When I first started blogging in grad school, I thought I was pretty clever by naming my blog “Type Three Error.” I planned to focus on teaching my readers how to avoid solving the wrong problem, which was a passion of mine. If I could succeed, all of you lovely readers could be more effective every day.

But over many years of trying to help people “not solve the wrong problem,” I kept running into brick walls. No matter how I explained solving the right problem / avoiding the wrong ones, I struggled to get my point across in writing. In a one-to-one discussion I could make some headway, but it was limited. You could say I was making the mistake of solving the wrong problem.

All that changed two years ago when I came up with the term “Meta-Problem” to describe what I was doing. I realized that it wasn’t that certain problems were inherently right or wrong, it was that we needed to solve a pre-problem first.

That pre-problem is deciding which problem we want to solve.

I have developed a way to do that. It’s called The Meta-Problem℠ Method, and it delivers better results than traditional approaches because it accounts for the real-world messiness and uncertainty that we call “life”.

Even if you are not a convert by the end, of this post, I hope at the very least to convince you just how maddeningly useless the advice to “solve the right problem” is.

So, what’s wrong with traditional problem solving? This could take a while, but stick with me, it’s worth the ride.

Telling people to “solve the right problem” assumes that somehow everyone forgot that they should solve the right problem, not the wrong one.