When I first started blogging in grad school, I thought I was pretty clever by naming my blog “Type Three Error.” I planned to focus on teaching my readers how to avoid solving the wrong problem, which was a passion of mine. If I could succeed, all of you lovely readers could be more effective every day.
But over many years of trying to help people “not solve the wrong problem,” I kept running into brick walls. No matter how I explained solving the right problem / avoiding the wrong ones, I struggled to get my point across in writing. In a one-to-one discussion I could make some headway, but it was limited. You could say I was making the mistake of solving the wrong problem.
All that changed two years ago when I came up with the term “Meta-Problem” to describe what I was doing. I realized that it wasn’t that certain problems were inherently right or wrong, it was that we needed to solve a pre-problem first.
That pre-problem is deciding which problem we want to solve…