#564 Why Slowing Down Makes You Better at Solving Problems

Hi, I'm Helen and you're listening to one of our squiggly career shortcuts. These episodes are designed to be deliberately short so they're easy for you to fit into your week and we focus them on something that we know lots of people might need help with. So today I want to talk to you a bit about how to solve the real problem at work. And I think this is a really relevant listen if you are, like if you're a natural problem solver, I'm a natural problem solver, like I see a problem. I want to fix it fast because then I feel like it, I feel like things are better.

And the risk is if you are a bit of a fix it fast problem solver, you can create what I think of as ping pong problems. So like you fix it, but then the problem just comes back again and you fix it again and it comes back again. And the reason that might happen is that you're not really solving the real problem. You're almost like solving the problem at the surface. But actually there's something else going on.

And it might be that the problem that is being presented to you isn't the real problem. And there's loads of problems at work, right? There's problems on projects, there's problems with workload, there's problems with budgets, there's a lot of problems. But if we fix them too fast or we kind of take maybe what's first stated as the problem, and try to solve that, we might not be really exploring the the roots of it, the things that have caused the problem.

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