According to the book, According to the book, there are two types of business problems. It also recommends which you should focus on.
I find this topic particularly interesting because, in business, you cannot avoid facing these problems. You will encounter these on a day-to-day basis. It is then now up to you which kind of problems you want to address and tackle. But selecting a certain type leads to a certain result.
So if you want to achieve something, make sure that the business choices or business problems you address are aligned to the goal you want to have.
For today’s blog post, we will be going through those two types of business problems, and which you should focus on. The two problems are technical problems and adaptive problems.
This is the third key learning that I have from the book by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy titled Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork
According to the book:
Technical problems are when the answer is already known. You just need to find out how to do it.
An example given was setting up a website. This kind of problem is a technical problem because there are already defined steps on how to do it. There are online courses, Youtube videos, and even books to help you do it.
However, it is recommended by the authors that for technical problems, what you should ask is “Who can do this for me?”
If instead, you ask the question “How can I set up this website?”, you are basically telling yourself that you are willing to spend your finite attention in learning how to do it. As mentioned before, this is very time-consuming and it is faster to ask who rather than how.
This is why it is important to challenge yourself into asking if you really want to use your own time doing this technical task, or would you rather spend your attention doing something more exciting. Ask if you can find someone who can do it for you, someone that’s much better suited in it.
“How” requires your time and attention.
“Who” requires someone else’s.
According to the authors, adaptive problems are problems that do not have a known answer yet. There’s no fixed formula. It requires innovative thinking to be able to solve it.
Adaptive problems require creators, inventors, and innovators. But these are also harder to define.
There are no silver bullets for adaptive challenges, so it would require your own strategy, plans, and time to adapt and come up with a solution. But given all of these things, adaptive challenges have long-term outcomes.
If you have a lot of things on your plate that you need to make decisions for, your energy and willpower will be exhausted. The thing is, even small decisions can affect these.
This is why Mark Zuckerberg famously only wears the same gray t-shirt everyday.
He explained the reason stating:
I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. There’s actually a bunch of psychology theories that even making small decisions, around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that, kind of make you tired and consume your energy. My view is I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than 1 billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life, so that way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services and helping us reach our goal and achieve this mission of helping to connect everyone in the world and giving them the ability to stay connected with the people that they love and care about. So, that’s what I care about. Even though it sounds silly that that’s my reason for wearing a grey t-shirt every day, it is true.
When you free up yourself with all of these technical tasks, you would have more time to spend in creating or doing adaptive challenges.