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Business Book Summaries

What’s Your Problem?

To Solve Your Toughest Problems,
Change the Problems You Solve
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
©2020 by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Adapted by permission of Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 978-1-63369-722-5
Estimated reading time of book: 4–5 hours

Key Takeaways
• When you learn to reframe your most challenging problems, you can find breakthrough solutions that
will save you time, solve unrealized problems, and boost the value you bring to your organization.
• Begin the problem-solving process by identifying the issue you’re trying to resolve, who’s playing a
part in it, and who will benefit from a solution.
• Look outside your own frame of mind to uncover what could be missing from your approach. Con-
sider causations, correlations, and oversimplifications that may impact your ability to find better
ways forward.
• Pay attention to the times, situations, and contexts where the problem isn’t as limiting or is absent
altogether. Use those positive exceptions to expand your perspective and uncover viable solutions.
• Look in the mirror and reflect on whether you’re playing a part in perpetuating your own problem.
Examine your involvement and your capacity to make incremental changes that will produce better
results.
• Make understanding your stakeholders and their perspectives a priority. Spend time with them and
learn about their motives, why they feel they need to take certain actions, and what it might be like
to be in their shoes.

Overview
Every day, organizations waste time, money, and energy trying to create solutions for the precise prob-
lems they’re facing. But when leaders take time to consider how those problems are being framed and
how they relate to a broader context, they can gain new vantage points that offer radically better solu-
tions. In What’s Your Problem?, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg explains the practice of reframing and
how it can help you minimize the time you spend solving the wrong dilemmas, frame big decisions
more effectively, and find creative solutions that can future-proof your career and business.
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What’s Your Problem? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Part I: Solve the Right Problem

Most effective problem solvers are optimists who believe in their ability to find a path forward rather
than accepting their fate. They also have a specific kind of knowledge that enables them to take aim at
the right parts of their problems and find optimal solutions. This knowledge is called reframing. It’s a
competency that goes beyond the abilities to analyze, think methodically, and work through factors of
influence. Instead, it’s a high-level activity that forces decision makers to pull back from the details of
their problems and see the big picture.

By learning this skill, you’ll be able to generate the mental breakthroughs you need to solve bigger
problems and find more effective solutions. You’ll achieve this by learning to rethink the objectives of
your problems, your assumptions, and the beliefs that may hold you back from better outcomes.

Part II: How to Reframe

Getting Ready to Reframe
Many problems you face can be solved with quick, off-the-cuff solutions. Others require more consider-
ation. For these tough challenges, you need to study your problem, ask the right kinds of questions, and
understand potential impacts to avoid solutions that are ineffective or draining of your time, energy, or
resources.

This work may seem time-consuming, and time is a resource that few leaders have, especially when it
comes to making calls that keep their businesses competitive, on track, and focused on success. You
don’t need to spend a lot of time defining your problem, and you shouldn’t put off a decision until
you’ve developed a perfect understanding of influencers and impacts. Instead, you should devote your
energy to thinking through the following questions:

• What problem am I trying to solve? Answer this question based on what you know today. This answer
is the first framing of your problem.
• Is there a different way to view the problem? Challenge your understanding of the problem. Try to
expand your frame by considering what you might be missing, whether there are better objectives
to pursue, where the problem doesn’t appear, and what other people’s perspectives of the problem
seem to be.
• How should I move forward? Determine whether you can validate the framing of your problem. Test
your assumptions in the real world to make sure that your diagnosis is sound before moving ahead.

Frame the Problem

To begin framing the problem, write a problem statement that explains what issue you’re trying to solve
as you know it today. Reflect on your statement and determine whether it’s effective in explaining what
you know about the problem and the circumstances that surround it. You can ask yourself the following
questions to test your understanding:

• Is the problem clear?

• Have I included any self-imposed limitations?
• Did I construct a frame that points to a specific solution?
• Am I feeling strong emotions about this problem? Are others?
• Who defined the choices that I’ve been given? Do I have the power to create better ones?

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What’s Your Problem? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Complete your initial frame by drawing a stakeholder map that lists everyone involved. Include indi-
viduals, companies, and business units that are influencing the current course or will be affected by
adjustments or new outcomes.

Look Outside the Frame

Your problem statement should describe your take on the problem and point to some issues that
deserve your attention. The goal now is to look outside your frame to examine the broader context and
find other factors that could impact the effectiveness of your solution. You can accomplish this by:

• Sharing your problem with outsiders who have different sets of skills than your own and listening
to how they choose to frame it.
• Thinking about whether any past events or experiences could be playing a part in your current
dilemma.
• Rethinking the factors that you believe are causing your problem and looking for hidden sources of
influence, including team dynamics, incentives, or emotions.
• Determining where you might have oversimplified the problem in your framing.

Rethink the Goal

Before moving forward, you should question what it is you’re trying to achieve. Revisit your goal and
definition of success, and determine whether you’ve homed in on the right objective. You may realize
that there’s a better goal to pursue that can help you attain a dramatically better outcome.

Five steps can help you to rethink your goals:

1. Assess the importance of your goals and determine what they help you achieve.
2. Challenge the logic of your assumptions about the steps you need to take to realize your intended
outcome.
3. Identify other courses of action that you could take to achieve your objective.
4. Look at the big picture to determine whether your well-intended goals are in the best interest of
your business, your market, or your career.
5. Determine whether your subgoals and the intermediate steps that you’ve planned to take are help-
ful or necessary for achieving your goal.

Examine Bright Spots

You may find that there are situations or contexts where the issue you face seems less problematic.
These moments are the positive exceptions to your problem. Pay attention to them because they can
help you gain a new perspective and identify viable solutions that you may have never considered
otherwise.

One way that you can find the bright spots in your problem is by thinking about how it has played out
in the past. Make notes on the times when the problem seemed less severe or had less of an impact, and
think about how you can recreate the circumstances that led to this bright spot.

Another way to find bright spots is by asking others for insight. Define your problem in broad, gen-
eral terms that others will relate to. You may find that your peers or people belonging to other teams,
departments, or industries have solved similar problems and found replicable solutions.

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What’s Your Problem? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Look in the Mirror

Factors outside of your frame can impact your problem in significant ways, but you may be perpetuat-
ing your problem, too. Think about the actions, behaviors, and attitudes you have that may be causing
or worsening the problem and whether you can make incremental changes that will lead to different
outcomes. You can assess your role in the problem by asking yourself the following questions:

• What is my part in creating this problem?

• Can I react in a better way to it?
• Can I scale the problem down to my level?
• What do others think about my reactions to this problem?

Take Their Perspective

You may find new solutions to your problem by considering how other people experience it. Refer to the
stakeholder map that you made in your initial problem frame, then make an active effort to understand
each person on your list in terms of their experiences, preferences, and emotions. If in-person discus-
sions aren’t feasible, then the next best option is to work on taking their perspectives. Invest mental
energy into thinking about what the problem looks like from your stakeholders’ vantage points and
how they might feel about the status quo, the introduction of change, or the shift in direction toward an
alternate outcome. Try to determine how their feelings will differ from your own. Allow their perspec-
tives to become part of your new frame.

Move Forward
The five preceding steps should give you a better sense of the context that you’re facing and the ele-
ments that are contributing to your problem in real, definable ways. Those elements should become
part of your new problem frame. Validate your new frame by testing it with others. Consider taking the
following steps to ensure you’re on the right track:

• Describe your take on the problem to your stakeholders and see if it resonates.
• If you suspect people will hesitate to give you honest feedback, consider getting outsiders to inter-
view them instead.
• Seek commitment from others to determine whether they feel strongly enough about the problem
to pursue a solution.
• Create a low-stakes simulation of your idea and observe whether it gains traction or acceptance.

Part III: Overcome Resistance

Three Tactical Challenges
Reframing can be a straightforward process, but you may sometimes encounter obstacles that will make
your work more challenging. For instance:

• You may find too many ways to frame a problem. When you break your original frame and start view-
ing your problem from multiple angles, you may find a series of problems that need to be solved
rather than just one. When this happens, you should document those problems and prioritize one
or two framings that seem easy-to-solve, surprising, or significant.
• You can’t find the causes of a problem. Sometimes, your first attempt at reframing won’t help you
identify what’s really causing your problem. You could handle this problem by asking better ques-

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What’s Your Problem? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

tions of the people who are involved in the problem. You might also consider setting up a learning
experiment where you shake up the routines around the problem and observe what happens.
• You can’t overcome silo thinking. You may find that your narrowed view of your work, business, or
industry is holding you back from making broad discoveries. To address this, you could either find
an expert in an industry that’s unlike your own to provide perspective or invite outsiders who can
inspire you to think differently about your problem.

When People Resist Reframing

Having to help other people with their problems introduce a new set of challenges. Some may be resis-
tant to the process, especially if they don’t see a need for reframing the problem. Others may follow you
through the process but reject your findings. Work through these types of scenarios by:

• Using professionally designed charts for your framework to create legitimacy around the process.
• Telling stories of success that others have found from the process.
• Framing the need for reframing around the participants’ motivators.
• Asking each person to provide their personal take on the problem before coming together and talk-
ing about how they differ.
• Asking questions about their resistance or rejection to understand their concerns.
• Letting them try it their way once with the agreement that they’ll try it your way if they don’t suc-
ceed.

About the Author

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem solving. He
has shared and refined his reframing method with clients like Cisco, Microsoft, Citigroup, Time Warner,
AbbVie, Caterpillar, Amgen, Prudential, Union Pacific, Credit Suisse, Deloitte, the Wall Street Journal, and
the United Nations. His first book, Innovation as Usual, with Paddy Miller, was translated into five lan-
guages.

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