Bregman and Howie Jacobson have put together a four-step guide to inspire people to gently push them to become better people. First, you have to turn from a critic into an ally, then, together with a colleague or partner, determine the desired result, find ways to achieve it, and then draw up a detailed action plan.
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Read also🧐
- How to learn to identify the source of all problems and why it is important for everyone to be able to
- How to Stop Being a Victim and Learn to Cope with Problems
- Solomon's paradox: why it's easier to solve other people's problems than your own