How to switch your mindset in 2 seconds from thinking in problems to thinking in solutions?

You have a visualized prioritized list of challenges so what now?

Let’s suppose you have a visualized prioritized list of challenges and now you want to help your team solve them. They see this list as a list of problems that are blocking them usually, that create anxiety for them and that make them see the negative side.

How to switch the mindset in 2 seconds from thinking in problems to thinking in solutions?

Using a standardized note-taking system called "How Might We's" will help your team to think of solutions instead of focusing on the problems they want to solve. With this technique, you rephrase the problems in the form of a question, beginning with the words “How might we…?”.

You might have the impression it is unnatural but after you try it out you will appreciate how the open-ended, optimistic phrasing guide you to look for opportunities, rather than getting bogged by problems, or almost worse, jumping to solutions too soon. It’s a very useful technique that is used by P&G, IDEO, Google and Facebook.

Here is what it means:

● HOW assumes we can take action and find solutions.

● MIGHT suggests there is more than one possible solution.

● WE suggest that we work together and build on each other’s ideas.

Let’s look at an example.

The top-voted sticky note with the problems you have collected from your team says “I have no idea what’s happening on project x”.

Because many people have voted on it, we can see it’s clearly an issue many people are having.

Rephrasing the sticky note as “How Might We” (HMW in short) allows us to turn it into a question that people can find answers to, without already prescribing a solution.

Here is how that problem might be rewritten into a more general challenge:”How might we keep everyone in the loop on all current projects?”

Facilitator hints:

• It is easier for the team when the facilitator rephrases the problems into “How might we” questions for them.

• It is essential when creating a HMW question to take care of how you formulate it, not to be too broad or too narrow. Let’s take a simple example to explain better:

  • The balanced HMW that is right in the middle is: “HMW Increase revenue using the current product?”

  • The too-broad HMW, in this case, is: “ HMW Reinvent web search?”

  • The too-narrow HMW, in this case, is: “HMW Make the button blue?”

Try it out and see how it is for you. As soon as you will see how simple it is to get everybody in solution thinking mindset you will love the HMWs questions ❤️.

If you are interested to find out the neuroscience explanation behind HMWs questions, I created a special post related to this here.

Experiment:

Take one challenge you have in your private life (a low-mid impact one) and try to formulate it in HMW question format. Let me know what is the difference for you and how easily you find solutions for it. Then try it out with a working challenge.

One-phrase summary:

Whenever you have a challenge that you or your team see it as a problem, try rephrasing it in HMW question format. The mindset will switch right away from thinking in problems in thinking in solutions.

You are ready to find now solutions. There are so many ways you can do this and in the next newsletters, I will write about some of my preferred ones.