Sometimes the best way to tackle a problem is to come at it sideways rather than head on.
Four recent examples have highlighted the usefulness of this reminder for me:
If you’re feeling a bit stuck today, consider multiple ways you or your group could tackle your challenge indirectly. Instead of skirting the issue, you may find you are effectively solving it instead.
- In our ELASTIC leadership session on likeability last week, the group discussed how being “likeable” is not the same as being “liked” — and that although being likeable is a powerful pathway toward building influence, it’s better as a symptom or outcome than as an explicit goal. Actively seeking to be likeable is a bit creepy!
- In a coaching conversation, we talked about how sitting down to think about a tricky problem is much less likely to lead to progress than letting solutions percolate subconsciously while doing other life-giving things such as walking, gardening, knitting, napping or having coffee with interesting people. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book Rest provides an excellent treatment of this concept.
- While setting performance targets in a strategic planning session, a team decided that their main metric of success could not be pursued directly without requiring marketing messages that seemed icky. They left with clarity about intermediate outcomes that they could actively pursue, and confidence that doing so would lead indirectly but definitively to their desired result.|
- People’s Adaptability Quotient score is a composite of 15 sub-dimensions. The way to increase our adaptability is to strengthen some combination of those 15 things, and higher adaptability will result. I love that there is no need to get good at all 15, but rather to be encouraged that there are so many different possible pathways to greater adaptability.
If you’re feeling a bit stuck today, consider multiple ways you or your group could tackle your challenge indirectly. Instead of skirting the issue, you may find you are effectively solving it instead.