Why Problem Solving is the Most Critical Skill for 2025
A couple of years ago, we all got sick of the word unprecedented. “Living in unprecedented times” was so overused it became a meme.
The way I see it, all times have been unprecedented. As technology and culture all evolve, no decade has ever followed the same rules as the previous.
Knowing how to deal with - or better yet, thrive in the ‘new’ is an essential part of business.
So how do you move forward through periods of uncertainty?
You get really good at solving problems.
Problem solving is not just about resolving issues that pop up in the day to day. It’s about looking deeper and interrogating the root causes of things
It’s about strategically and deliberately clearing a path to efficiency, excellence and your business goals.
It’s about taking people on the journey with you to design solutions that leave things better than how you found them.
(You can also do regular stuff like streamline your accounts process or automate away your administration nightmares but I think you already knew that).
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share with you these three key ways that Problem Solving skills will help you to:
Tidy up your backyard : Gain internal efficiency
Find new avenues: Solve problems for your customers
Dig up the landmines: Address deep, systemic problems
1. Tidy up your back yard
Gain internal efficiency
Most companies have ambitions to “be more efficient”, but don’t really know where to start.
Efficiency has a dirty reputation; bringing to mind ruthless optimisation which can feel at odds with the creative process.
I like to think of efficiency through the lens of ‘waste’ (which also has a murky reputation but bear with me).
Waste describes anything that occurs in your business that the customer is not willing to pay for.
For example, if you buy a greeting card, you expect to pay for the print cost, card stock and the time that went into the design. You don’t expect to pay for a bunch of misprints, a 2 hour weekly management meeting or a supplier selection process.
As a customer, you’re expecting the cost of the card to reflect what you are receiving, not the total cost of running a business, divided by the number of cards sold.
Now a certain amount of overhead cost is required to run a business, however when you can reduce the waste, not only will you see your profit margins increase, but you’ll also be spending less time on things that don’t matter.
“But my creative process requires time spent thinking, reflecting and experimenting!” I hear you saying at your screen as you hover over the back button in your browser.
Then it isn’t waste!
If your creative output is your product then any time spent developing it isn’t waste.
What may be waste is prototypes that have missed the mark, having the wrong people on the job, poor communication, unnecessary meetings or an unproductive environment that isn’t conducive to deep, satisfying work.
For more on the 7 types of waste, check out this article:
7 ways to improve efficiency (without sacrificing your soul)
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18 September 2024
You can see here how we can start to identify what is waste and what is adding value.
When you can start to reduce and remove anything that is not adding value, you begin to see efficiency but it’s not an overnight process.
One of the things about waste is that we do these activities for so long they begin to seem important. They become baked into our everyday tasks, unquestioned.
There is a level of careful dismantling that is required, to extract that waste and remove it.
This is where problem solving skills come in.
Check what the fence is for
There is a principle called Chesterton’s Fence which states that you should never take down a fence without understanding why it is there.
The waste in our business has become baked in for a reason, because it once solved a problem. For example, I once worked with a large finance department. Several years prior, someone had sent a fraudulent invoice to the accounts department and it had been paid. This was a big problem which needed an immediate solution so the team decided that every single invoice would be sent to the manager who would review and approve before it was processed.
Fast forward several years and every invoice was still being sent to the manager for her to reply almost instantly with the word ‘approved’. Her inbox was clogged, no invoices were actually being checked and the team had a whole extra task in their workflow that added no value.
It would be easy to see this redundant process, scoff and remove it. But you need to understand why the fence is there. The fence was there to protect against fraudulent activity. So although it was almost totally pointless, it was providing a level of comfort to the team, meaning that they could move through their process without the anxiety that they would be personally responsible for any fraudulent payments.
Whatever solution we came up with needed to incorporate the psychological comfort this bad process provided.
We ended up implementing an automated system which required the business unit who actually ordered the services to approve the invoice before it came through to accounts for processing. The person responsible for approving was the same person who knew what the invoice was for, with additional approval chains for high $ value payments to mitigate any dodgy-ness.
Once you learn to identify waste, you begin to see it everywhere, but dismantling it requires thoughtfulness. Businesses don’t become inefficient on purpose, its a slow calcification, gradually gunking up the works so you need to chip away at it carefully.
Stay competitive, stay lean
When you remove the waste in your business you become nimble and lean. You’re not spending your money, resources and time fuelling wasteful activities, rather everything you’re doing is adding value, it’s effective and efficient.
The less time it takes you to do a task, while still preserving all the value for the client or customer, the more time and energy you have for everything else - family, life, business growth, strategy, everything!
When you have clear, streamlined processes, you can understand your actual capacity. This clarity improves your business decisions; you know exactly how many clients you can take on. If you’re hiring, you know exactly where that team member will fit in. Your revenue won’t be chewed up by mysterious expenses and your profit margins can breathe a little.
This empowers you to stay as lean as is comfortable for you. And to be clear, I am not talking about running a small team to the edge of burnout (that is it’s own type of waste). Rather, we are not resourcing wasteful work. Hiring without addressing waste, is hiring people to do work that doesn’t matter.
In a fluctuating market, having a lean efficient organisation is a huge advantage. It means you can move faster.
It’s also a self perpetuating machine, once you start on this journey, you’ll find more and more opportunities to streamline. This is continuous improvement, and it’s the key to staying ahead of the competition and growing a successful business.
Upskill your team
Problem solving skills are not just for business owners or managers, in fact they are most valuable when embedded in your team. This is for two key reasons:
Empowerment - Nothing feels worse than having change pushed on your from above (or worse, some external force) even if the change is objectively good, it’s disempowering.
You feel demotivated and like a cog in a machine you have no control of. This is why I believe so strongly in empowering teams to solve their own problems.
It feels amazing to be part of the solution, it flexes a new muscle and develops a new skillset. It gives context to the overall business, not just your own patch.
Expertise - The truth is that no one knows the job better than the person doing it. Sure, being external to the process gives you an objective lens and ability to see trends rather than details (after all, I’ve built a whole career doing this) but as a problem becomes more complex, you need expertise to decode it.
Having the experts, those who are on the ground and in the details, solving the problems that effect them everyday will deliver far superior results than if you parachute a consultant in.
If this sounds like something you would like to prioritise in 2025, I’m running a Problem Solving 101 workshop in March. I’ll teach you how to identify waste, how to develop effective and sustainable solutions and implement them smoothly.
If you would like to learn a bit more about Problem Solving before you dive in, you can join the free introductory webinar on the 14th February. Register here to join and receive the recording.
