Solving Better Problems

Choosing between a bunch of horrible options is agonizing, it can make you feel helpless, because there is no “good” decision available to you.

But even when you’re stuck between the frying pan and the fire, you have more choices and more power over your circumstances than you might think.

Problems come in many flavors, and those flavors influence how we go about solving them. If the problem you’re working on leads to a decision you must make, it pays to ask yourself “what are the available choices?” That reframing can help you both solve better problems and feel more optimistic as you do so.

On good days, people usually remember their power of choice. We ask what movie to watch or where to go for dinner.

But when your options get lousy enough, say your flight is running hours late, we often focus more on how much we hate our current situation and not what we control about it.

That unhappiness with my situation is one of my key triggers to re-think the problem I’m solving. For one, it justifies the effort of making really sure I’m solving the right problem – there’s obvious opportunity if I can find something better. For two, the unhappiness with my current options is like a spotlight shining on what I wish was different and would like to change.

Not everyone sees the world this way. A lot of the analogies about exactly this situation imply the choices we have are ceremonial only like choosing between a “rock and a hard place.” as if the two options are equivalent. It feels disempowering because you’re picking your poison, when you’d rather pick no poison at all.

But two options are rarely all that equivalent. We have little preferences that can make a world of difference.

To me, this mindset shift is empowering. Suddenly, instead of a lousy situation being about resigning myself to my options, it’s about seeing my opportunity to make the most of what I’ve got. It’s a reminder that I might have preferences even when my options are poor. Sure, if I could I’d choose a world where I wasn’t on a horribly delayed flight… But if I’m here, what do I want to do about it?

The flight example happened to me twice recently. I had a lot of choices:

• When in the airport waiting for the flight, I had a choice of how to use my hours. I chose to get my work done so I could relax on the plane. I could also choose fun things to do that aren’t possible on a plane – say go to a restaurant or call a friend.

• When on the tarmac waiting for takeoff, I could choose what to focus my mind on. I heard people around me who were grumpy about how late we were going to be. I focused on adjusting my plans as needed at my destination and then switched to what I wanted to do on the plane.

• When we headed back to the gate due to the crew timing out, I could review if there were any better flight options to switch to, including different nearby airports, or even cancel the trip. I considered driving back home to sleep for 5 hours and return for a morning flight, switching airlines, etc. By the time we got back to the gate I knew my best option except for whatever the airline was going to suggest. They had found a new crew, had a rough ETA, and I knew that was my preferred option once it was available to me.

• When arriving very late at my destination, I could adjust my plans for the next day. That could have included getting an extra hour of sleep, buying an extra treat, and complaining to the airline.

The question at each step of the way was focused on my choices. What do I want to do in this moment, or some time later? In some cases, I had already made a prior choice, but the world changed. Because my original choices were made in that different world, I had to re-evaluate if I wanted to change anything else.

In hindsight, there are a couple of choices I might have liked to make differently. Because I was reflecting on my power of choice though, I recognized those oversights and will add them to the list of choices I consider in the future.

In fact, many of the things I noted above were options I considered because of some prior experience where I learned my power (see my post from 2018 on flying to a neighboring city instead of direct).

Sometimes though, your choices are implicit.

It turns out that Denver (where I live) frequently has afternoon thunderstorms in the summer that delay flights. At this point I have to recognize that choosing an afternoon / evening flight is also choosing a high risk of delays. I wish that weren’t the situation, but the question now is what I want to do about it.