Our experienced psychologists & consultants provide cost-effective solutions to help you get the best return on your most important investment - the people who make your company profitable.

“The Way you See the Problem is the Problem”

The above quote was given to me by a retired Naval Aviator as something he learned in flight school. In broad terms, it means that depending how you frame a question, the answer you get might be quite different. You can’t see something if you don’t look at it. The aim of this issue of Shrink Rap is to show how something that seems difficult can be made transparent if you look at it the right way. I am not going to try to generalize this exercise to any specific situation, but I hope that as you are confronted by challenges, you will think about the quote. Challenges may look complex from one angle, but if you recast the question, maybe you can see an “Aha!” in there somewhere.

Problem one: Let’s play a game called “Fifteen.” All that you need are the numbers one through nine—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—that’s it. There are two players. Each one chooses a single digit. A player cannot choose a digit that has been previously chosen by either player. The player who first chooses the digits that sum to 15 wins the game.

I go first, and pick 8. Lets say you pick 2. I’ll take 4, and you pick 3. I take 5. Here’s the question. What should you pick next? This is not easy for a number of reasons, one of which is that you have to do considerable arithmetic in your head, and another is because it is not obvious what a successful strategy would look like.

Problem two: Put “Fifteen” on the back burner for a minute and let’s look at the game commonly called Tic-Tac-Toe. You don’t need to think about how to play it. Compared to “Fifteen” this is no challenge at all. Here’s a game in progress. I’m the X and you’re the O. It’s your move. Where should you go?