Helping a friend solve a problem

Last week I spent a lot of hours completely overhauling meta-problem.com. I’m happy with how it came out, and encourage you to poke around and let me know what you think. The biggest change - the more I am trying to explain my ideas to a “general” audience, the more I find it helpful to frame things as “who’s making a choice, what do they care about, and what are their options?”

On the website I list out 8 settings where you and the person solving a problem might be different. Eventually I’m planning to add things like maybe worksheets or ??? When I was talking to a friend recently we discussed helping a partner and so I took a look at what I had written on https://www.meta-problem.com/teaching-my-friends. I’m pretty happy with it, so I thought I would share an excerpt for this week’s blog post, and encourage you to read the full thing at the link.

My Friends

There are two very different situations where we may want to help our friends be better problem solvers. Sometimes we are trying to make a decision together and the conflict comes from different points of view. Other times, we want to help them make their lives easier, and we think we see something they don't about the choices in front of them.

…

The challenge when you need to make a joint decision is mostly if there is disagreement on the value or costs of the different choices. Since I might have different preferences than you, we expect to need to compromise on an acceptable decision. Using a meta-problem (choosing the best problem to solve) we can talk directly about our competing priorities.

…

To help friends use a meta-problem to solve their problems better then, it's often more about helping them with the process. I've found bad suggestions are often as much help as good ones as it helps folks clarify what it is they really care about.

Read the full story here.