Seth Dobbs (he/him): Can you recognize when you’ve lost focus on a problem? And instead have dug your heels into a specific solution. Do you find yourself trivializing insights that are contrary to the path that you want to take? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs. And this is the principle driven leadership podcast. Where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building teams and organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills. But that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today, involves thinking about how elevating solutions over problems can be costly. Now the past couple episodes, I’ve talked a bit about how conflict is necessary. How being able to talk about difficult things is essential to a healthy organization. But before that can even happen, you need to be willing to at least acknowledge that there are difficult things to talk about. Anecdotally, I’ve met a lot of people that are surprised to hear that there are folks that might ignore information and insights that are contrary to the path that they’re taking. The truth is we all engage in this kind of behavior at some point. Committing to a solution and losing sight of the actual problem we’re trying to solve. My friend Anissa is a senior manager at a leading consumer packaged goods firm, responsible for overseeing product development and marketing strategies for a popular line of snack foods. Really impressive mind, smart, fast at processing information and responding, at least most of the time. At some point, her portfolio was losing market share and she decided that the solution was to introduce a new, healthy snack bar to appeal to the health conscious consumers – a demographic that was not currently well-served in her product line at the time. She’d seen the growth of this demographic elsewhere and had been looking for the opportunity to get into that market. Now this was the opportunity. So she made the bold move to get into that market.

She was passionate about this approach and push hard to convince her management and others to greenlight her efforts. They were able to rapidly develop a product based on some slight changes to an existing line and brought it to test market quickly. All the while her portfolios market share continued to suffer. The test market is where things started to get interesting. Preliminary results showed some consumer interest in the new product, but it wasn’t a home run. Now, she was undaunted by this and felt in part maybe the packaging and marketing was really the issue, but that the overall strategy was correct. So her team made some tweaks and moved on to the next test market where they fared some similar results. She nonetheless remain convinced that she was on the right path. And felt that more time was simply needed for them to see the impact of this strategic step into the health conscious market. Somehow she convinced management to agree to distribute a limited edition nationwide. Which initially yielded the same underwhelming response they’d seen in some of the tests and worse furthered her portfolio’s decline because to get this product out nationwide, they actually had to take away retail shelf space from other products in her portfolio. Which while they were already lagging previous year sales, those products were at least outselling this new product. Now, at some point, her team brought her some new research that indicated there was actually an overall consumer decline in interest in healthy snack products, as the national mood had people seeking more comfort foods. Her initial justification was that sure that was happening broadly speaking, but her market was still there. And she started getting pressure from upper management to change course, and she was frustrated by that. And that’s when she and I chatted about what had been going on.

So taking a step back, there’s a lot of reasons you can find yourself following a similar pattern, specifically, going down a path and refusing to change, perhaps even spite of evidence to the contrary. I think a driver behind this behavior is along the lines of the sunk cost fallacy. Which can be thought of as a tendency to continue down a path that we’ve invested money, effort or time into, regardless of evidence that the path may be making things worse. Meaning. You might even knowingly continue down a path that is becoming increasingly clear that it’s wrong because you’ve invested so much money, time, other resources into it. Now in Anissa’s case, the issue is less about literal costs or even effort in time, in some ways it’s a mental commitment. And some cases, the conscious or subconscious reinforcement behind a publicly made commitment. That is keeping people on a path that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s still for conscious reasons that we do this. We can often feel embarrassed to reverse course. Sometimes it’s hard to admit to yourself that your solution isn’t correct regardless of the evidence. But sometimes your brain can simply move from solving an actual problem to perceiving getting your solution to work is the problem that needs to be solved. More simply, our brains decide that the path to the outcome is actually the outcome itself, which is a quick way to land you in trouble. Anissa was trying to solve the problem of how do I make my solution work, which in this case was specifically, how do I make this new product line sell? In doing so she lost sight of the actual problem.

How do we restore the portfolio?

Solution fixation can be devastating at any scale.

It could have a relatively small impact, like missing a simple project deadline because you’re focused on a path that you can’t complete. Or it could impact a much larger scale by preventing you from seeing threats to your business. The thing is if you can’t face reality, you can’t fix reality. This concept is core to creating a culture of problem resolution. Part of facing reality is being able to step back and look at the bigger picture, especially when an unforeseen event or series of events has happened. Such as the market not responding in the way you want it to.

If you’re not able to look objectively at the world around you, you won’t be able to address the unknown.

Your team will struggle to embrace the inevitable change that’s going to happen around you. Now at the scope of a small project, you might be lucky to have a minor impact. But at the larger scale of a business, if you can’t be flexible and adaptable, you might struggle to remain relevant. Anissa was frustrated with a mounting pressure to back away from the new product line and she repeated to me that part of what was so frustrating was that they wouldn’t see the results of the strategy per for perhaps a year or two, but that management didn’t want to give her the time. I asked. But occurred to her that she might actually be seen the results of her strategy already, but further that perhaps things had changed like a decline in consumer demand for healthy snacks so that her solution was no longer relevant to existing conditions. We then moved on to talk about what she was trying to accomplish. Pushing a new product into a new demographic. Or, recovering her portfolio, like which one? And after talking about that for awhile, she realized that she had conflated the two. That the new product line was a means to the end, not the end itself. And she realized that for many reasons, she was so focused on making the means work, that you’d lost sight of the end,

in spite of all the evidence around her.

Facing reality can be challenging. But again, you can’t fix reality if you can’t face reality. And the first step is often just acknowledging that information tells you things that you don’t want to hear. It doesn’t mean you have to address it. But you should at least be open to understanding what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing and question yourself.

Is this new information indicating problems you need to overcome, or is it indicating that the solution path you’re taking isn’t valid anymore? Or is it something else? Being ready to face reality, that is acknowledging and deciding if you need to act, will make you better able to nimbly adapt when the unforeseen occurs and avoid solution fixation. Now, this doesn’t mean that change and adaptation will happen quickly or cheaply. Adapting to change can be work.

It can be costly. But sometimes not as costly as not adapting.

Now you certainly wouldn’t expect a plan for the unforeseen. It’s why it’s the unforeseen! The good news is a healthy organization is able to adapt. It starts with having a vision that plots the future in terms of outcomes, not actions. Because if you’re fixated on actions, it’s much harder to adapt. But when you’ve plotted out the future this way in outcomes, it makes it easier to build a culture of problem resolution. One where you and your team are able to face, analyze and address reality as necessary. And that’s why facing reality is so important. I’ve seen otherwise competent leaders that completely miss challenges that are right in front of them because they won’t face reality for any number of reasons.

Thing is there are so many sources of the unforeseen. New competitors, disruption outside of your industry, people leaving your organization or entering your organization, changes in customer needs. Macroeconomic factors. Sometimes crisis is unavoidable. Sometimes disaster is, but if you’re able to face reality and take that step back, you might find that the solutions that you previously ignored suddenly become more feasible after disaster occurs. And this fixation can happen to all of us in so many different ways, both professionally and personally. So I’ll close by sharing a brief story about a friend of mine. He was traveling to Europe with a family of four.

He was going to fly out of Chicago on a Friday night for a couple week trip. He decided looking at all the different costs of things and stuff like that. He actually had called ahead for a cab to get them to O’Hare airport in Chicago.

And this was before there were any kind of ride share apps to be clear. But parking at the airport would be very expensive. And he could have taken the L the train, but, , all their luggage, it would’ve just been difficult to do.

So they decided on the cab. The thing is the cab didn’t show up. So he called dispatch and they said, we’ll send another one out. That one didn’t show up. Then he called again. Basically because a lot of time was elapsed and he gave up on that and he actually went out into the street and started walking around his neighborhood. Trying to hail cabs. None of whom wanted to drive to the airport on a Chicago Friday rush hour, afternoon. So he never actually made it to the airport that night and had to reschedule for a Saturday flight. It was very expensive booking four new flights with less than 24 hour notice. After he told me the story, we talked about what he could have done differently in hindsight. , and I suggested he could have parked even in the daily lot and that would have been cheaper than the rebooking the flight. And he said he would have been better off driving to the airport departure drop-off, handing his car keys to a stranger than paying the reschedule fees for the next day. So similar to Anissa, he was solving the wrong problem. Solving the problem of how do I make my solution work? He had decided his problem was how do I get a cab to the airport? Not how do I get to the airport? And he had set constraints on cost of getting there, of parking at the airport and stuff that which no longer were valid due to unforeseen circumstances.

The solution was great for handling the known: cabs will show up on time.

Cabs are always available. But when unknowns hit, he was not prepared to adapt. The shift from thinking about solving a problem and the outcomes are trying to reach to thinking about “doing the solution” is insidious and it can easily happen if we’re not on our guard. A healthy organization remains healthy by embracing reality, embracing appropriate, productive conflict, and being able to talk openly about challenges. A healthy organization is ready to face adversity, whether it’s something expected or unexpected, and rally to continue forward motion.

What problems are you experiencing right now? And what solutions are you proposing? I want you to ask yourself, are you trying to make the solution fit your problem? Or are there other ways to get to the desired outcomes that don’t include the solution that you’re focused on? And what signs can you look for today to determine if you’ve elevated your solution or strategy over the problem that needs to be solved? Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe, comment, share with a friend if you liked it. And send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. We’ll address a few towards the end of the season.

And join me next time, where I’ll talk about how sometimes facing reality requires us to go slow before we can go fast.