How to help friends solve problems with the Meta-Problem Method
Sometimes when we’re talking with friends or making plans together, we feel a moment of friction. It seems like we’re talking about the same thing, and yet, we find ourselves talking past each other.
This isn’t exactly a problem. But if we want to make decisions together, or help someone make a decision for themselves, the Meta-Problem Method can help provide a framework to do just that.
People often fall into one of the following traps:
A group of friends may disagree on the value or costs of different choices. Using the Meta-Problem Method to choose the best problem to solve, we can talk directly about our competing priorities.
Suppose you are trying to decide where to live with a friend, and both of you care most about the length of the commute. Maybe one person is willing to drive a little further in exchange for fewer household responsibilities. Or maybe one person expects to quit their job soon and so the commute doesn’t matter in the analysis.
Helping your friends solve their own problems better is difficult because you often only see a small sliver of what they are trying to accomplish. When you decide if you should take a new job, move to a new town, or which car to buy, you will make that decision in the context of your other goals in life. With friends you are often missing a lot of that context unless they choose to share it.
Bad suggestions can be as much help as good ones, as the subsequent discussion helps folks clarify what they really care about.
The first step in using the Meta-Problem Method is laying out what your goals are, closely followed by what decisions you can make to improve those goals.
The value of the Meta-Problem Method lies in the clarity it brings about what people really want to achieve at each step in the decision, how much they are willing to stretch their goals, and how they weigh the effort against the result.
