“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” -Henry Ford

When working through ideas or designs (brainstorming), don’t state a problem without having a solution. Stating problems is easy. Anyone can find a problem in anything. But saying that the idea, design, product, or whatever has a problem isn’t helpful to anyone. Nothing is perfect, which means everything has a problem. Having a problem doesn’t make the idea wrong or bad, but focusing on that problem makes it feel that way. This can be demoralizing to you and your team. More importantly, too much focus on problems can paralyze progress. Once the conversation moves to problems, that is all that gets discussed. Instead of making decisions and moving forward, you stay still and discuss what won’t work.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t state the problem. You should. But you need to do it in a way that helps keep the discussion moving forward. The statement should be constructive instead of attacking, which allows others to respond without being defensive. It is also beneficial if you can set up your team to make a decision on the problem.

The best way to do this is to think of possible solutions before stating the problem. You can then provide a solution while stating the problem. This makes the problem feel smaller and helps drives the conversation towards finding solutions than problems.

There is a caveat to this rule - you can’t come up with a solution. This happens. At that piont, you have to decide if it is worth stating the problem, or if you can live with it. Both cases are acceptable.

An easy example of this practice is with a poorly placed button. You may notice that a button is hard to find. Your instinct is to say “that button is in a bad place”. You just want to throw it out there. This can quickly lead to other people pointing out other poorly placed elements. Instead, if you take the time to think how you would solve the issue, you will see it differently. Maybe the placement isn’t the problem, and instead it just blends in. Your approach is now to say something like “I notice people can’t find that button. What do you think about making it blue so it stands out?” Instead of the discussion focused on stating problems, it’s going towards solutions. A response could be, “that is distracting when it isn’t needed. What if we only turn it blue after this field has been filled out?” Now instead of a destructive discussion about problems, you have a solution to the problem.

One reason that we don’t do this is because we think our solution is wrong. We know it needs solved, but we fear being wrong. In the above example, you already came to the same conclusion - the colored button was distracting. But you didn’t know the solution to that problem. By developing a community of bringing solutions, you can suggest incorrect solutions knowing someone will help solve the next problem.