How The Most Successful People Think Differently To Solve Their Biggest Challenges

Paul B. Brown, Contributor

Invariably, when presenting a new approach to solving problems, authors, pundits and commentators go to great lengths to “prove” why everything that existed before they presented their argument has been a waste of time.

That’s just silly. 

You know why people attack everything that has come before. We live in a hyper-competitive environment when it comes to getting someone’s attention and so if you have something new, you may feel compelled to come up with a gimmick such as “everything you know is wrong” in order to get people’s attention.

We understand why they do this, because it would have been extremely tempting to go down this road ourselves.

We have developed a proven approach to dealing with uncertainty in all forms, i.e. what you should do when you don’t know what to do. 

We know it works because it is the same approach that the people who are masters at dealing with uncertainty—successful serial entrepreneurs—use. (There is nothing more uncertain than starting a business, and serial entrepreneurs are masters at it.)

The clichéd image of entrepreneurs coming up with an idea, laboring feverishly to perfect it, and delivering their creation to the market fully-formed is not what usually happens. The much more typical path is that they come up with an idea. They take a small step toward implementation to see if anyone is interested, and if it looks like some people are, they take another step forward. If they don’t get the reaction they want, they regroup and then take another step in a different direction.

In other words, they:

• Act.
• Learn (from that action)
• Build (off that learning)
• Repeat, i.e. they act again.

That cycle continues repeats until the entrepreneur succeeds, knows she is not going to, or decides there is another, more appealing opportunity to pursue. As we said, the approach serial entrepreneurs use when faced with the unknown (starting a business) will work for you when you face the unknown of any kind.

So, does this mean you should scrap your traditional ways of problem solving?
 
Absolutely not.

You shouldn’t use this approach exclusively. The way we all were taught to solve problems that are predictable—how do we introduce our existing product into an adjacent market; how many refrigerators will we sell during a recession—works just fine. You have historical precedents and data to draw on.

When you do, predict away.

When you don’t, try what we are advocating. It gives you an additional tool. It does not replace the ones you have.

We concede presenting a new idea this way is far less dramatic then screaming “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.”

But it is honest, the process has been proven, and it should be helpful.

Paul B. Brown is the co-author (along with Leonard A. Schlesinger and Charles F. Kiefer) of Just Start: Take Action; Embrace Uncertainty and Create the Future recently published by Harvard Business Review Press.