How to use the Meta-Problem Method to solve your own problems
So often we get lost in the weeds of what we’re doing that we miss the bigger picture. We forget our power of choice and feel locked into decisions we made ages ago.
To use the Meta-Problem Method we most of all need to take a step back. Below is an illustration of just what that might look like.
Let’s assume that your dilemma is you want a more comfortable life.
What goals can you set yourself to address the dilemma? You could make more money, move to a different location, buy a better house, get more leisure time, hire someone to help around the house, and many more options.
For this example, let’s assume you decide to focus on the goal of making more money.
The next step is to understand what is holding you back. Maybe you see a tradeoff between making more money and doing work you enjoy. You could move to a location that has more high-paid work opportunities, but you value the community and support network that you have already built.
As you spell out some of the tradeoffs, you might realize your initial goals were too restrictive.
Sometimes solving one problem helps you make progress towards several goals at once. We call these “high yield” problems. For example, launching a side hustle could help you develop new skills that increase your job satisfaction overall. Finding a new job could come with higher pay and less stress.
Now that you have figured out the range of problems that you could tackle to achieve your goals, evaluated the tradeoffs and identified the high-yield candidates, the challenge is to pick the best problem or set of problems to solve. The best problem (or set of problems) is the one that gives you the highest return for the least effort.
For example, when you see that your current job undervalues you, it becomes obvious to look for something better. At the same time, hiring some help would give you the time and mental energy to start working on a side hustle. Maybe switching departments at your current company is the best way to earn more without the stress of a job search.
Observe and learn as you go. New information may reveal itself as you implement your chosen solution, so check continuously that you’re still solving the right problem. For example, you thought getting a new job was the best option, but it becomes clear that a side hustle might fit you better.
For important decisions, there are often so many unknowns that it would be virtually impossible to get it right on your first try.
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.
How citizens can help government pick better problems to solve
Nowhere is the gap between intention and reality more evident than in the relationship between government and citizens. The Meta-Problem Method can help shrink that gap.
Someone you know has likely suffered the consequences of this misalignment, when a policy intended to make life better for a group of citizens ends up failing or worse, damaging their lives even more.
Sometimes that’s because the government picked the wrong problem to solve, other times the delivery machinery thwarts or distorts the outcome.
Let’s take the national issue of penal reform. Holding people in prison is costly both for the individual and for society. In addition, in our current system about 70% of released prisoners re-offend within five years.
Addressing those problems means deciding what we think is the purpose of imprisonment (punishment or redemption?) all the way through to what support does a released prisoner need to prevent re-offending? There are tradeoffs to manage at every step in the decision chain.
At a local level, let’s take the issue of zoning, the planning process that cities use to decide what goes where. It affects almost every aspect of city life. Deciding what zoning rules to set involves weighing and managing multiple layers of tradeoffs to balance conflicting local needs and desires.
Engaged citizens can use the Meta-Problem Method to pick the best problems for government to address with public resources, and to think through the sequence of additional problems that will need to be solved to deliver the desired outcomes.
As with volunteering, the first problem is where to focus your energy and resources (at what level, on what issue and with what skills). Your personal values and where you are in your life will guide your initial choices.
How to pick the right cause and the right role for you
Following the Meta-Problem Method can help you solve for both impact and efficiency.
The goal when exploring a dilemma is to identify which problems would be the best to solve, both in terms of the benefits and the costs to achieve the improvements.
There are two main lenses to use as you contemplate volunteering: What will my impact on the world be, and what will I get/take from the experience? Each of these will require a subset of supporting choices, which bring a set of consequences.
Some not-for-profits do research, some provide hands-on help, some lobby in support of an issue or profession, some raise public or professional awareness, and so on.
Which type of work would suit you best as a volunteer? How clear is the organization about its goals? How well does it use its resources? How much impact is it having?
Your expertise will help you decide at what level you want to operate. Can you offer leadership skills, management expertise or functional skills (for example marketing)? Would you be more valuable in the field?
There is often a lot you don’t know about what the organization wants and needs. If your first-choice not-for-profit doesn’t accept you, your research should have given you long list of alternatives.
Sticking with your chosen organization for a long time adds an interesting layer, as you can evaluate your contributions today and over the coming weeks, months, or years.
Given limited hours in the day and so many demands on your time, the key to maximizing impact is to choose something you’ll prioritize time and time again.
Some people are driven by a cause, a sense of purpose, or some vision of what needs to be different in the world of tomorrow.
Others enjoy the satisfaction of helping others. Maybe you went through a rough patch and think of volunteering as paying forward the help you received when you were at a low point.
Time spent volunteering can help you develop skills, expertise, and experience in a new field. Maybe you want to make new friends and connections: volunteering is a great way to meet others who have a shared passion.
How to help your colleagues perform better with the Meta-Problem Method
Navigating team dynamics, including your own role within the team, can pose some tricky dilemmas. The Meta-Problem Method can help you resolve them.
One of the first dilemmas you’ll face when joining a new group of colleagues is figuring out whether they know how to act as a team. How well do they collaborate? Do they know how to bring out the best in each other? Can they critique each other’s work in a way that generates new options rather than conflict? Where are the decision-making boundaries?
There are three sets of goals that need to complement each other – your own, your individual colleagues’, and the collective goal of the team.
It’s important that everyone has a shared understanding of the collective team goal, and to check the team’s work constantly against that goal. Do you have the right set of colleagues on the team? What is the best use of your skills?
Ideally the team should make decisions together based on how they will help both the team and individual goals. For example, should we use this project to learn a new (and possibly riskier) technology? Should a junior person lead this project, or someone more senior?
Each scenario might be a developmental opportunity for the team, an individual, or both They also have ramifications and risks that you will have to weigh.
A team must be able to accommodate a variety of working styles without compromising the goals or creating tension. How healthy are the working relationships between colleagues on the team? How compatible are the individual working styles? Who tends to dominate in meetings, who looks for ways to build, who is a constructive critical thinker, etc.? What role should you play in the team?
The Meta-Problem Method helps frame decisions in terms of goals and effort. When people are torn between different options, you can ask “which of these options is likely to deliver the most progress towards our goal, for the least effort?”
Making your choice explicitly about the costs and benefits of the different options makes it easier to see the situation clearly. Sometimes the biggest insight is that no one wanted to pick one of the options you had because they were all lousy. Once you’ve realized that, everyone can focus on finding better options instead.
How the Meta-Problem Method can help you manage more effectively
Managers get things done through other people. It’s a role that is rife with interests to be balanced, tradeoffs to be weighed, and consequences to be anticipated, all within a dynamic and changing environment.
Those are exactly the circumstances where the Meta-Problem Method really comes into its own.
Teaching colleagues how to evaluate their options will help them be more effective and productive members of your team.
For example:
Part of a manager’s job is to help the team develop strong problem-solving strategies. Introducing them to the Meta-Problem Method helps them understand the consequences of different choices they could make as part of the group.
Faced with a new challenge, should you bring in an outside specialist, or invest in training someone on your team? When is it a good idea to invest in cross-training so you can keep everyone busy more of the time? Should you hire someone new to deal with an influx of work, or re-prioritize your existing projects to get through a temporary spike in needs?
Certain projects may need a lot of calendar time and repeated touches, but less of your total team capacity. Other projects might need a short stint from your most experienced employee or a much larger chunk of time for a more junior team member.
As you evaluate the portfolio you may identify synergies between projects, or areas where some sacrifices will need to be made.
Once you get into delivering a specific project, there’s a new set of challenges. A particular solution might seem the best, until you realize you don’t have the right expertise on your team. Or while one option might be the best in the short term, your organization will quickly outgrow it.
You are the expert in what your team can do and what you already have on your plate. You are also the liaison between your employees and the rest of the company.
Understanding the key dilemmas your organization is facing can help you see opportunities. Maybe someone on your team wants to learn a new technology just as your organization is looking for ways to start testing it. Or you may need some help with a project just as another group has some extra people looking to pitch in.
As always with the Meta-Problem Method, the key question to ask yourself is “what problems are the best ones to solve because of the eventual impacts they will have on my goals?”
How to help students problem solve with the Meta-Problem Method
Problem solving in the classroom usually means teaching students specific methods to solve specific problems. We rarely, if ever, teach them how to pick the right problem to solve.
The Meta-Problem Method addresses this challenge, while also teaching the general skills that enable students to be better problem solvers. It’s about identifying the best problem to solve, knowing there is a tradeoff between the value of solving a particular problem and the effort it takes to solve it. To learn more about the approach, click here.
Your students may not know what the goals and options are, or how to weigh the nuances between them. Those nuances can make a big difference.
For example, a teacher who wants to teach students about fractions might face these questions:
While they sound similar, those are two quite different problems, with quite different solutions. A skilled teacher needs to solve both problems.
Students are rarely told why a problem has been set up the way it has, i.e. the purpose of the problem.
When a student gets a “wrong” answer, it could be because they did not understand the method, or because they did not understand the purpose of the problem. Suppose a student is asked how to divide half a pizza among four friends.
A student might miss that they started with only half a pizza and give a wrong answer. There are also ways they might give a “wrong” answer, which is somehow not incorrect:
Here are two ways to give your students a window into deciding which problem to solve:
The Meta-Problem Method can help students with poor behavioral choices as well as academic problems:
A student is fighting with a friend – help them think about the difference between how they wanted things to go and how they went. What decisions can they make to improve the situation? Is everyone on the same page about what they are trying to accomplish together?
This is the heart of using the Meta-Problem Method, talking directly about what your goals are and what decisions you can make to try to achieve those goals (i.e what is the best problem to solve).
How to help kids overcome challenges with the Meta-Problem Method
Kids complain. A lot.
Sometimes, like us adults, they just want a sympathetic ear and a warm hug.
Other times, they really are asking for help to solve a problem, but they can’t describe what the problem is. For example, your child might tell you “I’m crying because it’s raining outside”, when a little probing reveals the real issue is that they are bored, they want to play, and the rain is preventing them from doing so. While you can’t control the rain, you can solve the real problem by suggesting some interesting indoor games.
Don’t assume you know what the child’s goals are. Ask your kids “what are you trying to accomplish? What choices do you have?”
When you don’t understand what someone wants, or you disagree what their options are, in effect you’re each solving different problems.
There are choices you can make to improve those goals. If the problem is “I’m scared of the dark” you can think about solutions like reducing darkness or reducing fear. Focusing on the options to achieve our goals lets us discuss directly what we’re trying to accomplish.
The Meta-Problem Method is all about making sure the problem you set out to solve is as good as possible. How do we define good?
A “good” problem gives you the best balance between the effort it takes to solve it and the benefit you will get from solving it.
The Meta-Problem Method enables us to clarify what we really want, how much compromise we are prepared to accept, what options we have and what the trade-offs are between them.
It makes implicit assumptions explicit, so we can discuss them calmly together.
Stuff happens! Change and uncertainty are facts of life, but we often approach problem-solving as if they didn’t exist.
Kids are chaos agents. Every parent knows that no plan, however thoughtfully prepared, survives contact with reality.
One of the key points in the Meta-Problem Method is that solving a problem is a process, not an event. So, as you implement your chosen solution, watch for new information and changes in circumstances and keeping asking yourself “is this still the best problem to solve?”
