PROBLEM SOLVING

Effective leaders know that it is impossible to solve problems without vision. This is because vision is both an endpoint and a roadmap. In essence, vision projects a new destination into the future and then charts a path to get there. Understanding this maxim, throughout his lifetime renowned mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein often shared that “the problems we currently face will not be solved on the level at which they were created.” But Einstein also observed "the framing of a problem is often far more essential than its solution" and "imagination is more important than knowledge." So the way we see our problems determines the types of solutions that we pursue. I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I do like sports movies (pretty much any well written sports movie) - primarily because they are usually great proxies for teaching leadership principles. One of my favorite sports movies is Moneyball (a biographical sports drama based on the the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game), which tells the story Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane (portrayed by Brad Pitt), who challenges the system and defies conventional wisdom when he is forced to rebuild his small-market team on a limited budget. During a pivotal recruitment scene Beane is sitting at the table with his scouts facing the reality of a recruitment challenge with limited cash. His repeated question to the team is, "what's the problem?" Beane's scouts provide various answers, but none of their responses get to the crux of the matter. Ultimately, Billy's (and the team's) success resides with the fact that the team reframes the "recruitment problem" differently and, as a result, they are able to innovate a remarkable solution - one that only a few seasons later becomes the standard for building an effective roster. The takeaway: beginning leaders avoid problems, emerging leaders confront problems, but seasoned leaders overcome problems - and they do so by dealing with root causes instead of symptoms. #LeadWithProblemSolving

Image by Jcomp on Freepik